Business Planning Tips

Business plans are used in the private and non-profit sectors to describe key elements of a project or business, focusing on critical success factors. We evaluated the data from 150,000 businesses that use Mailchimp and determined that although tools like abandoned cart, product follow-up, and category follow-up automations are the most effective for selling more stuff, there are others that work better for boosting customer loyalty or re-engaging customers.

Having to write down the strategy also creates an opportunity to make sure all of the founders are literally on the same page about what they intend to do. If they are not, fruitful discussions can be started which are better to get out of the way at this early stage while plans are still much more flexible.

For many entrepreneurs, the ideal scenario is to grow your business large enough to support the cost of a really excellent finance director, who can take care of all the detailed legal and financial matters for you, and leave you completely free to concentrate on growing the business – concentrating your efforts and ideas and strategy externally towards markets and customers, and internally towards optimizing innovation and your staff.

A limited company exists in its own right – a tricky concept to understand for many people – basically meaning that financial liabilities belong to the company (its shareholders, to the value of their shares in other words) rather than the directors and executives of the business, as would apply in a partnership.

Don’t skip the evident advantages: if you have a product that isn’t presented at the market at all, or if you’ve found a way to deliver services of a much better quality than your competitors because of the professionals that joined your team, make sure you talk about it. But don’t go too deep in praising yourself.