What is it?
Every business, whether big or small, requires strategic business planning to be successful. All businesses face issues and problems on a daily basis that need to be resolved in order to make the business reach its targets or goals. Most of the top-management resolves such problems by developing optimized tactics, which work fairly well. However, to make a business successful, something more than tactics is required. You need proper strategic business planning to maximize growth and give your business that extra edge. Strategic business planning is developing and formulating a business plan keeping in mind all strategic factors, such as competitors, demography and customers, that can influence the business.

What are the factors involved?
With each business having a unique set of factors that distinguishes it from others, strategic business planning is never easy. However, one thing that is common for all businesses – their aim to be financially effective in order to survive in the market. Thus, while implementing strategic business planning, the primary factors that need to be looked into are the optimal use of resources at hand and maximization of returns on investment (ROI). Apart from these, the budget is another key aspect that has to be looked into during strategic business planning. A business plan devised for a multi-million dollar company would be totally different from one formulated for a small business with a limited budget. The key to proper strategic business planning lies in discussion, development of new understanding of business aspects, gaining new insights and the generation of new ideas.

Who can help in formulating?
While one can look into their in-house management team to formulate a strategic business plan, it is always better to look for specialized services that can understand your business with a new prospective and have high expertise in your field. This would provide your management team a third-party view, ideas and assistance during strategic business planning, enabling it to create a strategic plan that would be both effective and efficient. Obtaining the assistance of a facilitator will also help your business gain an edge over that of your competitors.

No matter what the size and scope of your company, writing a solid business plan and brand positioning statement will help you. Not only will the process of writing a business plan and brand positioning statement help you carve your own path toward business success, the first will help you attract investors, while the second will help guide your sales strategy, bringing in new customers.

With that in mind, let’s cover some tips for writing a solid business plan and brand positioning statement.

Writing a Business Plan: Top Tips

1. Moderate your optimism.

Business success doesn’t come easy. Most new companies don’t actually bring in revenue during the first year. More than half lose money.

So, exercise moderation when choosing dates for milestones, defining management responsibilities, and setting your budget. It will probably take a little more time, help, and money than you expect to get your business off the ground.

2. Emphasize cash flow rather than profits.

Cash flow problems are a leading killer of small businesses, so planning ahead for them should be a top priority.

In fact, the company Palo Alto, a designer of business plan software, says if you include just a single table in your business plan, it should be the cash flow table. You bet investors will be looking for it.

3. Explicitly differentiate yourself from competitors.

If your product or service has enough demand to be profitable, you already have competition. So, if you want to achieve business success, you have to make it clear how what you’re offering is different from what the other guys are selling.

What this really comes down to is finding a niche. Your competitors aren’t fully meeting the needs of all of their customers-that’s impossible. What this means is that you have an opportunity to identify segments of their customer base you can cater to better and convert them.

A great exercise for differentiating yourself from your competition is writing a brand positioning statement.

4. Stick to 15 pages or fewer.

Rambling in your business plan is a sign that you don’t have a firm grasp on your core business concept.

A business plan for a new company shouldn’t be longer than 15 pages, and that’s with tables and images. If you ask around, you’ll notice that this is the maximum length set by many business plan writing competitions, and there’s a reason for that-it’s harder to write a concise business plan than a rambling one.

Writing a Brand Positioning Statement: The Basics

A brand positioning statement defines how you can serve your target market in a way your competitors don’t. If written well, it can help fine-tune your sales strategy.

The quintessential brand positioning statement used in marketing textbooks around the world comes from Swedish automobile builder AB Volvo:

For upscale American families, Volvo is the family automobile that offers maximum safety.

As an entrepreneur, you can use a brand positioning statement as part of your overall sales strategy to promote your business or yourself. A brand positioning statement should identify, preferably in one sentence, all of the following:

• Your product or service
• Your company (or you)
• The category the product or service is in (or the field you are in)
• Your target customer
• The one key benefit you provide, possibly with a brief explanation

You may have noticed that the brand positioning statement doesn’t explicitly mention your competitors. It is implied that your key benefit is something you can provide better than the competition within your niche. You have hopefully already identified this when writing your business plan.

Now, although there are similarities between a brand positioning statement and a tagline, your tagline is made for customers, while your brand positioning statement is more suitable for keeping you focused on your core strengths. If you don’t have a tagline for your business yet, we recommend starting by writing a brand positioning statement, as it should help you pinpoint the direction you want to move in.

Good luck!

When writing the business plan for your hair salon, entrepreneurs tend to make a number of mistakes that turn off readers, especially those who have a number of plans on their desk to consider.
 
Too Much Detail
 
There is such a thing as too much detail in a business plan. While the plan must cover its bases completely, including company description, industry, customer, and competitor analysis, marketing and operations plans, management team, and financial plan, it only needs to be detailed enough to persuade some investors to work with you. To create a plan that is detailed enough to convince every investor may end up working for no one. If the document is this long and complicated, it can easily be set aside by professional investors who will happily pick up another business plan that is less of a headache to read.

 
Remember that a human being is reading your salon’s plan and that he or she is just interested in hearing the story of how the salon business will work and what the payoff will be for them. They don’t care about the minutiae of how you will run the business or pages and paged of detailed customer research. This type of detail might be appropriate for an appendix, which is considered optional for readers to peruse, but the body of the plan must get to the heart of the matter by simply fulfilling the purpose of each individual section.
 
Assuming Reader Understanding
 
At the same time, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the reader already knows recent industry trends in hair salons or is familiar with your key competitors. You must show what you feel is important about these items in the appropriate sections of your plan, to reassure investors that you’ve done your homework and understand the situation yourself. If a statement is obvious you don’t need to dwell on it, but, nevertheless, don’t skip key steps in the logic of why your hair salon is a viable business.
 
Financials Without Notes
 
Finally, the financial plan includes many pages of pro-forma financial statements which are, in a sense, guesses about what will happen in the future. Readers will feel much better about these guesses if they understand the assumptions they are based on. Explain these assumptions in notes that accompany the financials. Without these explanations, the reader will make his or her own assumption – that you simply pulled numbers out of the air that sounded good and tried to pass it off as financials projections. Even if readers disagree with some of your assumptions, it is better that they know what they are than them writing you off in this way. Disagreements with readers can lead to valuable further discussion and maybe can help you strengthen your plan further in the end.