Having your business well organized and planned out is very important and a must if you want to profit in your embroidery business! I want to share with you the 9 steps that it takes in planning for a successful and profitable embroidery business!
Before I get started, I want to ask you a few very important questions, questions that you need to think seriously about. I also want to tell you that at the end of this presentation, I will be sharing an opportunity with you that if you take me up on it, you will be able to get your business organized much quicker and will have all of the tools to work with in order to be able to do it more efficiently. This will be huge in being able to get your business set up properly and get you on the right path to profit in your embroidery business.
- About how much planning do you think do you for your business on a daily basis?
- Do you have a Business Plan, One that you can actually use to run your business?
- Do you have a Marketing Plan?
- Do you have Specific Goals for your business?
- Is your embroidery business on track for meeting its goals this year?
- Do you have a plan in place for the lean times?
- Do you have a plan for each area of your business?
And the most important question of all!
- Do you run your business or does your business run you?
Planning for your Embroidery Business is one of the most important functions that you can perform in your business. Every single area within your business needs a plan, not only the one in your head but one written on paper.
Without a plan in place, we wander aimlessly through our day taking care of whatever problem comes across our path. The phone rings, you handle that problem, a customer comes in the door, you take care of that person, the day goes by in just this manner and before you know it, the day is gone and you feel like you have accomplished nothing.
How do I know this, I have been very guilty of this. Before I started planning out my entire business, I just handled each issue as it showed up and hoped at the end of the month I had enough money to pay the bills! This is not the way to run a business!
Your business is a very serious venture and if you do not plan it out, you are just running a hobby and you would be better off doing something else with your time unless, of course, this is the kind of life that you want! For me, I want to know what I am doing and what I need to do each day of my week and month.
I wake up each morning with my plan in place and I know exactly what I have to get done that day and I do whatever I can to get it accomplished. Does it always happen, No, but I sure do work at it hard enough and try to get it all accomplished. Without a written plan, I would not know what I had to get done by the end of this week or this month in order to reach my goal.
If you have your goals set and your plan together it is much easier to get through your day. Crazy things happen at times that put a stumbling block in front of you, but you still try to get around that block! This is the time when you have to make adjustments
I Started With No Business Plan
You may have heard me talk about how I started my business with no plan. I had no plan of any kind! I would sort of plan out my next day but it was only a to-do list that usually did not mean much of anything. If it got through my to-do list, OK, if I did not, oh well, I just did not get it done!
I did not even know what a business plan was. It was not until I had to go to the bank to borrow some money that I found out about a business plan. I also found out that I could not borrow any money without a business plan. They also wanted a business plan that made sense, one that I was going to follow.
I went to the Small Business Administration because that is what the bank told me to do. This is where I started learning how to create a Business Plan. I also worked with my accountant to help me get through my first one. It was really tough for me and took a huge amount of time. They required that I do a ton of research and I had to create a lot of financial data for them. I had not even heard of most of the statements that they required that I create.
At that time, I had no accountant and was not at all familiar with all of the statements that they were talking about. They wanted 3 years of projections, 3 years of Cash Flow statements, A Balance Sheet, my current Income statement, What was that? I was clueless!
Going through this entire process prompted me to go to our local college and take accounting courses. I found them very interesting and I learned a ton about business that was totally foreign to me. I also took Business Law and Business Report Writing. I finally felt a little more qualified to run a business and I understood the 9 steps to profit in your embroidery business!