Simply Junior

When planning to build any kind of online presence as a small business, it is important to start with a good foundation. A good online foundation contains the following four main components: a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a LinkedIn profile.

A website can and should begin with a simple informational site consisting of five main pages. People should be able to find the business on the web, learn about the company, contact someone for customer service, learn about the products available, services or capabilities, and find the business in the “real” world.

A Facebook page offers many of the same features as a basic website. Visitors should be able to find the company fan page, contact someone for assistance, interact with the business, and share the page with friends. Luckily, all of this is built into Facebook.

LinkedIn is commonly described as the primary social media place for business. A company should create a personal profile with information about the business. Each employee should reference the company in their personal profile and appear as an extension of the business.

Twitter has a wealth of information and is really very simple. Companies use Twitter to “tweet” small updates and to search for specific mentions of the business firm, competition, partners, and anything related to the company’s market.

Don’t let Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter become a full-time job. Set a specific time and look quickly through the Facebook and LinkedIn Profiles. Create a few searches and lists to review related Twitter activity. While looking at each of the services, respond to any serious inquiries, share a personal comment, and share something useful.

Ok, now here’s the secret — Connect all of these items together! Over time, start to write a blog on the website. When posting a blog entry, “push” it to the Facebook page. The Facebook page should then automatically “push” to the Twitter page. Connect Twitter and the blog to the LinkedIn account. With these “connections,” a single blog entry is easily “pushed” to the three social media profiles.

This might sound like a lot of work, but it really isn’t. The setup is not difficult and can be done in just a few hours (assuming the company information is available). After everything is completely setup, it doesn’t take much time at all to write a short (but high quality) blog entry, quickly check the social profiles, and build a solid online presence.

Writing a business plan is very important for a small business. You have to explain your background, qualifications, experience and your capacity to implement the project. A good business plan is absolutely essential to convince the banks and financial institutions to lend you money for the project

Your business plan should explain who is starting the project. What is the project? When are you starting the project? Why are you starting the project? How are you going about it? The results expected from the project, should also be mentioned.

Your background and qualifications have to be explained in detail. You have to explain what projects you have done before. You should give a detailed explanation of the product or service you are going to launch. And also the competition you might face. If you are already in business, you should also give details of the activities of the company or business. The revenue expected should be mentioned in detail.

If it is new business the details of how you are setting up the business. How long it would take to set it up? Your production and sales targets should also be mentioned. How you are meeting these targets should also be explained.

Where are you going to set up the business? Whether it is a shop or a factory? How are you acquiring the land? The details of construction of the building and the costs involved should be mentioned.

Your marketing plans will have to be explained. Who are your customers and how are you going to reach them should be explained. Whether you are hiring a marketing company to market your product or marketing it on your own has to be explained. If you are planning an expansion, the details of how it would be financed should be mentioned.

You have to do quite a bit of ground work and research before starting any new project. It is always better to have contingency plans to get over any unforeseen problems. I have seen people visualizing various scenarios, and making plans to face them. It is always better to look before you jump.

The last article ended with the business plan updated through the Operating Income line. So we’ve discussed revenue, direct expenses, and most SG&A expenses. Here we’ll finish with the calculation of net income. We’ll wrap up our business plan discussion with some overall thoughts in the next article.

The next area we need to consider are the effects of any financial activity your firm will be engaged in. Interest income and expenses need to be forecast. Part of the overall aspects of your business plan will be what financing you receive, how much of that money you will use directly, how much you will use over time, and how much that not currently being used will earn.

For instance, let’s say you received $100K in financing at the beginning of year one. You anticipate that, given your specific operations and level of business, you will use $50K by the end of year one. The average amount that you will not be using at any given time during the year is $75K, as you run it down from $100K to $50K. You will probably have that money in an interest bearing account. We can assume an interest rate, say 1%, and multiply by the average balance, $75K. The result, $750 would be our interest income for year one. You should continue your cash flow analysis and calculation through years two and three.

Of course, you may have some Interest expense as well. If you financed your business with a loan of $100K, for instance, then you would calculate the interest expense for the year. If the interest rate were 6%, then your Interest expense for the year would be $6K. Depending on your payback schedule, the interest expense could be slightly different – this assumes you are paying interest-only for the year, but this would be close in any case. You should continue this projection for years two and three.

Most small business will not be paying out dividends, but if yours will, the next line is where they would be shown.

We should deduct our net interest expense and dividends from our Operating income to give us our Net Income before Income taxes. Last but not least, we have income taxes to project. For simplicity, we’ll assume that the business is a sole proprietorship. In that case, tax rates are the same as individual rates. Your net income from your business is added to any other net income you may have through any other salary or business, and the tax owed would be calculated accordingly. In the same way, you should estimate the tax for years two and three.

Once you deduct your income tax from the previous line you will have your projected Net Income for your business. At this point you will have essentially completed the revenue, expense and income picture for your business as per your business plan. Of course, an ancillary product of this process would be year-end balance sheet figures and cash flow statements. These will show the cumulative financial results / effects and cash position, respectively.

Please see the next article in the business plan article series where we will take a step back and take a look at the big picture and the most important issues related to the business plan.

As the 2010 business year winds down , like most business owners you are probably taking a break, and coasting through to the end your year. But, you should be reflecting on the past 12 months and you should also be reviewing your business strategy for 2011.

Your Business Strategy for 2010 – Looking Back

Whether you identify your year-end in December or not, the end of the year is a great time to take stock of how things went in 2010. Most business owners and entrepreneurs tend to have a short focus, typically only 2-3 months, and as a result, they often don’t take time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what they should be focusing on long-term.

As we enter the holiday season, you should be able to carve out some time to sit down, and reflect on the past year. To start, you should think back to where your business was in January 2010. What were your goals for last year? Did you achieve them? If not, why? Many business owners are surprised by the progress their business made (or didn’t make) when they just take the time to think back and reflect.

Your Business Strategy for 2011 – Looking Forward

After reflecting on 2010, you should now start planning your goals and objectives and where you want to be by the end of 2011. Ask yourself the following:

1.What is your revenue goal for 2011 compared to 2010?

2.What should you be measuring in your business to know how it’s doing?

3.Are their new or additional products or services you should add to your business offering?

4.Are there things you should drop or change how you offer them?

5.If your strategy is not performing at the levels you expect, does it make sense to keep pursuing the same strategy, or should you change it up?

6. What are the biggest frustrations you experienced this past year, and what can you do about them?

7. Who are your most valued employees and have you let them know how valuable they are to you?

8.Who are your problem or difficult employees, and are you going to take action to correct the problem?

9.Who were you most valuable suppliers or vendors? (Where there some that you should stop doing business with?)

10.Which customers were profitable, and where can you find more like them?

This 10 question list is by no means the only questions you should ask yourself. In fact, there will probably be a lot more that start to come to mind as you go through the process. The main action you MUST take is to write them down, and then, next December, you should pull them out and see how things are going. Or better yet, you could use them to create a plan for you business, and review the plan at least once a month to make sure you are on track to hit (or exceed) your goals in 2011!

VPS is a fairly new technology that has gained much popularity in a short amount of time. There are mainly three options currently available when it comes to hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting and virtual private severs. Shared hosting is mainly selected by new websites and smaller businesses that do not have very specific needs. dedicated servers are used by large websites and businesses that have to deal with very high traffic levels and require resources of their own. Virtual private servers lie somewhere in between both of these options and offer good features, reliability and flexibility at cost effective prices.

Would It Be A Better Option for Your Business?

VPS is much similar to dedicated servers when you think about user experience. You would get the same kind of isolated experience, same response time, flexibility and speed. However, the major difference between both of these options is the cost involved. When it comes to dedicated servers, you will be required to invest a large amount of money for the hardware and infrastructure that would be required because the resources will be for your own use. With virtual private severs you would be sharing the resources with other users and so there is no need for any investment in hardware. If you want cost effectiveness, then virtual private servers are definitely the right choice for you.

When is the Right Time to Shift?

Before you consider shifting to VPS from your shared hosting plan, it would be important to know what would be a good time for it. If you are using shared server currently and if you are not really facing any major problems with your account then you may not want to immediately shift. Virtual private servers are a step up from the standard shared packages and so the best thing to do would be to shift to it when shared hosting does not meet your requirements any longer. If you have a new website and a very small business then shared hosting may be sufficient for you.

If you have a business for quite some time now and have increased traffic levels then shared hosting may no longer be sufficient when it comes to performance. At this stage you would want to think about shifting to a new hosting option. If you are planning an expansion in the near future or are thinking about adding new services and products on your website then it would be best to change your hosting plan to VPS before it.