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Business success is dependent on a solid financial foundation & success looks different to everyone & there is a lack of equity of access to resources and information for small business owners and independent contractors & there is a societal narrative making us believe “balance” is our ultimate goal & … There are so many “&”s that impact being your own boss. Let’s have some frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success.
Molly Beyer: Hello, hello, I am Molly Beyer, host of The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond, a podcast where we have frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success. There are so many ands that impact being your own boss. Join us as we explore all these ands and more. Like, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts and let's explore these ambiguous ands.
Molly Beyer: Hello and welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. I'm your host, Molly Beyer, and I'm here to lead you through frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. We're going to start this episode with a little story. Imagine you're on holiday in a foreign land, and you decide you want to visit a local tourist spot that you've always wanted to see. You have a general idea of where you're going, and maybe you can even see your destination far off in the distance, so you set off down the path. The path starts to wind through villages and fields, and you stop being able to see your destination. When you started, you knew the general direction. So you decide to use the sun as your guide and continue on the way. After a while, the sun goes under the clouds and you start to question if you're still headed in the right direction. You decide to ask a local how to get where you're going. They give you directions using the local language, which you barely speak, and describe landmarks that don't make any sense to you. But you head off in the direction they pointed, following the path into the woods. Now you definitely can't see the sun. The path has disappeared, and you start to feel the eyes of predators on you as you stumble around. You remember you have a map you drew before starting out and take it out of your pack, but you've wandered so far off track that you aren't even sure if you're still on the map.
Molly Beyer: This is what it can feel like to start a business. You have a beautiful idea, a general sense of how to turn it into an enterprise, and a bunch of random resources you can use on the way. So in the last episode, we talked about defining success for ourselves as whole people. This episode, we're going to talk about defining the metrics that make a business successful. Generally, this means it can make long-term profits, generate sustainable growth, and meet the changing needs of its customers. When talking about success, I also talked about my love of the journey story and helping any business owner to find success. Well, the journey story of a business starts with a business plan, using it as a map to get through the seemingly foreign land of business management. There are many pieces to laying a solid foundation for a business. Liken it to erecting a skyscraper, you need to anchor deep into the bedrock to make sure your building does not topple over. Or an example from the natural world is a plant taking root. The stabilizing structure grows first before you ever see a sprout above ground. Building a business is much the same. Great energy must be spent solidifying the foundation so the structure we see is stable and strong. General advice to laying the foundation is that all businesses start with a business plan, but there are many formats that a business plan can take, so it is important to find the one that works best for your business. Having a fully written out, detailed, traditional business plan with data and financial projections is necessary when you're seeking financing or funding, or sometimes for a business in a heavily regulated field. Using a lean startup plan can get some of the information in the traditional plan, but is less in-depth, does not generally include data and financials, and tends to be more story-based.
Molly Beyer: This could be an option for a business that is self-funding, but wants a great outline of the business before moving forward. For a solopreneur taking their passion to the masses as a service provider, it may be even more scaled-down and may only include exercises on defining some specifics like product or service, ideal client, market-dominating position, messaging, and sales processes. No matter what, though, it's incredibly important to answer the questions lined out in a business plan for yourself as a roadmap on how to structure, run, and grow the business, and as the basis for decision-making through the life of the business. But just like our idea of success, this map is fluid. And even if you've been in business for years, reviewing and revising these questions or this plan can mean the difference between stagnation and exponential growth. Follow the link in the episode description to download a fillable PDF business plan questionnaire. This is a great exercise for all businesses and can help set or reinforce a solid foundation. Whether just starting a business, feeling stagnant, or looking for meaningful ways to get teams or management engaged with the business, because this is a great team-building activity.
Molly Beyer: Today we are going to focus on the executive summary and market analysis portions of a traditional business plan with a little dip into marketing and sales management. This is the very minimum of what you should know before you start a business. If you're following along in the business plan questionnaire, this is questions one through eight. For each question, I will give an abbreviated answer from when I started my business. But my actual answers to these questions were much longer and went significantly deeper. Now the first question is also the start of the executive summary. The executive summary in a business plan comes first, though I do recommend writing it last if you're creating a traditional business plan. Creating the rest of the plan will give you all of the information and the inspiration that you need to write the summary. And that summary really is your first opportunity to grab the reader's attention, especially if you're looking for investors. They will read the summary to decide if they will even bother to read the rest of your plan. So the first question you need to answer is why did you start this business? This is part of your personal success journey story. Now I started my business as a way to have a professional identity while being a stay-at-home parent. I knew it would be too easy to lose myself in my new role, and I wanted to make sure I had an identity other than mom. It was also an opportunity to help small business owners while making a little bit of money for my family.
Molly Beyer: The second question is what is your experience and why does it qualify you to run this business? If there are degrees or professional certifications in your field, by all means add them. But also make sure to dig deeper. Add the experiences or special insights that make this business a no-brainer for you, and really focus on your superpowers. Our superpowers are often the things that we find troublesome about ourselves, but actually make us super awesome. My experiences include many years of management, administrative and finance work, an MBA with an accounting concentration, time as a business consultant in a partnership, and a superpower of being able to quickly scan data for discrepancies and relevant patterns.
Molly Beyer: The third question is pretty straightforward. What is the nature of your business or idea? Mine started as providing virtual bookkeeping services to small business owners, while also helping advise and guide them to move their numbers from historical to proactive. Now we take our answer to question three and put it under a microscope to answer question four. What makes your offering of this idea, product, or service unique and what barriers are there to the market? Virtual bookkeeping isn't an overly saturated market yet, but it is and has been growing. It was definitely necessary for me to distinguish myself from other virtual bookkeepers to start getting clients, and I really leaned heavily on my degree and my time as both a business manager and a business consultant to speak to the areas of small business that could most benefit from excellent financial records. It was the added experience, advising, and history of running successful businesses that really helped set me apart.
Molly Beyer: Now these answers segue nicely into question five. How will you fill the market need? Where are the critical needs of your potential customers, and are those needs currently being met? Every business needs a bookkeeping system, but many businesses do not have one. Or if they do, it was likely set up by an owner or manager, someone without the experience and training to set it up correctly. And these same people are likely the ones handling it on a day-to-day basis. By offering many levels of engagement, including setting up and training in accounting softwares, I was able to fill an even greater market need than just being an ongoing bookkeeper. Question number six is what is your target market and why, as well as how important is your target market to your competitors? My target market when I started was restaurants and coffee shops, but quickly turned into solopreneur service providers. Over time, however, I've even dropped that. Now many of my competitors niche industry or business structure, and I really have always remained industry and structure-agnostic. And even though the virtual bookkeeping world is growing, there are no limits to the numbers of businesses needing bookkeeping services. So though there is competition, it tends to be an industry of relationships. So personality fit truly is key.
Molly Beyer: Question seven is all about pricing and will be very industry and product or service-specific. This is where you will need to do some research to get a feel for the current market, and it is also a space that you will want to revisit often. The questions to ask are what is your pricing structure? What are your gross margin levels? And finally, do you plan to use discounting and if so, to what extent? These are questions we'll cover in depth in a future episode, but having at least a basic starting point will really help you start with confidence.
Molly Beyer: And finally, for today, what is your company's elevator pitch? Elevator pitches are used to briefly describe something. The idea being if you had 30 seconds on an elevator ride with someone, how would you make a lasting impression on them? To start this exercise, you need to identify three things. One.) Who is your ideal client, Two) What do you do for them? and Three) What is the pain you help them to avoid? You've already answered many of these questions, so now put them together. My earliest pitches essentially broke down to we provide balance to small business owners through individualized design of their bookkeeping system, and continued support as their true business ally, so they can stop making knee-jerk financial decisions and start being proactive. This is a pretty small statement, but using this formula, you can add more information to fill a 30 or 60-second introduction. It also helps you move from a vague and lacklustre introduction, like 'I own a landscaping company' to a compelling and memorable message like 'I create beautiful landscaping for busy professionals that makes their home the envy of the neighborhood so they can avoid the heat and spend time doing what they love'. Which message would you be more likely to remember? These eight questions will help build your solid foundation and are the first lines on your roadmap of success. Though it is possible to start a business without a business plan of some kind, it will weaken the foundation and make the structure of the business less strong.
Molly Beyer: Thanks for hanging out with us today. We would love to hear your feedback on today's episodes as well as requests for future content. Drop a comment or suggestion and join us next time for more frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Please also like, subscribe or follow so you never miss an episode. Until next time, I am Molly Beyer and this has been the The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. Have a wonderful day!