How to Maximise Your Profit with a Business Strategy

July 23, 2009

All businesses should have a business plan. It can be a rather intimidating task to sit down with a pen and paper and start creating one for your business. It’s something that is very important for you to do though, and as a Virtual Assistant you will probably find that you don’t need to do too much, as it’s unlikely that you’ll need much funding for your initial start up. I would encourage every start up business, Virtual Assistant or not, to sit down and go through the process of writing a business plan. The very act of putting your ideas onto paper helps you to focus and clarify your ideas. There are plenty of templates out there to help you, and I suggest your first port of call would be to look through the ones on the Microsoft website.

Initially, you should start with a very simple document that covers the following items:

1. Your Elevator Pitch – A thirty second description of your organisation and the services you handle which you can bring up when networking to introduce yourself in less than 30 seconds.

2. Market Analysis/Market Research – Is the research that you have pursued to locate your market, the target market for your products and services, your competitors and your services. You’ll need to provide a description of the different groups of targeted customers included in your market analysis, and explain why you are selecting these as targets. You may also want to describe the Virtual Assistant market by summarising the market growth over recent years and some trend analysis of where the market is likely to be headed.

3. Marketing and Sales – You should have developed plans to market your products and services, and to close sales. Your marketing strategy needs to include how you intend to concentrate on your target market, what sort of media you intend to utilise to establish awareness of your business and how you intend to position your business online; this will require developing your unique selling position. Your sales strategy on the flip side will address how you intend to finalise agreements and lock-in clients; this will encompass pricing, delivery, terms and conditions.

4. Operations – You need to describe how your business is going to be set up, including premises and equipment, you may also want to include how you see this changing as your online business grows.

5. Management and People – This area should encompass a rundown of how the company is set up, what support staff you use currently, or may want to utilise in the near future.

6. Finance – This is the part that generally scares people to death, but there is really no need to panic. You need to do this to make sure that your business is viable, and so that you have a set of goals and targets to work toward. You can download spreadsheet templates from the internet if you use Microsoft Office. I personally suggest that you acquire them from their website as they have a huge variety of completely free templates. This will comprise of :

* A personalised spending plan so you are aware of what expenditure you will need to cover from your income.

* A worksheet showing how you’re going to fund any start up costs you might have.

* A Sales Budget – You will probably want to use value based pricing for this. You can reasonably estimate your sales by working out your billable hours per month at the rate you expect to charge.

* A Costs Budget – You will need to identify your fixed costs and your variable costs. There is no requirement to calculate the cost of sales because as a Virtual Assistant you are merely offering a service.

* An Operating Budget/Profit and Loss – This is a strategy for your business which details the sales and expenditure accounts in one form.

* Break Even Analysis – This will demonstrate the amount of hours you need to bill in order to cover your costs, and then anything in excess of that is profit. To complete this type of analysis you need to know your variable costs/unit, sales price/unit and fixed costs.

* Cashflow Forecast – This will be the most critical document to you. It’s the heart of your business. Poor financial management is one of the principle reasons for business collapse. This will help you monitor the cash coming in and going out of your business, and it will help you identity when you will have cash available to make capital expenditures, or when you might not have enough cash and need to make arrangements with your bank before the problem happens.

That’s everything you essentially require to make a start. This should even be all you really need to set up a business bank account. You can add things like an executive summary at the start of the document, which is a section designed to give a brief overview of your business together with highlights from sections 2 -6 above. If you wish, you could add appendices to include your CV and so on.

Don’t forget, your business plan should be dynamic and you should use it as a yardstick of how effectively you’ve met your targets. It needs to be reviewed at least every four weeks from when you start your business, but this can be extended as your business grows, although it’s always best to monitor the financial section at regular, short term intervals.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a highly qualified Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps businesses and individuals accomplish every detail of their professional aspirations. Want to discover more about these insightful online business building success strategies? Support the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance now!

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Thanks so much!
Michelle

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