August 31st, 2010 by admin
A business plan guide is a great place to start when you are getting ready to write your first business plan. Perhaps you have found a book about writing business plans, or are following a template, but chances are, these materials will only focus on the steps necessary to create your business plan and will fail to point out the critical mistakes that most new business owners make. So let's ignore the step-by-step tutorial for a moment and focus on the real world mistakes you need to avoid. 1. Don't Put it Off.Yes, writing a business plan can be a monumental chore. It's easy to procrastinate while you focus on the more exciting processes of your business. Many new business owners will wait until the day before their scheduled meeting with the bank -- and then frantically try to write a plan overnight. You can imagine the results. Don't wait until you have more time. There will never be more time. You need to clear your calendar for a week and make your business plan a top priority. Or if that isn't feasible, schedule a certain period of time each day to work specifically on planning. No doubt you have ...
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August 30th, 2010 by admin
One of the places that has become the new frontier in the world of business nowadays is Africa. Indeed, the continent has come out from its rather backward past and emerged as a potential for commercial activity. Thus, many entrepreneurs have set their eyes into conquering Africa's business scene. However, doing business and investing in Africa is certainly not going to be easy. Just like any new business front, Africa poses a lot of challenges that a company opening here needs to overcome. And what's more, the continent has some unique features that needs to be considered by any business wanting to establish itself here. One of the biggest considerations that one seeking to put up a business here need to think closely about is the continent's culture. In fact, there is a lot of cultural notions that one needs to take note of here, mainly because the continent has a large number of different groups. In contrast, though the Chinese market, for instance, have a large reach, its culture is pretty much a homogeneous one, which means that targeting this particular market would be fairly easy. Sadly, this is not the case for Africa. The groups of people here ...
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August 29th, 2010 by admin
If you are an internal or external small business consultant for a franchise organization, you are constantly looking for ways to help your clients improve their marketing efforts in order to increase revenues.
The value of marketing efforts for franchises should be measured by both their cost-effectiveness and their results in terms of increased sales for the organization. Improved cost-effectiveness can be achieved by implementing better marketing systems. Such systems need to be designed to minimize the time required by the corporate office to oversee the management of local franchisee marketing campaigns, while at the same time they need to contribute towards an increase in the corporate office's visibility into the campaigns and towards increased brand consistency across the organization.
Here are 5 tips for small business consulting franchise marketing made easy:
Tip #1: Unify your brand image across all franchise locations by using consistent collateral:
Fast-growing franchise organizations often find themselves quickly outgoing their own marketing systems that worked so well during the early stages of growth. The modus operandi for marketing within a franchise organization must necessarily change when the organization goes from 10 locations to 50 or more, but unfortunately many organizations fail to keep pace with their own growth. ...
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