Business Planning

The Business Planning Process

When fundraising, you’re asking someone to entrust you with their money, so ultimately the most important thing is you’re confident in your numbers, which means first business planning. This will align activities across business areas, enabling informed decisions and improving your chances for success. Good planning will strategically leverage your assets to achieve your business goals. 

SWOT Analysis

This is a practice to evaluate the internal and external factors that will affect building your business — internally your Strengths and Weaknesses, externally your Opportunities and Threats.  As you conduct your research, survey your market, and become more knowledgable about your industry, you can come back to update this. This isn’t to go on the Pitch Deck, but can be a valuable tool in the Business Planning process.

Strengths

These are your internal attributes.  Do you have intellectual property?  A strong brand and audience?  Loyal customers?

Weaknesses

What internally might stop you from succeeding? Do you have debt or bad credit?  Are you lacking a skill or the experience you need? Are your operations inefficient?  These don’t need to be posted anywhere, but it’s important you’re honest with yourself.

Opportunities

What are things happening externally that you can capitalize on?  Trends?  Emerging markets?  Changes in consumer behavior? New technology to be utilized?

Threats

These are external factors that may create challenges for you.  The economy? Changing regulations? How’s competition?

• • • • • • •

Create Your Plans

Define your vision and mission, set goals and objectives, develop strategies, and create tactical action plans to achieve those goals. Keep it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).  

Vision / Mission

This is your long-term ideal future purpose and role.

Example: To see local economies flourish

Objectives

What do you need to do to achieve the vision?

Example:  Make funding more accessible to entrepreneurs 

Strategies

Strategies are formulated to achieve your goals and objectives. Determine your product or service, define your competitive positioning, and identify your target market. You may have one Objective, but you’ll likely have multiple strategies. These can help establish your value proposition.

Using your SWOT Analysis above, Strategies could be:

• Leverage a Strength to capitalize on an Opportunity
• Use a Strength to minimize a potential Threat
• Address a Weakness to reduce your vulnerability to a Threat
• Take advantage of an Opportunity to overcome a Weakness

Example A:  Form relationships with quality entrepreneurs to help build out educational space

Example B:  Find new businesses to educate on fundraising and become paying members

Tactics or Actions

To accomplish the defined strategies, activities are outlined as actionable tactics. What exactly do you need to do? What channels will you use? Who will carry these out? These tactics should inform some of the costs to expect

Example A:  Beta launch by partnering with startup organizations to offer help for free in exchange for support and feedback

Example B:  Run ads on Meta targeting fundraising entrepreneurs, invite to webinar and sent to evergreen funnel to make sales

If you want to organize this in outline form, it could look like this:

I. Objective
   A. Strategy
      1. Tactic
      2. Tactic
   B. Strategy
      1. Tactic

This structure can be applied to: 

Marketing Plan: Develop marketing campaigns, promotional activities, and advertising plans to reach target customers.

Sales Strategy: Describe sales tactics, customer acquisition methods, and sales targets.

Operational Plan: Define production processes, supply chain management, and quality control measures.

• • • • • • •

Financial Planning

Run the numbers to project revenues, costs, profitability, cash flow, and the potential for return on investment (ROI). Evaluate and feel confident in the financial feasibility of your business.  Investors are interested in knowing your competence in managing your money.  Before you ask them for it, do what you can to feel that your finances are comprehensive and accurate.  We go more into preparing an income statement and Profit & Loss chart in the next module.

For now, work on collecting the numbers you know or can make an educated guess about. Outline funding requirements, budgeting, and financial management practices.