WHAT GOES INTO A BUSINESS GUESS

Business plans are really just guesses. When starting out, any business plan will prove to be inaccurate. Problems will come up that you never considered. The 1, 3 and 5 year projections you came up with will not even be close. You don’t know where your business will end up. It’s all guess work.

However, you should still come up with a business plan of sorts. What I’m going to call a Business Guess. The purpose of creating a business guess is to think about what you are doing in a logical manner. Understand where you are now. Decide where you want the business to go. Figure out how to get there. Correct course early and often.

Business Explanation – State what your business does.

Example – Acme Generic Web Design generates ideas, writes competitive analyses, creates digital product strategies, plans content, constructs information architectures, devises wire frames, designs websites and logos, develops code, integrates content management systems, optimizes for search engines, conducts user testing, tests for quality assurance, maintains websites, marketing through social media, analyzes website stats, consults businesses and writes.

Current Status – You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. Examine the current state of your business. Write out your financial, website and product/service data. Make sure your data is up to date. You should update all your data every month to measure progress.

• Example:
  New Clients – 2
• New Client Earnings – $3,000
• Repeat Clients – 2
• Repeat Client Earnings – $2,200
• Earnings – $5,200
• Expenses – $1,000
• Net – $4,200
• New Website Visitors – 516
• Repeat Website Visitors – 167
• Leads – Newsletter Sign ups/Contact Form Submissions – 25
• Conversion Rate (Visitor to Lead ratio) – 1 in 27.32
• Close Rate (Lead to Client ratio)Leads – 1in 12.5
• Hours Worked – 172
• Billable Hours – 104
• Employees – 0
• Services Offered – Business Consulting, Digital Product Strategy, Content Planning, Content Creation, Interactive Design, Visual Design, Website Development, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimization, User Testing, Quality Assurance, Maintenance, Social Media Marketing and Website Analytics.
• Services Sold – Website Maintenance, interactive design, website development, social media marketing, search engine optimization and a content management system.

Where Do You Want To Be? – Where do you want your business to be in one month? Write down your goals for each piece of data you are tracking.

Acme Generic Web Design wants to keep the same amount of new clients coming in while increasing the amount of work from repeat and ongoing clients. The reason for this is that repeat and ongoing clients have a lower cost associated with them due to less meetings, research and administrative time. This is reflected in the increase in billable hours worked.

Acme always want to increase their website traffic, conversion rate and close rate by a little bit each month.

Acme also wants to sell consulting services because consulting is more profitable than website design or development. Acme is compensated for all time spent consulting, but they might underestimate the amount of time need to complete a design task.

• Example:
  New Clients – 2
• New Client Earnings – $3,000
• Repeat Clients – 3
• Repeat Client Earnings – $3,200
• Earnings – $6,200
• Expenses – $1,000
• Net – $5,200
• New Website Visitors – 550
• Repeat Website Visitors – 200
• Leads – Newsletter Sign ups/Contact Form Submissions – 30
• Conversion Rate (Visitor to Lead ratio) – 1 in 25
• Close Rate (Lead to Client ratio)Leads – 1in 10
• Hours Worked – 172
• Billable Hours – 124
• Employees – 0
• Services Offered – Business Consulting, Digital Product Strategy, Content Planning, Content Creation, Interactive Design, Visual Design, Website Development, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimization, User Testing, Quality Assurance, Maintenance, Social Media Marketing and Website Analytics.
• Services Sold – Business Consulting, Digital Product Strategy, Website Maintenance, interactive design, website development, social media marketing, search engine optimization and a content management system.

How will you get there? – List out actionable steps to get your business where you want it to be.

Example – Increasing the amount of work from repeat and ongoing clients – Acme will now provide a free detailed ongoing marketing plan for each website that Acme completes. Acme will also provide marketing plans for the last five websites that they have completed. The marketing plans will provide clients with a detailed explanation of and plan for website maintenance, SEO and social media marketing. Hopefully some previous clients and current clients will see the need for and purchase these services.

Increase Website Traffic – Acme will write one extra blog post this month and post it on all social media to gain extra traffic.

Increase Conversion Rate – Change location of the newsletter sign up form to be more noticeable.

Increase Close Rate – Make the next issue of the newsletter more educational and useful for the reader. This will help establish Acme as more of an expert in website design and hopefully lead to more clients.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading Business Guesses. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.