30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Choose a Module, Any Module

Yesterday, Tim Berry shared some great advice. Let's hear it again:

Think of a plan as a collection of separate thoughts, bullet points, maybe a table of dates and dealines, and some projections, including a few key strategy points like what you're writing for whom and what target media, some goals and objectives, a definition of success, and a lot of specific concrete steps to be taken -- dates, deadlines, task responsibilities -- and then add some basic numbers, like sales and expenses.

You don't have to stop time and suspend life and business while you do the whole thing from start to finish. On the contrary, start anywhere, get going. Pick a module to do first, whether it's target market conceptually or specific sales forecast or whatever, and do that, start using that, and go on with your business.

But if you're new to business planning, what modules should you include? I can't answer definitively, but these are some of the modules I include. Check out the list, snatch one of them and get started on it. Then let me know how it's working for you.

I break it down by several types of modules. Today, I'll start with the big picture and in later posts, I'll break it down more specifically. Feel inspired? Get started today!

First is ideological:

Morals
I know, you're wondering what morals have to do with business. To which I say: A lot. Serenity in business is about focusing on what you can control and shifting your attention away from what you can't. But it's also about doing work that's in alignment with your highest aspirations. Ideally, work feeds both your soul and your bank account. But to do that, you have to know what they are.

Here's how you find out. Each of these are modules. Do one at a time. List your:

• Loftiest professional values;
• Personal and community values;
• Responsibilities; and
• Weaknesses.

Some of these will be professional. Two of my professional values are creativity and honesty. One of my personal values is spirituality. I also value health. And it's my responsibility to pay my bills. All these go into this.

Skills
When your client asks (or you wonder) what you have to offer, this list will tell you. Here, it's helpful to have saved emails of praise from clients and readers. They are better able to tell you what your skills are than you , because your clients are the ones to whom your services need to be of value. Skills can include:

• Professional skills: ability to type while interviewing, writing evocatively, working collaboratively with editors, being good at short turn-around assignments, and being responsive to queries, among others.
  
• Personal skills: If you're the head of your homeowners association, you better believe you have conflict resolution skills and leadership skills.
• Personal expertise: If you used to make dolls of yarn and sell them at the swap meet, you have expertise in both crafting and haggling. If you've been going to the gym forever, you may have expertise on how not to use the equipment or how to care for injured knees or shoulders. If you started, as I did, this year visiting a body worker, you have experience using alternative methods to heal physical illnesses.
  

Everything in your life is grist for this mill. When we get to a later module on the types of things you want to cover, you'll be primed to discuss adding or changing coverage areas.

Mission Statement, AKA your elevator speech.
Everyone needs one. Now that you've assessed your values and skills, you know what you can include in it. It should be one or two sentences that describe what you love about your job, what you do well, and what you cover. And it should help guide your business decisions in the next year.

After all, you can ask yourself: Does this assignment fit into my mission?

Next, I'll share modules for evaluating your 2008 business.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: The Wrap Up

Here's to 2008 and the end of this 30-day business planning challenge. In case you missed anything, here's a round up:

Planning for Serenity: A reprieved post on what business planning has to do with serenity.

Checking on Progress: Here's what my business plan tells me about my goals vs. my achievements this year.

Goals vs. Actions: Does a business plan work? Here's a lively debate about what success means in business planning.

How Katrina Does It: A skeleton plan and regular review is all freelancer Katrina Ramser needs to keep her on track.

Learning Your Way: Or, planning your way. Plan in a way that works with your learning style.

The Plan Is Useless; Planning Is Essential: A Q&A with business planning guru Tim Berry.

Choose a Module, Any Module: Following Berry's advice, I lay out the first of several modules that allow you to start planning now without setting aside a day or a week for it. Day 1? Philosophy.

2008 Modules: Day 2? A summary of what you accomplished this year.

How Kim Does It: Simple questions to guide your business planning in 2009.

2009 Modules, Part 1: Your financial requirements for the coming year.

2009 Module, Part 2: Marketing and other plans that will help you meet those financial goals.

2009 Modules, Part 3: New directions, new markets and new beats for 2009.

Reaching Goals With Groups: Q&A with "goals gal" Karen Childress, who has used accountability groups to help her reach her goals for years.

New Modules for 2009: Fellowships, awards and other fun add-ons to my 2009 plan.

Forget the Plan, Not the Planning: Biz plan expert Erik Sherman lays out the case for year-round planning. Notice a theme here?

Finding the Time to Plan: Squeezing business planning into my already busy life and the structure that gets me there.

I'd love to hear what worked for you and what didn't in this challenge.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Some New Modules for 2009

I've laid out a lot of modules for you. I know it can be overwhelming. Please don't feel like you have to do all of them. But as I read other's methods of planning and as I think about the blind spots in my own business, I've created a few new modules I'm thinking of adding to this year's plan.

They're mostly fun stuff.

Consider these:

Monthly/Quarterly Accomplishments
It's been brought to my attention this year that I tend to move the bar on myself: I accomplish something and then my mind clicks over and asks, "You achieved this. So why haven't you achieved that? Clearly, you're a slacker." Most of my colleagues and editors would disagree with that characterization. And while I believe that most successful people are always looking for the next mountain to climb, there's a limit. And there's a difference between ambition and not letting yourself savor your successes.

So taking a cue from Katrina's more laid back approach to planning, I want to add a module that's all about those accomplishments. It would look something like the balance sheet I described in the self-care challenge--only this one would live in an ongoing business planning document I update monthly. I plan to include anything I consider an accomplishment:

• Meeting an income goal.
• Adding a new client.
• Getting better at workflow, cashflow or time management.
• Attending networking events.
• Sending X queries.
• Staying on my marketing goals.

The list goes on, but the point is to create a list and then put it all together at the end of the year for me to examine and--let's face it--bask a little bit.

Fellowships
Who wouldn't want a stipend or a paid trip to learn more about your field. This fits into my goal of advancing my craft--but every time one of these deadlines rolled around this year, I found myself miles deep in files, deadlines and day-to-day minutea. This module will allow me to put together a list of fellowships I want to apply for, their deadlines (or, if they aren't yet announced, when they were due the year before) and what they require.

The next step, then, would be to put them on my calendar with a reminder a month or a few weeks before the deadline so I can put them together.

Awards
This fits in with the first module. Accomplishments. Let's celebrate them. But first we have to take time to corral the clip, copy it, address it and figure out when it's due and to whom. So I'd like to spend some quality time with Lovely Lady Google and find the awards I want to track, add them into my calendar, record the address to which they are to be sent and maybe set up a special file on my desk organizer in which to store award-worthy stories until they're due.

How will you plan in your rewards for 2009?

30-Day Marketing Challenge: Little and often

That title is taken from a recent blog post of the same name by Janine Adams at Peace of Mind Organizing. I loved it because it fits in so well with my approach to marketing my business.

Here's what she says:

A little phrase that’s been going through my head a lot lately is “little and often,” something Mark Forster writes about in his books and something that’s really come to the forefront of my mind as I work with his Autofocus task-management system. Little and often simply means working on a project a little bit at a time, frequently (or at least regularly).

I think some of us—including me, particularly in the past—feel like we have to have a large chunk of time available to work on a large project before we can get started. Trouble is, that large chunk of time rarely becomes available. But if we apply the principle of little and often, we can chip away at the project bit by bit and get it done.

It can also be applied to routine tasks. If you wash what few dirty dishes you have every single day, you’re applying the principle of little and often. And you never have a big pile of dirty dishes to contend with. If you let them pile up until you have a whole sink (or dishwasher) full, it feels likes more work. And it’s more stressful to look at all those dirty dishes.

She's talking about organizing, but it applies to marketing, too. In fact, it applies to all of time management. One of the primary obstacles I hear from self-employed folks is that they don't have the time to market. I often wonder how much time they think they need, or how much they've found they need in practical experience.

My approach to marketing is to take it in 10 minute or 30 minute chunks. In 10-30 minutes I can do one or two of the following:

• Start to draft a query.
• Seek the name or email of a potential client.
• Research one or two markets.
  
• Update my standard letter of introduction and send it out.
  
• Contact a source to use as an anecdotal lede in the query.
• Follow up on a query I send two weeks ago.
• Ask fellow freelancers via email to suggest a good market for a potential story.
• Polish up a query and send it.
• Reslant and resend a previous query.
• Ask an editor to lunch.

Most days, "query" is a task on my to-do list, but since I don't feel like I have to complete a query from inception to submission at one time, I can make a tiny bit of progress on each one. That's how I make time for marketing.

In a way, it's like writing a business plan in Tim Berry's model:

You don't have to stop time and suspend life and business while you do the whole thing from start to finish. On the contrary, start anywhere, get going. Pick a module to do first, whether it's target market conceptually or specific sales forecast or whatever, and do that, start using that, and go on with your business. Then do another, then another. A good business plan is never done. It's also useful from module one on day one.

Apply this to your marketing efforts, do a little often, and it will become not just a working part of your business, but an easy part of your business.

What time management techniques help you fit marketing into your day?

Photo courtesy of fdecomite.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: 2008 Modules

Yesterday's post laid out a few modules for you to choose from when you start working on a business plan. But wait--there's more! Today, we're focusing on modules that help analyze your 2008 work, with more to come tommorow.

Remember: You can start anywhere. I've suggested an order, but please don't let it stop you. Pick one, do it, and go back to work.

Favorite Clients
List all your clients, then rank them from one to five, with five being "I never want to get an email from them again" and one being, "I want to marry this publication and have lots of zine babies."

You'll use this module as you get to the next section, planning for 2009. You can't know where you're going till you know where you've been.

Client Health
This is a new module I'm thinking of adding to my biz plan this year: In it, I'll look up news on my client's health and see how they're doing. That way, when I get to planning for 2009, I'll have a sense of where I need to take my marketing efforts.

Work Breakdown
Equip yourself with a pen and piece of paper and scan back through your articles for 2008. Make some lists.

• Types of assignments you did: ie, reviews, service pieces, departments, shorts, features, essays, etc.
• Coverage areas: ie, health, real estate, technology, green lifestyle.
  

Whatever it is, list the type of work or beat, and then put hash marks next to each type every time you come across it. Had a year where you felt weighed down by work, irritated? It may be because you were doing types of work that don't feed you anymore. Or it could be that you're no longer excited by a coverage area.

Source of Clients
This is one of my favorite modules, and one that was really eye-opening when I added it last year. Take that list of all your clients and then think back to how you started working for them. This will show you what kind of marketing works for you: Networking, cold calling/pitching, referrals, etc.

Spending Breakdown
To know how much you need to earn next year, you first have to have a baseline of spending from which to start. A quick spin through your online bank account or accounting software may be enough. Or, if you're anal like me, you'll want to go back through a month's worth of spending and write down every penny to see what you really spend. Divide it by "business" and "personal."

I can hear you now: We had unexpected expenses this year. I shouldn't count them. Count everything. You'll always have some unexpected or unusual spending. It's the nature of the beast. Just make a category for "Unexpected." And be sure to include how much you spent on taxes.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Forget the Plan, Not the Planning

At this point, we're getting to the end of our challenge. You've seen how I do business plans and how others do business plans. You've seen every module (practically) you can include in a plan. And one theme comes up over and over again: Don't just write it and forget it. Business planning is an ongoing thing, a living organism that gets bigger and better when you focus on it. Today, guest blogger Erik Sherman, who taught me to do my first business plan and who is offering a new class on business planning in January, explains why making business planning a practice rather than a product is essential.

In the business planning for writers class I sometimes teach, I've often been asked about writing a business plan. "Don't bother," I say.

That probably sounds strange, but it actually isn't. Over the years, I've found that most companies and people write business plans for one of three reasons:

• They think they're "supposed" to.


• They want to get someone to give them money.


• They're taking a class on business planning.

I've worked on my share of business plans, and they can be a good exercise. At some point you need to think about what it is that you want your business to do, how you plan to market it, who your market is, whether you can realistically make enough money to stay afloat, and what the potential for the venture is.

But the problem with the way most people undertake business planning is that it becomes nothing more than a formal activity for a period of time. The result, a paper document, gets shoved into a metaphorical (or sometimes real) desk drawer to sit. Then the plan authors go off, start trying to make a go of it, and forget all about that plan they devised.

That is a largely useless expenditure of time and energy because the planning has now stopped. According to experts--and my own experience in a number of areas supports this--planning should generally represent a good 80 percent of a project. You put all that time into planning because you want to maximize your chances of achieving what you set out to do in the time you allotted. You start with anticipating as much as you can, and then as things unfold, you continue to refer to the plan, modifying it as circumstances change and periodically seeing if you are still on track and, if not, whether you can get back on.

But if the plan has become a fossil in a drawer, you quickly lose any benefit from it that you got. What if one customer segment turns out to be the best fit for what you want to accomplish? It might be that unexpected expenses will increase the amount of money you need to make to be
self-sufficient. A sideline offering might overtake what you thought would be your main line of business.

It is easy to get lost in the daily process of running a business. Without keeping an eye on what you want to achieve and the plans you put into place, you can easily head off in a wrong direction. This is akin to driving without a map in an area that is unfamiliar to you. Getting caught up in the specifics of where you are doesn't tell you if you're getting closer to the ultimate destination.

When I teach planning, students do start with some exercises that help establish where they want to go. But most of the class focuses on how to make planning work in operating the business. That includes measuring success, pinpointing weaknesses, and otherwise working smarter, not harder.

I'm not saying never write a business plan. But make sure you know why you're doing it. If you're not setting a framework to help you make better decisions and to keep the business headed the way you wanted in the first place, then you're keeping the drudgery and losing most of the benefit.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: 2009 Modules

This is the third in a series of modules you can choose from to start making a business plan as you go. The first post laid out modules for your values and mission. The second laid out modules for assessing 2008. And now for the fun part: Planning and strategizing for 2009. Why do I say this is fun? As Emily Dickinson has said, "I dwell in possibility."

Planning for the coming year lays out all your possible paths and ways for you to get there. To get to the solutions, first you have to figure out your needs. That's what today's modules are about.

Remember: You can start anywhere. I've suggested an order, but please don't let it stop you. Pick one, do it, and go back to work.

Capital Spending 2009
Had your computer for five years already? Is your printer making a weird sound? Planning a move? Need a new desk, chair, laptop bag, digital recorder, memory or software? Make a list and spend a few minutes tooling around Amazon or other sites to get a rough average of expenses.

Make sure to include personal spending, because your business will have to support your personal life, as well.

Check on Your Emergency Fund
Mine has about $200 in it right now. For real. My goal is much higher. In this module, come up with a range you want to have in savings by the end of the year.

Estimate Taxes
Plan to set aside between a fifth and half of your income for taxes, depending on your tax bracket. Really. To find out your tax bracket, you can ask your accountant or check the IRS's Web site for self-employment tax information. I know this makes you want to hide under your bed, but including in your plan is essential to keep you out of crisis later. It's just a number. It really can't hurt you.

Income needs for 2009
Carry forward your current cost of living. Then, add in:

• Capital costs you've come up with above;
• Your savings goals;
• Your tax needs;
• Any scheduled increases in expenses, like health premium increases.

Now tally it all up. That's your need every month. Again, this is just another number, and if you don't make it, it really won't kill you. I can attest to this personally. I didn't hit my income goal for 2008, but having a goal got me a lot closer than I would have been otherwise.

Hourly rate
Take that number you came up with above and, if it's monthly, divide it by four weeks, then by about 20. Twenty is about the number of hours you can expect to spend on assigned work a month--at a maximum. Some freelancers spend as little as 15 percent of their time on income work. The rest goes to marketing, admin and bill collection. Really.

Does this all sound daunting? Of course it does. This is the scariest part of every business plan and the part that keeps people from doing any of the rest of it. If you don't have the stomach for it today, then hold off. Get a friend to do it with you, or at least sit with you while you try one of the modules.

For more help with this resistance, consider a post I did last year on business planning resistance: Righting the Resistance.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: The Plan is Useless; Planning is Essential

What does a business plan have to do with me? I'm creative!

If you find yourself asking that question, you're not alone. In fact, many of the people I've talked to this month equate a business plan with a sleek wire-bound document and venture-capital funding.

Business plans can apply to you, too. But they're different. To find out how different, I had a little chat with business-planning guru Tim Berry. He's the author of The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan and Three Weeks to Startup. He is also founder of the business-planning software Business Plans Pro.

Here's what he had to say:

How is doing a business plan different for creative professionals (writers, photographers, etc.) than for people needing VC funding, etc?

The business plan for the creative professional is a tool to improve management -- and by that I mean make more money for your work, do it better, get compensated better -- in at least two important ways.

• It helps to hone and highlight strategy. That can be as simple as what kinds of things you want to write, for whom, and where you want to place it; it's always a matter of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
• It keeps track of what you were thinking, some measurement of success like publications, articles, of whatever (what I call metrics) , and what was supposed to happen as a collection of concrete specific dates, deadlines, task assignments, and numbers.

With that as its function, the plan itself doesn't need the full formality of the classic business plan. It doesn't have to be a formal document, it can live on a computer or somewhere else. It doesn't have to explain the a company -- its history, its ownership, its management team, for example -- to outsiders. It doesn't need to explain an investment proposal to investors, or offer a return on investment to anybody explicitly, or have an exit strategy, or any of the many trappings of the formal business plan document intended to support a search for outside investment.

You mentioned in our private email that you believe having a business plan is more important in the current economy. Why?

Because a business plan properly managed in a planning process that includes regular plan vs. actual reviews. It's one of--if not the absolute best--tool for managing your writing business, steering it through uncertainty towards your goals.

And uncertainty is right now higher than its been at any other time in my 60-year lifetime, so the plan, as a steering mechanism, is more important than ever. I should emphasize though, when I say plan, I really mean planning process, which is keeping the plan alive, reviewing plan vs. actual, tracking progress towards the goals and making corrections where needed, particularly when assumptions change.

I often hear that people with business plans earn more money. Is that true? Is there any research as to why? If not, what's your take on the issue?

The actual research on this is spotty because almost everybody confuses planning with "the plan." What fouls up the research is that so many people think "business plan" means the full formal document, so they'll tell researchers they didn't have one. I've seen some studies showing that companies with a business plan performed better than companies without, but I've also seen studies showing that many successful companies say they didn't have a business plan. There's that confusion again because, of those who respond like that, many of them did have a plan but not a full formal plan document.

Where I go on the question of whether or not people with business plans earn more money, really, is to answer with another question: Do you think people who have thought through their strengths and weaknesses and publications and target audience strategies, managed their priorities, set goals and tracked progress against goals, and planned on dates and deadlines and task responsibilities and tracked progress and completion earn more money? I think it's common knowledge, or one of those truths that people hold to be self evident. Underneath the confusion is the Dwight D. Eiisenhower quote: "The plan is useless. Planning is essential."

Many people have told me they don't have a plan because the idea of it is overwhelming. How do you advise people to get over overwhelm? What steps can people take to make the process manageable?

This is why I say the plan-as-you-go approach is the right thing for these confusing times. Think of a plan as a collection of separate thoughts, bullet points, maybe a table of dates and dealines, and some projections, including a few key strategy points like what you're writing for whom and what target media, some goals and objectives, a definition of success, and a lot of specific concrete steps to be taken -- dates, deadlines, task responsibilities -- and then add some basic numbers, like sales and expenses.

You don't have to stop time and suspend life and business while you do the whole thing from start to finish. On the contrary, start anywhere, get going. Pick a module to do first, whether it's target market conceptually or specific sales forecast or whatever, and do that, start using that, and go on with your business. Then do another, then another. A good business plan is never done. It's also useful from module one on day one.

It should be the computer equivalent of the old-fashioned loose-leaf binder on the desk. It's always there, you work on it some, pull it up and revise it, use it to manage the relationship between the immediate fires to put out and the long-term goals, keep it alive, use it to steer the business through the hard parts.

Any other questions you'd like answered? Let me know!