Business Plan - Your Roadmap To Success
Your business plan is literally a roadmap to your success. If
you and your family were going to drive to your vacation
destination, you wouldn’t just get in the car and start driving
without knowing where you were going. You shouldn’t start a
business that way either.
If you are planning to have a simple home business, built
around the Internet, you may not think you need a business plan.
You may think only high level businesses need them in order to
secure corporate funding but that’s not true.
Every business needs a business plan. When you sit down to
write a business plan, you are literally mapping out the path
you want to take in your business. Not only will your business
plan help you define what you want to accomplish, it can help
you streamline your business and create focus.
Many people may be under the impression that business plans are
huge documents that can be difficult to write. On the contrary,
you do not have to create a huge document at all. Your business
plan can consist of a single page outlining your basic goals.
The point is to put your thoughts and ideas down in writing.
When you take the time to think about your business, where you
want your business to go, and estimate your costs as well as
your profits, you are much more likely to succeed.
Rather than working sporadically and blindly, you will be able
to look at your business plan and know exactly what you need to
be working on. This can serve as a great motivator and help you
reach your business goals.
A common myth is that a business plan is rigid. That once you
write it, you have to stick to it. As your business grows, you
can change your business plan to suit your needs. You may find
certain aspects of your business growing at a faster pace than
others and decide to focus more on those areas.
For instance, if you have a website and a podcast, you may one
day decide to focus more on the podcast and not have as much
written content on your site. Or you may decide to charge a
membership fee for access to the written content.
Having your business plan by your side can help you evaluate
your decisions and decide what is going to add value to your
business and what will take away from your business. Before you
start a new project, take out your business plan and see if this
new project will fit in with the plans you have already made.
This can save you a lot of time, energy, and money.
Tracing Back The Origin Of Outsourcing
When societies first formed, the people in those communities began to deal in services, goods and other items they could trade amongst themselves. Outsourcing started first with the production of tools, food and household appliances, and a worker outsourced an activity to another worker.
In the industrial age there was not too much outsourcing going on. In fact in the 1800s and 1900s the organizations were integrated vertically and each organization took care of its own manufacturing, mining and production from start to finish. The retail stores who sold the goods were also owned by the main company, so nothing was being outsourced.
Most companies of the time not only handled their own taxes, but they were self-insured, had their own lawyers and even built their own buildings, offices and factories without any outside help or assistance.
During the industrial revolution there was a lot of growth in the area of outsourcing especially in such service areas as insurance, engineering, and architecture. At the time, even though they had started to outsource, almost everyone lived in the same country, city and town. When the service industry came into being, they started to do outsourcing and gave their jobs to outside contractors.
The history of outsourcing shows that outsourcing started with manufacturing of items such as apparel, toys and shoes. Later on high-tech items such as consumer goods and electronics were starting to be outsourced and in fact pricing through outsourcing was extremely competitive. In search of lower costs, many manufacturers started to look for offshore assistance, and began to employ offshore companies to do the work for them. As transportation means increased so did offshore manufacturing jobs, since the goods that had been manufactured offshore could now travel back at a faster pace and be sold in the retail and department stores.
As the lower income countries improved in their skills, and the people became more educated, outsourcing too became more important and more cost effective. In the 1970s in the United States computer companies outsourced their contracts and this has continued ever since. Billing, processing and payrolls have also been outsourced where necessary. Insurance companies covering the cost of medications and medical clinics who administer your records use claim processing centers that are offshore in such places as India, the Philippines or Russia.
Eventually many companies in the United States and Europe realized that outsourcing was a good method of keeping costs low and now even data-transcription, information technology and call centers are being outsourced.
How to Reduce Video Marketing Anxiety as a Woman In Business
Author : Danette Hibberd
Many people, including a lot of women in business, get all wound up as soon as they think about creating a marketing video. The countless cheerful recommendations on the net about “keeping it real” tend to get lost in your anxiety about looking unprofessional or amateurish when you make that first video.
But here’s a secret for you, in case you’ve forgotten it: You can always edit!
Editing is the best feature about video marketing. You get to have all the fun of making the video. And then you can sit there and cut out every bit you don’t like, or tighten up the “script”, if there’s a point where your dialogue on screen seems to drag.
If you’ve forgotten something, you can insert it. Easy!
If a large proportion of your target market are visual learners, you can insert second mini-videos by simply dragging and dropping new clips into your story line, showing them examples of what you’ve just been explaining.
And if you’re demonstrating how to use a physical product for example, your video is about candle making, you may not even want your actual recorded sound track at all, for some sequences. You can replace those screeching truck noises from the highway, the sounds of your kids fighting in the background and your neighbour yelling at his dog with appropriate music.
So there you are:
You’ve explained how to use the candle making tools, and now you’re going to demonstrate how to melt the wax and create a gorgeous shape. Segue in the music, speed up the action so it’s not dragging on and on, and just show them 1 minute of you actually doing some candle creating, at your sped-up pace.
Much more entertaining than real-time slow, methodical wax shaping with trucks roaring by, don’t you think?
Let’s cover a few tips for Inserting Missing Information
If you’ve forgotten to include some key point in your video, it’s easy to go back and insert it. Just shoot the “missing bit” and drag and drop into your storyline.
If it’s something as simple as forgetting your URL at the end of the video, this is easy as pie: However, if what’s missing is you explaining a key point in your “How To” video, you’ll need to make it look as if the new section wasn’t thrown in later as an afterthought.
The first way to keep it consistent is easy:
Just wear the same clothes and accessories and make sure your hair looks identical to the way it was in your original video. But there’s a second part to this, and people often fail to include it.
Make sure your lighting and set up is identical.
If you shot your video outdoors, it means waiting for the same sort of weather or light setting, or shooting the “fill in” segment at the same time of day. If you shot the original video indoors and there is any source of natural light entering the room, the “same time of day” rule also applies; but you shouldn’t have to worry about weather (unless your video was shot on a bright day, and there’s an abnormally dark thunderstorm rolling in).
Here’s another tip that’s often overlooked. If you have a clock behind you or in view, make sure you adjust the time to be consistent with your original video.
Remember to take notes.
This brings us to our last tip: Make notes about your video, as soon as you’ve shot it! Include things like the time of day, camera settings, lighting details and any special elements you must remember.
But if you’re really not happy with that first video, and all else fails, you can always go for the ultimate “edit” of all.
You can simply re-shoot!
Finally, it’s a total waste of energy to experience anxiety when it comes to video marketing. Just be you, present your topic in a succinct fashion and your video shooting and marketing experiences will be anxiety free.
If you want to earn more money whilst working less by turning your knowledge into passive income, Get your FREE report ‘11 Quickest Ways to Monetise Your Expertise and Fill Your Product Funnel’ by Danette Hibberd Product Funnel Formula
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