Business Plan Tips

Thinking about starting a business and have no idea where to begin? Unless you know some people with past experience when it comes to starting a business and writing business plans the journey may take much longer than it needs to. Would-be entrepreneurs and small business owners in South Africa now have the free assistance of the SEDA Small Business Stars Business plan competition to assist you on your “how to write a business plan” journey. They are also throwing in R4-million worth of prizes for the best business plans. You have until the 29 February 2012 to enter.

How SEDA Small Business Stars Works

Firstly, the competition is designed to encourage and assist you in taking your business idea, or existing business, to the next level and support the development of your business concept. It’s open to any South African citizen over 18 who has a business idea or an existing small business and they provide free workshops/training to assist you in entering the onlien competition. You do not have to have a registered business to enter. To register click here.

The SEDA Small Business Stars Business Plan Template is broken down into the following 9 sections that have come all too familiar as I’ve written my first business plan in 2005. Herewith those 9 sections of the business plan and some tips based on past experience.

Tips to Writing a Business Plan

1. Product – when it comes to the product or service your new or existing business offer remember the following… You should be able to describe your business to a potential customer/partner/investor in 30 seconds or less highlighting the value your business adds to the intended audience. This is usually referred to as the Elevator Speech. When it comes to determining the market need don’t just thumb-suck numbers based on what you see around you. Try and substantiate market research based on White Papers published by various organizations, you could go as far and wide stats released by the United Nations depending on your business. Ensure you are able to back up any estimation you do during market research with facts and figures from reputable sources. Substitutes and Main competitors do not have to offer the exact same product/service you do to be a direct competitor. In many cases certain elements of a product or service that may be unrelated to what you offer clients can be a direct competitor. Just because a particular product or service doen’t say it ‘does the same as your business offering’ doesn’t mean it can be used to do the same thing as your business. When it comes to determining market need, once again, the research you’ve done the better. There is never too much market research in a business plan.
2. Marketing – This is the second most important part of your business plan, once again going into excruciating detail about your marketing plan is vital. Your marketing plan should be follow similar principles to writing a business proposal. As an added bonus I’d mention the marketing plan throughout the various other element of the business plan. A good marketing plan will be either make or break your business.
3. Sales – Instead of thinking of Sales being the responsibility of one particular person in your company think about this… Every person that interacts with your company, website or product/service is a potential sales person. Keep your customers happy, be sure they are aware of the value your business provides to them, and you cannot go wrong. There is immense value in word-of-mouth, Word-of-Mouse too. Your customers are online, make sure you are listening to the various online channels your customers are using and respond in a timely manner too. When it comes to sales tools please focus on the web and mobile. Flyers lead to dead trees and a waste of your cash flow. Watch this video for more about the right way to market your small business.
4. Management Team – This is the most important element of any business plan in my opinion. No matter how innovative your business plan is, without a team that can successfully execute, your business plan is futile.
5. Operational Issues – When it comes to operational issues, less is NOT more. Be as excruciatingly detailed as you possibly can. This will show you have considered everything. I mean everything. It’s your business, so you know exactly all relevant operational issues that are critical to your business success.
6. Vision and Mission – The only advice I can give is… ensure your vision and mission changes the wwworld
7. Financial Information – Enter the projected income for the next three years. You can use your past performance as a guideline. It is better to use conservative estimates. Being conservative doesn’t really cut it here. Whatever your projected expenses is, double it! When projecting income for the next year, imagine you won the SEDA Small Business Stars prize money (which you’ll use for sales, right ), factor this in when predicting (not projecting) income. Do not fib with your historical expenses.
8. Job Creation – Quick Tip: If your business really adds value to your customers, the products or service your small business offers, will not only create new job opportunities within your business but should create new employment opportunities within the business you service too. Add that into your submission. Here I’d add some customer references too for good measure.
9. Special Awards – Does your business support the achievements and aspirations of people with disabilities, supported the achievements and aspirations of young people or has your business created jobs in your community? If you can answer yes to any of these be sure to inlude it in your SEDA Small Business Stars application.

These are a few aspects of writing a successful business plan I’ve found to be important since writing my first award-winning business plan in 2005. If you have any questions or would like to give advice to those starting out writing a business plan which I may have omitted above, please leave a comment below.

Pinterest is visual in a way that anybody can enjoy. Male, female, young, old – there’s a little somethin’ Pinteresting (I just had to. Sorry.) for everyone. It’s a place where you see positivity. It’s like this unpretentious, noncommercial island in the middle of the advertising-riddled internet ocean; a place to escape to and indulge in eye-candy overload. I don’t know… there’s just something about Pinterest. When days seem dark, take a hop and a click over to ogle some ‘Pins’ – you may find yourself pleasantly distracted. Whether it’s by the discovery of a new exotic destination to add to your travel bucket list (I’m eye-balling the heck out of Patagonia right now) or whether you’re entertained by an infographic poster depicting the evolution of the geek – the point is, there is a distracting pin lurking around a pinboard near you.

I want to wax lyrical about this site and what a treat it is for the eyes but I won’t. I’ll just go so far as to say that it’s a place you’ll find easy to get lost in. The part I like most though, is that you can choose to follow other people’s boards. So if you’re keen on learning about or seeing more of a specific topic or theme, you’d just need to ‘follow’ a fellow Pinner’s board and you’ll start seeing all their cool Pins in your Pinterest news stream. And if you spot something you really like, you can ‘Repin’ it and store it in one of your own personalised Pinboards, making it easier to track down later on.

8 Things that make Pinterest appealing…

1. It’s easy to use. No, really. It’s quite simple.
2. It’s a useful tool for organising images and random finds
3. It’s a visual feast – Pinterest looks good on anything
4. You get to see things you ordinarily never would. DIY and travel/places Pin Boards FTW.
5. You get to see ordinary and old things in new ways and from other people’s perspectives
6. It’s a fantastic place for businesses to conduct free market research. Consumers are essentially displaying all their favourite brands, recipes, music, art, décor, travel destinations (and more) to the world. Market Research can’t get any simpler – or easier on the eyes.Pinterest harbours and promotes a warm and creative global community.
7. Pinterest has no ads. As in there is no advertising on the website. At all.
8. I’ll say it again – Pinterest is advertising free.

Government should be a platform

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia defines it as “a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other.”
The government, in its role as a service provider to the citizens, needs to be completely capable of providing high quality, effective, affordable services. However, sometimes, in conditions where the government itself is unable to do so or when the government is not the best delivery vehicle (for example, citizen access to its own information), it must involve or allow third-party involvement (profit or non-profit organisations) in producing efficient and innovative ways to deliver access to governmental services. Hence the need for a governmental API. Is that too much to ask?

At the present time in South Africa, Access to basic government information is a serious problem. And so one of the ideas I had in mind is a simple implementation of this API to create or aggregate government services. And if a mobile version could be made available, this could be a potential game changer. By allowing citizen to search to find the relevant services offered by their local, provincial or national government – the possibilities are endless.

Tell us what you think?

Wed AddiCT(s); note – Aslam Levy’s prediction for 2012 could really make a difference when it eventually happens.

Joe Botha – TrustFabric CEO

• More control over personal information and reputation.
• A focus on strong ties (real friends) – rather than weak ties (contacts).

Jon Cherry – co-founder & editor of Cherryflava.com

What’s going to be hot in 2012? Branded experiences – brand promotion that goes beyond a screen and sticky content. All the tools are now available to create branded experiences that closely resemble magic and seamlessly integrate that with popular social media platforms without the need for a digital device to share that experience on. Building an authentic, permission-based brand community is all in the design of the real-world experience.

Dave Duarte – MD of the Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy

More than 2 million people in SA will get their first smartphone in 2012, taking our total user-base to over 10 million. This will likely drive more broad-based use of the web and mobile apps for everything from job-hunting and banking to entertainment and socialization. As a result, early-adopter organizations will start replacing their traditional call-centers with text-based chat support for mobile users on WhatsApp, BBM and Mxit.

More than twice as much money will be spent on online and mobile advertising in South Africa, which will boost the incomes of online publishers and enable more success among digital entrepreneurs. As a result, we will also see more investment in the space, enabling yet more innovation.

Erik Hersman – Founder of Ushahidi & iHub

More African startups will find funding than ever before.

Henk Kleynhans – CEO of Skyrove Wifi Hotspots

In 2012, new “Super Wi-Fi” equipment equipment will become broadly available, allowing independent wireless ISPA and individuals to make use of prime, but underutilized TV white space spectrum for delivering high speed last mile broadband. This will likely be the most significant technology innovation of the decade, in terms of the economic impact it will unleash.

Alan Knott-Craig – CEO or MXit & World of Avatar

Advertising will become a secondary (and unnecessary) revenue stream for web businesses

Aslam Levy – Internet Portal Manager at the Western Cape Government

In the e-Government space we will see the eventual understanding and embracing of “Social, Mobile and Location”. The prioritization of these key theme’s will result in greater digital inclusion, especially for rural communities.

Paul Scott – Free Software hacker @ MIH SWAT

There is a lot of hype, but I think that the thing that is going to have the most impact will be bigdata and bigdata analysis. Not big as in petabytes, but big as in how to process it all quickly enough to be
meaningful.

Realtime analytics for predictive decision making in cities and medical will probably be the first iteration, but that will also be extrapolated quickly to other things too.

Mobile (android probably and WP) will make a lot of news. With new processors in devices (quad cores and GPU based processing) new apps will emerge that will allow folks to do much more on phones/tablets rather than desktop. Bandwidth will be an issue, but not as big an issue as power supplies (battery life).

I reckon that marketing will get more local and then hyperlocal. It will also be more targeted and intense. Spatial will (again) be a big player, but less so than the previous few years as the value add onto spatial will be more important than the spatial apps themselves. Basically, if I were to start a business this year, it would be with data processing and analytics for the masses.

What do you predict the technology trend for 2012 will be?

On The Brink discusses the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud.

Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society.

Concepts such as border-less opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today’s dumb society are brought up and discussed.

We’re entering a new era. Technology has enabled us to interact, innovate and share knowledge in whole new ways – creating a dynamic shift in mindset. People are empowered, business is liberated and society is more connected than ever.

via Top Documentary Films

Last year they pioneered South Africa’s first true Cloud hosting platform, allowing users to deploy and provision fully operational Linux servers in seconds. 1273 Linux Cloud Servers have been deployed to date.

We value all the feedback we receive from our loyal customers, and we have seen an unprecedented demand for our Linux Cloud Servers, but Microsoft Windows still remains the most requested feature. So, after several months of internal trial and testing phases, we are very excited to finally release Microsoft Windows on the platform.

The technology behind RSAweb’s offering allows users to buy Linux or Microsoft Windows servers from the web with full control over the resources and operating system. CPU, RAM and SAN Storage can be added on the fly as usage or demand requirements change.

RSAweb’s Cloud Servers with Windows are available in the following configurations or resources – all of which include FREE setup:

• Windows Server Std 2008: R141 p/month
• Windows Web Server 2008: R171 p/month

This gives you complete control with full administrator access to your server, allowing you to select you choice of operating system, applications and configuration.

Try RSAweb’s Microsoft Windows Cloud Server for yourself and please let me know how it goes. Web AddiCT(s); try not to touch anything Microsoft with a 10 foot pole. The trial period lasts for 7 days. You will be prompted to sign up for the service should you wish to continue using your cloud server. No bank details are required to the Cloud Server Free Trial. You can simply sign up using your email address, and your server will be good to go in no time.

Would that not be a blast? If TrustFabric becomes ‘mainstream’ and more companies start using it, changing banks would be easier than Mobile Number Portability. The whole RiCA, FiCA and whatever-iCA they come up with next would not require as much time and as big an advertising budget the RiCA deadline just did. To me, not only will a VRM tool like TrustFabric save me time but it will save the corporations millions, that’s a win-win. It can be used as the South African Opt-Out registry and can even spell the end of SMS Spam which I complained about yesterday.

It doesn’t end there. TrustFabric this week announced a new service called TrustFabric Child
Protect.

Their new service helps protect children from inappropriate content by
letting parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number or
email address of their child.

Approved content providers or social networks can query the Child Protect
registry to find out if a mobile phone number or email address belongs to an
adult before access is granted to certain content or features.

Parents can start using Child Protect by signing up for TrustFabric Connect. Imagine having your kids mobile numbers connected to the Child Protect service. Those late night ads on freE TV offering you XXX rated material with a simple SMS & subscription service could simply ping Child Protect to verify the user or the mobile phones age. I can even picture MXit users parent’s, who are concerned about their children’s safety in chat rooms meant for a more mature audience, control with who their kids converse on Africa’s largest social network simply by setting up Child Protect. Those parties that are not organised by cigarette tobacco companies, just by event management companies with very similar humped wavy logos could even use Child Protect to ensure minors do not get exposed to their brands. The possibilities are endless and with it I agree with Tyler Reed this is the most ambitious stat-up to come from South Africa… ever.

PS: TrustFabric Child Protect is a free service. Find out more here

With Android it is much easier because you’re phone is treated a a USB storage device so access to the files are as easy as opening Finder or Windows Explorer and simply dragging what you need over to your desktop. All this has changed with Samsung Kies Air, an app exclusive to Samsung Galaxy devices, that will allow you to Sync your device over WiFi.

Samsung today have added a useful application to its App Store – Kies Air – which allows users to sync their phone with a PC wirelessly. The application allows PCs to access the smartphone over WiFi and view call logs, videos, photos, bookmarks, and IMs, as well as send SMS messages from the computer’s browser – which not only promotes user friendly and an enhanced experience, but also allows for quick synchronisation of contacts and calendars.

“This innovative application development is just one way in which we at Samsung are striving to deliver to the market functional applications that not only simplify our customer’s device management, but also ensures that they have access to the very latest in technology offerings, from both a B2B and B2C perspective,” says Brett Loubser, B2C Apps Development Lead at Samsung.

Content management however is not where it ends, the Kies Air application enables the consumer to use the PC keyboard for typing messages and emails for example, quickly. Furthermore, the ability to archive text messages and sync content to the device as well as incorporate Samsung Galaxy smartphones as a modem makes this application a market leading innovative tool for Samsung Galaxy users. Now users will be able to upload and download music, pictures and videos wirelessly, which is convenient if a USB cable is not available or your USB ports are occupied.

“This service is just another way we are enhancing the customer experience – making the interaction with the device easier and more seamless in line with our already strong product line,” concludes Loubser.

Now WiFi Sync is possible on the Samsung Galaxy (version 2.2 or later) or Samsung Galaxy S2 using Kies Air.

One of the interesting things that Paul Graham emphasized on , is that that startups have to focus on building products or services that will make people’s lives better. He added, “… it’s funny how straight forward it is. People often think that business requires some sort of trickery, or … you have to corner the market or something… but actually you have to make people’s lives better.”

When asked about the number one killer of startups, Paul said “ … they (startups) make something that users don’t like! … they make dog food that dogs do not like to eat”

Given how fast innovation is happening across the world at this point in time, this definitely is an interesting interview to watch – it might help you validate your startup idea so that you may go from just being an “idea” to filling for an IPO.

Unfortunately, the video embedding option has been disabled by Bloomberg, to view the video, click here.