Edmonton Business Consultant | Components of A Business Plan Template

All right, here we are. We’re joined today with Josh spurl of spurl and associates, the Edmonton Business Consultant from north of the border. That will help you, um, really get into a great place with your Edmonton Business Consultant and your finances. Now, Josh, can you talk to us about the importance of a business plan for anybody who might’ve missed the earlier podcast? Why does everybody out there need a business plan? So we talked about earlier that companies are 50% more likely to increase their revenue if they have a business plan in place. So 50% more likely to increase your Edmonton Business Consultant. That’s a shot that, that I want to take. Although that’s not, that’s not really that awesome. I mean,

okay,

no, you have to do it. You got to get serious. You’ve got to create a business plan. What are you doing? You got to get a business plan. I don’t have time to make a business plan. Okay, fine. Here’s, here’s the, here’s the deal. We had an opportunity before today’s show. I didn’t ask Josh about this, but I, I reached out to the local community and I thought, you don’t want to do, I’m gonna interview people that have not made a business plan and have tried to go out there and start a company now in America, we now know, according to Forbes, that nine out of 10 American businesses, according to Forbes, fail startups, nine out of 10 fail according to Forbes, eight out of 10 existing existing businesses fail. And so we thought, you know, I’m going to interview the average man on the street and ask him, you know, what happens to your Edmonton Business Consultant if you do not have a business plan? You know, and so I’m, I’m asking people and one guy says, I’ll over here, over here, I have a, I have a tie, I have a hot take. And I said, well, hey, okay. So just to recap here, you, you did not make a business plan, is that correct? He said, absolutely. And I said, and how’s it going? You didn’t make a business plan. How’s your Edmonton Business Consultant going? He says, well, this is, this is what I want to tell you.

First off, I am 35 years old. I am divorced and I live in a van down by the river.

it’s, I looked at him and I said, so you didn’t make a business plan, you’re divorced, you live in a van down by the river. And then he said,

like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. I took the wrong weight, quit drinking,

feel like I picked the wrong week when I’m fit to meet.

Oh John.

Then I looked at him and I said, Oh boy, turns on his name was Billy. Oh. So if you don’t make a business plan, things could get rough for you. So now if I am going to make a business plan template, um, what software do you recommend I use for the business planning process as the Canadians in Scotland? Yeah, we have a, a software that we use, it’s called a live plan and it’s a web based planning software. So it’s really easy to integrate and collaborate with your via the web based Edmonton Business Consultant. And we really include the price of that software in our fees. So you use called live plan? That’s correct. Okay. Live plan.com? Yes. Okay. So I’ll put here a fun fact on the show notes here. I’m going to put here, Josh recommends live plan.com. So why do you use that software and what did you use previously?

Previously we had our, our word documents and an excel plate. Our excel documents, although they’re, they’re really flexible, they’re difficult to collaborate with people, um, because you both can’t access them real time and also they’re difficult to update. Uh, the web based software makes it a little bit easier to update and make changes year to year. So why do you, why do you start with an executive summary when you’re creating a business plan? Well, it’s, you know, people have short attention spans. So the most pertinent information, if you can get it first, you know, especially if you’re applying for a loan, that banker might only ever read the executive summary before they make their decision. So we start with the executive summary and put the most pertinent information first. So what are the most important can bump components on the executive summary that we need to start with?

So the first thing that we do in the executive summary, it’s described the product and services along with the average price that you charge along with the average cost that it costs you to deliver the service and the average gross margin per unit on a per unit basis. So next you use a company overview section. Now what’s included in that company overview section, the company overview section is really designed for external users. So it’s going to list, you know, who, where do you operate out of, you know, who is your Edmonton Business Consultant, who is your lawyer, who do you bank with? And it’s a lot of it’s designed for attracting financing. Okay. Now then you have the product section. How does this differ from the products and margins in the executive summary? So the first, the first paragraph is almost the same and we, we restate what those products and margins are.

But then we go a little bit deeper because in the product and services section we want to establish, you know, what are the variances, what are all of the different things on your menu so to speak, whether you’re a restaurant or not, you, you have a menu and we want to drill down into, you know, what are the high fees that you charge, what are the low fees you charge for various products and services? Okay. So then you have this market and analysis market and risk analysis section. Super important to identify these risks. So I think that’s one thing that a business owners forget about. They have risks, they have worries, but they don’t just take the time to document them, write them down. And you know, I encourage them, you know, in our business planets, what are the three things that I say keep you up at night?

You know, are you worried about getting sued? Are you worried about not being able to attract enough customers? You know, what we want to do is document those three biggest risks and you know, explicitly state what we’re going to do to mitigate those risks. And then you have a sales and marketing plan here. What are typically trying to, to, to quantify here. So in the sales and marketing plan, first of all, we’re going to start with how many customers you have and what sort of revenue those existing customers are going to generate for you. And then we drill down to how many new customers you want to you’re going to need to acquire to hit your objectives. And what are the top five marketing initiatives that you’re going to use to, um, basically attract those new customers. Now. And the next, the next area is you have this operations strategy that includes, um, milestones.

What are the purposes of, of these milestones? So often in a business plan, there’ll be some, you know, really important, uh, um, kind of events that are going to have to happen in order to execute the plan. I’ll give you an example. Maybe you have to complete the build out for your new location or maybe you need to make a website go live maybe to hire a key staff member. So what we want to do is establish timelines on those key metrics because those are really going to drive those projections. You know, obviously you can’t start collecting revenue until that build out is complete. K now you have a staff in key supplier section. Uh, what is one of the components of this section that is fairly unique to your planning process over there at spurling associates, we will go through and look at the time blocks for the business owner or owners, you know, what do they do with their day?

It’s one of the most significant areas in the end. What’s going to drive the financial analysis? You know, I tell people there’s probably two really significant areas that drive our projections. And number one, it’s the market initiatives. Do they have enough marketing initiatives to generate the leads and then to, you know, what is the owner going to do with their time to make this happen? You know, I’ll, I’ll go back to the, the contractor example. So if you’re a contractor and you want to move your Edmonton Business Consultant business from 500,000 a year to a million dollars a year, when are you going to do twice as many estimates as you’ve been doing before? When are you going to do twice as many site visits and all businesses happen? Very much the same way. We have to understand when this work is going to be done and for growing this business.

So what have you think of the business? What do, what do you think of business plans that, that try to project out a longer amount of time. I think they’re mostly a waste of time. You know, you’re in a business plan for a small business, you want to be going to three years in the future. I’m more than that. It’s more of a business guests rather than a business plan. So when projecting the income statement to the balance sheet and the, and the cashflow components, uh, what, how do you, how do you go about making these projections monthly and annually as it relates to the income statement? The balance sheet and the cash flow, how do you, how do you do that? So most business owners, they’re really concerned about what my cashflow is going to be on a month to month basis. And one of the critical things that we see is is when they come in and it’s a, it’s a critical mistake with a lot of other templates we see.

Yeah. Is that the cashflow and income statement and balance sheet? If you want to accurate cashflow on a monthly basis, you also have to do an income statement and balance sheet on a monthly basis. We see a lot of plans come in where they grabbed the template online and they have a cashflow on a monthly basis and then they only have a balance sheet at the year end and invariably almost always that cashflow ends up being incorrect. So in your experience, what happens when you project some financial statement components monthly and then some components annually? Yeah. So that’s where we go back to that, that, that cashflow, that income statement really in order to check if your cashflow is correct, you have to go and assemble that balance sheet to know if your cashflow was correct month to month. So it’s really a, it’s one of those missteps. It’s a shortcut.

It doesn’t work. If you want to know where your cashflow is going to be month a month, you also have to do the income statement and balance sheet on a month to month basis as well. Josh, I appreciate, appreciate you being on today’s show. I think you’re enlightening a lot of people out there. For anybody out there who wants to get ahold of you or to schedule a consultation with you, what’s the best way they can go about reaching out to a proactive Canadian Canadian accountant of your Edmonton Business Consultant caliber? So our website is www dot [inaudible] s p u r r e l l. Dot. Ca. Um, or they can call us at (780) 665-4949. Can you repeat that phone number one more time? Someone was trying to take some notes. There is (780) 665-4949 Josh, you are a great Canadian. Thank you for being on the show. Thanks very much. Clay.