Best Business Practices

Much like a map or a GPS provides clear directions to your destination, a business plan can help define your goals and spell out the steps your business must take to achieve them. It can also establish a set of benchmarks to measure your progress. A business plan is critically important when it comes to obtaining financing. Here are the key sections that a business plan should include.

Executive Summary

Your executive summary outlines the primary points in the subsequent sections and touches on your company profile and goals.

Company Goals/Mission Statement

This section summarizes your company’s purposes and goals. It defines who you are and what you want to achieve.

Market Analysis

Here you can demonstrate your industry knowledge and present conclusions based on your assessment of the industry, your potential market and its demographics, and your main competitors.

Company Description

Provide information on what you do, how you do it, the markets your business serves, and what differentiates your business from the competition. You can include examples of recent projects that were completed and, if advisable, the names of some of your major clients.

Organization and Management

Here you can outline your business’s organizational structure and identify the company owners, management team, and board of directors.

Service or Product Line

This section provides the opportunity to explain what you sell and how your products or services benefit customers.

Strategy and Implementation

It’s important to summarize how you plan to market your business and what your sales strategy is. This section should include information on how you will reach target customers and penetrate the market and should provide details about pricing, promotions, and distribution.

Financial Plan

This is where you present an overview of your finances. It is where you lay out your assumptions about revenue growth, operating costs, and cash flows. Include balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow schedules as well as details about capital requirements.

For businesses that haven’t traditionally embraced remote employees, it may be difficult to get up to full speed with the current turn of events.  To make the inevitable transition less overwhelming, we assembled a handy checklist of actions to consider while adjusting to the new workplace reality.

Organization

• Access your staff members and/or roles that are able to work remotely, those that can’t work remotely, and those where remote work may be possible with some modifications.
• Conduct an employee survey to determine the availability of computers that can be used for working remotely, as well as availability to high-speed internet access.
• Create company guidelines covering remote employees, including inappropriate use of company assets and security guidelines.
• Develop and conduct work-at-home- training for using remote access, remote tools, and best practices.
• Select a video-conferencing platform for services, such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx, or Go To Meeting.
• Develop a communications plan to involve remote employees in the daily activities of the organization.

 Security

• Create and implement a company security policy that applies to remote employees, including actions such as locking computers when not in use.
• Implement two-factor authentication for highly-sensitive portals.
• If needed, confirm all remote employees have access to and can use a business-grade VPN, and that you have enough licenses for all employees working remotely.

Staff

• Institute a transparency policy with your staff and communicate frequently.
• Check in on your staff, daily if possible, to confirm they are comfortable with working from home. Find and address any problems they may be experiencing.
• Make certain each staff member has reliable voice communications, even if this results in adding a business-quality voice over IP service.
• Don’t attempt to micro-manage your staff. Remember their working conditions at home won’t be ideal, and they will need to work out their own work patterns and schedules.
• Create a phone number and email address where staff members can communicate their concerns about the firm, working at home, or even the status of COVID-19.

Infrastructure

• Ensure that you have ample bandwidth coming in to your company to handle all of the new remote traffic.
• Make sure you have backups of your services so your staff is able to keep working in the event extra traffic causes your primary service to go down.

You may need to adjust or expand this list to match the specific needs of your firm and the conditions affecting your organization.  Use this list to get you started and to help guide you through the process.

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