No business can flourish without a business plan. Starting to draw one up from scratch for your business can be a pretty onerous task. Nonetheless, it is critical that you do this, and as a Virtual Assistant you needn’t do too much, as you shouldn’t need to spend too much on your initial start up. I would suggest that every start up venture, Virtual Assistant or not, should actively initiate the process of writing a business plan. The very act of getting your thoughts on paper helps you to think hard and identify your aims. There are lots of templates online which can be really helpful, and I recommend that a good place to begin would be to study those on the Microsoft website.

At first, you should start with a basic document that encompasses the following items:

1. Your Elevator Pitch – A thirty second description of your company and the services you provide which you can use when networking to introduce yourself in 30 seconds or less.

2. Market Analysis/Market Research – Is the research that you have undertaken to identify your market, the target market for your service, your competitors and your service offering. You’ll need to provide a description of the different groups of targeted customers included in your market analysis, and explain why you are selecting these as targets. You may also want to describe the Virtual Assistant market by summarising the market growth over recent years and some trend analysis of where the market is likely to be headed.

3. Marketing and Sales – You need to have strategies in place to market your product and to close sales. Your marketing strategy is going to include how you’re going to focus on your target market, what media you’re going to use to build awareness of your business and how you’re going to position your business in the marketplace; this will entail recognizing your exclusive selling position. Your sales strategy on the other hand will deal with how you’re going to close the deal and get the client on board; this will include pricing, delivery, terms and conditions.

4. Operations – You need to describe how your business is going to be set up, including premises and equipment, you may also want to include how you see this changing as your business grows.

5. Management and People – This section should include an overview of how the company is set up, what support staff you use now, or may want to use in the future.

6. Finance – This is the part that generally scares people to death, but there is really no need to panic. You need to do this to make sure that your business is viable, and so that you have a set of goals and targets to work toward. You can download spreadsheet templates from the internet if you use Microsoft Office. I personally advise you get them from their site as they have a very extensive range of free templates. This will comprise of :

* A personalised spending plan so you are aware of what expenditure you will need to cover from your income.

* A worksheet showing how you’re going to fund any start up costs you might have.

* A Sales Budget – You will probably want to use value based pricing for this. You can reasonably estimate your sales by working out your billable hours per month at the rate you expect to charge.

* A Costs Budget – You will need to identify your fixed costs and your variable costs. There is no requirement to calculate the cost of sales because as a Virtual Assistant you are merely offering a service.

* An Operating Budget/Profit and Loss – This is a plan for your trading operations which includes the sales and expenditure budgets in one document.

* Break Even Analysis – This will show you how many hours of work you need to bill in order to break even, and then anything above that is profit. To complete this type of analysis you need to know your variable costs/unit, sales price/unit and fixed costs.

* Cashflow Forecast – This is going to be the most important document to you. It’s the lifeblood of your business. Poor financial management is one of the principle reasons for business collapse. This will help you monitor the cash coming in and going out of your business, and it will help you identity when you will have cash available to make capital expenditures, or when you might not have enough cash and need to make arrangements with your bank before the problem happens.

That’s everything you essentially require to make a start. This should even be perfectly adequate to set up a business bank account. You can add things like an executive summary at the start of the document, which is a section designed to give a brief overview of your business together with highlights from sections 2 -6 above. If you wish, you could add appendices to include your CV and so on.

Remember, your business plan is a living document and you should use it to measure whether or not you’re meeting the goals and targets that you have set for yourself. It needs to be reviewed at least every four weeks from when you start your business, but this can be extended as your business grows, although it’s always best to monitor the financial section at regular, short term intervals.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Then why not get involved with the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance now!

Article Source: Business Plans for Virtual Assistants

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