1. Simplify Your Product — if your customer doesn’t need all the features of your current product in all situations, is there a way to make a simpler (and therefore less costly) version?
2. Make Distinctions — if there isn’t much obvious difference in features between your lower priced and higher priced versions, you are likely to dilute your brand and sell primarily the lower priced version. Use your packaging, point of sale displays, and marketing messages to make it clear that the higher priced version is a better value (features for price).
3. Think Small — instead of creating lower-end versions of the same products, create more affordable with the same brand aesthetics as your main line. For example, an upscale bakery that usually does whole cakes could create individual portion deserts. More affodable, but with the same quality and image as their main product line.
4. Choose a New Name — rather than marketing your new products under your existing brand, establish a new name just for the lower end products. You could have your new brand with a tag line referencing your old brand — in the bakery example, Indulgences brough to you by Supreme Bakers.

There are many ways to provide a lower price point product that will appeal to your existing and new customers without diluting the value proposition of your current brand if you approach the task creatively and with some input from your customer base.

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• A florist with concierge service — you sign up, tell them your important dates and occasions, give them the names and addresses of the recipients, and they call you prior to the date to take your order, recommend specific arrangements, and then send it all out. No more forgotten birthdays and anniversarys.
• A dog training business that provides all types of classes — from basic puppy manners through competitive conformation, obedience and agility. Their unique selling proposition is that they have everything under one roof, something not available at any other facility in town.
• A plumbing repair business that provides all services on a fixed price basis. You pay a flat rate to fix a leaky faucet, no matter whether it takes them five minute or five hours to do the job.

Your unique selling proposition can be related to the products or services you offer, the customer service you provide, the shopping or dining atmosphere, the pricing structure, the customer follow-up, or your guarantees. What is important is that you identify what makes you different from the competition and use that as a basis for selling your business!

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The reason that all of those free sites tell you to write a business plan and sometimes provide an outline to fill in is that successful entrepreneurs know that you won’t get far without a road map for your startup. They are happy to give out a basic outline for free because it’s like giving out the Table of Contents for a textbook on surgery…you might figure out the order of what you need to know but certainly not the details. A formal business plan, with the executive summary and pretty graphs, is useful for one thing – convincing investors that your idea is viable. The information that goes in a viable business plan can only be accumulated through specific research and knowledge. If you want to start and run a business, guess who needs to conduct that research and gain that knowledge? That would be you!

Allowing someone else to write your business plan or, worse, buying a ready-made plan, means that you will not have enough knowledge of your product, your competition, your target market, or your marketing options to make the choices that determine success or failure. Merely knowing your operations (what you do) is not enough. Any seasoned business owner will tell you that you need to be an expert in every area of your startup to have a chance, including planning, marketing, and financial management.

The LaunchX System was developed specifically to address this problem. Every aspect of what you need to know to succeed is covered, step-by-step, so that any idea can be developed into a legitimate plan for success. Then, whether you need investment for startup or for later expansion, we include software that easily allows you to convert your knowledge of your business into a formal business plan. And, your personal LaunchX Coach will help you through every step of planning and writing to ensure your startup has the best chance of success.

So, if you are wondering who should write your business plan, the answer is YOU…after you have actually planned the business.

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Not.

The reason for such high failure rates in US startups is just that – people are willing to spend more time deciding which car to buy or planning their vacation than actually planning the business. Realistically, a business owner will spend more hours working in the business than doing any other thing, including sleeping! So, shouldn’t planning the business deserve a serious, concentrated effort? Unfortunately, many of the scammy get-rich-quick schemes promote the idea that you can succeed without doing anything…guess what? Only a very few who buy in to MLMs ever break even. Guess why? No planning. They don’t know their market, they don’t know their competition. They don’t understand how promotions actually work. They don’t keep any actual books, so they don’t even realize how much money they are losing. They do, however, spend a lot of time waiting for the business to “take off” on its own…

If you want to be a business owner, get ready to work. Success doesn’t come easy no matter what industry you are in, and entrepreneurship can be the toughest, but most rewarding, of all. The knowledge and skills you need to succeed are not particularly difficult to master – if you can read, write, and learn, you are halfway there. If you are ready to start, LaunchX is ready to get you there.

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It is far more important to start with defining the image and culture of the company you are creating than to agonize over a single sentence to summarize the basis of your venture. Image and culture are the personality and character, respectively, of your business. Your image, or how others see you, is indicated through all of your marketing tools and your interactions with customers and suppliers. Your culture, or how your business gets work done, is developed internally and almost always starts with the folks at the top. In this case, that’s you. How you get work done during the planning and early stages of operations will lay the foundation for how your business runs overall. If you are disorganized, your employees will get the message that disorganization is acceptable. If you treat your employees, suppliers, and customers with respect, that too will become a standard part of your company culture. Of course, every employee that you hire and the way your staff works together will influence the overall culture in some way, but as the owner you do wield the power to guide how the work gets done.

As you are working through your startup planning, keep in mind both the image and the culture you want to develop. Pay attention to the details of your business planning that will affect how others perceive your business and how work gets done. If you still need to write a mission statement for a formal business plan, it will be much easier to sum up the general goals of your organization.

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Here are five ideas for building social consciousness into your startup:

1. Budget for Philanthropy: Build an expense line item into your business budget for contributions to your favorite cause. Whether a few cents tacked on to the cost of goods or a small percentage of total sales, the set-aside will add up fast. Handle this account as you do your tax accounts – leave the cash alone and write a check once per quarter.
2. Sponsor Local Youth Activities: Whether Little League or the Youth Symphony, NFPs for kids are always in need of support. Often, you can sponsor a team for a season for just a few hundred dollars. Your business will get a little advertising, and those kids will have something productive to do.
   
3. Encourage Employees to Volunteer: Some businesses offer their employees paid time to volunteer – even one hour per week can really help a busy NFP. Others run ongoing contests among the employees to see who volunteers the most over a period of time (3months is good – not too long, not too short). The prizes don’t have to be extravagant. One small business uses a cheesy sports trophy that is passed around from winner to winner, another simply treats the winner to their favorite lunch. But human nature, such as it is, loves a competition, and both these companies turn in hundreds of hours of volunteer time each quarter.
   
4. Trade Company Picnics for Fundraisers: Instead of spending outrageous amounts of cash on boring Christmas parties or annual picnics, plan a volunteer day that your employees might enjoy. Help on a Habitat house, take cookies to a nursing home, sponsor a car wash for a local school. One company with a staff of salesmen takes a half-day each November to run a “Scavenger Hunt” with the employees. Each team is provided a wish list of toys and such from a local homeless shelter and they attempt to collect as many of the items as possible without paying for them (using their persuasion skills…no stealing, of course!). The winning team gets the afternoon off to deliver the goods and bragging rights for a full year.
   
5. Join the Conversation: Consider volunteering on committees or Board of Directors (better) for your favorite NFPs. Typically, these positions do not require more than a couple of hours per week, but they are great opportunities to help out while increasing your networking circle.
   

As you are developing your business idea, keep in mind the issues or causes that are important to you. Consider ways to build philanthropy into your startup from the beginning so that community involvement becomes an essential element of your company culture. Help the community, help your business.

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Many first-time entrepreneurs see the “write a business plan” advice enough that they set out to do just that. They find a template or software or even a boilerplate, ready-made business plan for their type of business and check that item off the to-do list, only to realize they have no idea what to do next! Actually planning your business will not have this result because, after a thorough consideration of exactly how your operating business will run, you will know what things need to be done prior to opening, how much they will cost, and how long they will take.

The problem with most of the startup resources available is that they fail to tell you how to plan your business. They don’t tell you where to go to find out how to legally register your business, much less how to find the right business name or which entity type is best for you. They tell you to create a marketing plan without laying out all of the options, from online advertising to developing promotions (coupons or premiums) to submitting effective press releases. They tell you to keep an eye on the money without telling you how to read the basic financial statements or how to work through basic profitability ratios to see where your business stands.

Simply filling in the headings in a business plan template will not help you develop a clear picture of how your business will run. If you need a formal business plan to present to investors, you really need to know and understand all aspects of your business idea, how various factors might affect your success, and a solid, justifiable set of numbers that you can easily explain. Whatever your business idea, doing the work to plan the business will greatly increase your chance of success – or tell you that your idea needs to be modified for success. Regardless, good planning will save you untold time and money over the long term, and delving into the details will increase your creativity in bootstrapping, reaching your customers, and preparing yourself to respond to opportunities and threats that can make or break your business.

We designed the LaunchX System to fill this need for entrepreneurs. The step-by-step program considers every aspect of business startup with an emphasis on planning, marketing, and financial management – the three keys to business success. In addition to the Handbook and Workbook that walk you through your startup planning, beginning with planning your business and ending with a formal business plan, the LaunchX System includes an Employer’s Manual (everything you need to know to find, hire and manage your small business employees), critical small business software (Peachtree Accounting, ACT! Contact management, OfficeReady business form templates and more!), and additional time-management and organizational tools to help entrepreneurs develop any business idea into a thriving company.

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For every business idea, the first order of business is to actually plan your business. Merely writing down your business idea and throwing together unjustified numbers for projected financials is not a plan. Rather, you need to thoroughly define your product, identify your target market and how to reach them, determine all legal requirements, and develop solid, justifiable financial projections before you can decide whether your business idea is viable. In addition, you need to develop a complete marketing plan, from the role, design, and SEO of your website (yes, your business must have a website!) to the best routes for reaching your market through paid advertising to the role of networking in developing your business.

Quite a bit of effort goes in to a well-developed plan, but the experience will leave you completely prepared for managing your business once it is up, running, and making money. Your well-developed plan will provide you a roadmap for where your business is going and how to get there. In addition, if you will need outside investment to launch your startup, all of this research will easily develop into your formal business plan and will clearly show that you have done your homework and know your business inside and out.

With your completed plan, you will know whether you can finance the startup yourself or will need outside investment. If you can fund it yourself, the next steps are to execute the plan and open for business! Then, your responsibilities shift to the actual operations, managing employees, overseeing the financials, and planning for growth.   

There is a lot to starting your own business, but the independence and flexibility that comes with entrepreneurship is well worth the effort. The process is not as complex as it seems, and the keys to success are easy to remember – Planning, Marketing and Financial Management. If you begin your business with these factors in mind, you will greatly reduce your risk and greatly increase your odds of success.

The LaunchX System is the only complete startup program on the market and includes everything you need to take your business idea through startup to a successful company. The program is designed to address every startup stumbling block entrepreneurs experience as well as the tools every small business needs to grow and succeed. The tools included in the LaunchX System are there to help you minimize your risk and decrease the time it takes to get your business off the ground. If you are serious about turning your business idea into a successful company, check out the LaunchX System.

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Working for yourself is often considered “risky” by non-entrepreneurs, but most business owners don’t see it that way. Instead, entrepreneurs see every factor as within their control and as an opportunity to build their business into a successful company. With your own business, you are in complete control of the direction of your business, you decide how and when to market, you manage all the finances, and you make the final decisions about every aspect of growing and developing your idea. While it’s true that any failures are your responsibility, business ownership tends to drive entrepreneurs to pay closer attention to the details and factors that drive success or failure, and have far more incentive to pick themselves up when they slip and try again.

The primary factors in reducing the risk in any startup are good planning, efficient marketing, and solid financial management. Good planning does not mean throwing together a basic business plan using a ready-made outline. Rather, you need to completely flesh out your business idea, considering all relevant factors from your business name to target market to expenses. Efficient marketing begins with a complete understanding of who you are trying to reach and how your product or service will grab their attention. With the ever-changing marketplace, it is more important than ever to research and understand the various marketing options available and establish procedures for ensuring your business is getting the best return for your marketing dollar. Financial management of the business is often a struggle for new entrepreneurs. Owning a business is all about turning a profit, regardless of the type of business you choose. It is critical for new business owners to select the right accounting system (not necessarily the most popular) that will allow you to accurately evaluate the financial health of your startup, and to understand the basics of evaluating the numbers on a regular basis.

If you are working a full-time job now and are reticent to give up that steady paycheck, consider starting your business part-time. As mentioned in the earlier “Time” posting, working on your idea just three hours per week for one year is equivalent to taking one full work month to focus on your startup. In addition, starting your business while still employed eases the financial pressures inherent in startups. By tightening up your personal expenses, many entrepreneurs may be able to launch their business without any outside investment. At a minimum, completing all of your business planning while working will make it clear whether working for yourself will be successful enough to support you financially and how much capital you will need on hand to survive those first few months.

One side note – some potential entrepreneurs worry that if they start a business and it fails, then all of their personal assets (house, savings, etc.) will be at risk. The primary avenue for protecting yourself from that possibility is to organize your business as an LLC or corporation and to make the effort to keep your business compliant. Basically, this entails keeping all personal and business records completely separate, filing all required paperwork and fees with the state on time, and maintaining accurate records of your business entity. In addition, new business owners should avoid providing a personal guarantee to any lenders or suppliers, if possible. Business failure does not necessarily mean a devastation of your personal assets as long as you plan from the start to protect and separate your business and personal worlds.

The slow economy and tight job market make this an excellent time to start up your own business. By planning your company conservatively enough to survive this economy, you will develop a culture of careful spending, efficient marketing, and consistent oversight that will prepare your company for explosive growth once the economy bounces back.

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