Business Overview
Tentative Goal
Business Plan
Riches, Wealth & More
Strategic Planning
Sales & Marketing
Expense Control
Magic Trick/Accounting 101
Human Resources
Sponsors
Start/Strengthen Business
Coaching
Cooperative Effort Program
Fund Your Nonprofit
Business Incubation
Create a Social Enterprise
Establish an Entrepreneurial Coach Mindset
Click links and scroll to learn
One of the strongest things Chimorel can do for you, for others
and for each nation is to support you as you develop a profitable business,
a funded nonprofit or a successful social enterprise.
I would like to increase my company’s profit
by $10,000/mo.
Learn to Enhance Your Net Profit.
Let’s set a tentative goal to increase your company’s profit by $10,000/mo, assuming monthly sales of $100,000/mo for a 10% increase.
At the link above, we discuss the elements involved in achieving this tentative goal. See Magic Trick above for a brief introduction to accounting.
Focus On Long Term Wealth
Instead of Temporary Riches
Learn & Teach Proprietorship
Riches are transitory. Wealth is enduring. A “good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” Do not be satisfied with employees who make you rich. Develop new proprietors who become “partners” and who prosper in your business. Help your neighbor to become responsible. Allow failure to develop strength.
We look at wealth from a micro and macro economic perspective and strongly encourage you to teach your children and your employees to become servant leaders who understand the true nature of stewardship.
Do I Need a Business Plan?
Absolutely or maybe !!! If you intend to seek financing from a bank or another outside source, you absolutely need to have a well written, well thought thorough business plan. More than that, you are unlikely to get anyone to take you seriously if you don’t have a solid business plan.
However, we strongly suggest you don’t seek outside financing during the initial phase of developing your business. You will still need to think through all the details of your business. You may also write your ideas down. But during the early stages of developing your business, spend most of your time making things happen, keep the plan in your head and make the adjustments necessary as you go.
Learn to fail fast and cheaply. Iterate, experiment, pivot to Plan B. Don’t spend a lot of your or someone else’s money until you have a product or service that is tested against the consumers’ desire and you are making sales.
Create an outline you constantly revise. Your plan will develop as you make notes and put your business together. Your initial focus will test the reality of your business. You will make sales and develop employees.
If you grow your business with other people’s money, expect other people to control most of your business and perhaps a lot of your life. If you go a little slower and fund your initial expansion from your own profits, you will end up controlling your business, your profit and your life.
When you ask someone to write your business plan for you, expect to pay something like $25,000+. We strongly encourage you to begin to make it happen, to make notes, to make sales, to develop potential employees. Chimorel will support you. You will do most of the work and it will cost a lot less than $25,000.
Understand the difference between strategic planning and daily operations. Determine what it takes to make sales. Our Cooperative Effort program offers unique alternatives to start and strengthen a business. You will discover that long term (five+ year) strategic planning is unlikely to keep pace in today’s hectic disruptive environment. Your strategic plans need to be for the next three+ months and capable of changing rapidly.
As you grow, you will want to ask yourself some serious questions about your need for capital. Are you thinking through the details of your business plan? Do you need guidance to ask the right questions? Are you just starting your business or are you looking to strengthen your business? Do you need coaching? Do you have the funds to pay for what you need? Click Write a Business Plan to learn more.
When you need a business plan, we will support you. If you need to clarify who your customer is or develop hiring strategies, our coaches are available. If you don’t have the funds you need, we suggest you use our website as a guide and explore the many alternatives we provide.
Strategic Planning
One more time, you need to understand the difference between strategic planning and daily operations. Your strategic planning will flow from your business plan. It is easy to get caught up in the day to day operations, putting out fires, meeting deadlines and solving crises. If you never step back to see where you are going and plan for the bigger picture, real growth is unlikely. You won’t know how many and what kind of employees you need until long past the time you needed them. You won’t know how much financing you need or the best alternatives to keep your costs in line. Let me tell you about one of my clients.
He was converting cars from gasoline to natural gas. Occasionally, he lined up some significant fleet sales and contracts with government agencies. Most of his time was spent raising money trying to stay afloat. Each week he would raise $5-8000 capital, but this was starting to dry up. He sold his receivables at a 20% discount, meaning he got 80 cents for every $1 in sales. His gross margin was slightly better than 40%. His net margin varied from 12- 22% depending on a lot of factors he was losing control of. He asked for my help.
I suggested ways to reduce expenses. I got a bank to offer 96% for his receivables. I tried to cancel a trip to a show he couldn’t attend. I tried to get him to plan a long term marketing strategy, to accept the bank’s offer and to put his capital requirements into a long term strategy without success. He spent his days raising money, putting out fires and wouldn’t make the tough choices he had to make to survive. We agreed to cancel my contract. His office closed a little later.
Did you grasp the difference between strategic planning and daily operations? Although the client was almost out of options, we could have pulled him back from the brink and saved his business. If he accepted the bank’s offer, he would begin to break even. With some serious cost cutting, long term marketing and strategic financial planning he could have pulled his business out of the fire. Instead he focused on putting out fires, trying to raise funds from a dwindling base of investors and creating expenses he couldn’t pay and didn’t need.
As you create your business plan, it does not need to be formalized in writing until you seek outside funding. You do need to understand, however, that developing a strategic plan that looks beyond daily operations is required for real growth, whether you write it down and make it pretty or just keep it in your head as you go.
The next part of strategic planning is to keep your plan within the confines of a fast paced, disruptive market. Your five year plan that might have made some investor happy is meaningless when someone changes the marketplace dynamics next month.
Before you spend a lot of time writing a Business Plan, you need to determine what it will take to get customers. This is your first priority. If you can’t make sales, there is not much point in writing a Business Plan.
If you don’t know how to get customers, there is not much likelihood your enterprise will succeed. Click Sales & Marketing above to learn a little about what you must do to make sales and implement a solid marketing plan.
Once you can make enough sales to pay you an adequate salary, then you may want to take the time to write a solid business plan and seek the funding to hire more employees and grow your business.
The next thing you want to do is to have a very clear picture of your expenses. After you have customers, you must learn to control expenses. Click Expense Control to explore this section of our website. We give you ten big picture cost cutting ideas.
You will want to go far beyond these ten ideas, but they will help you begin to think about the kinds of things that can enable you to keep your costs under control.
When you go beyond the next step to make it happen, you will uncover seven priorities, then you can make decisions to start your business, strengthen your business or request business coaching.
