You’re probably acquainted with the saying “failing to plan is planning to fail.” And it’s completely true. It’s a bit like building a boat and it never leaving the harbour. That’s not what boats are built for and businesses are the same. Without a business plan, your business will fail. It’s a certainty. So today I’m going to share with you five quick tips to put together your first business plan if you’ve never done one before and if you have done one, this may give you some new ideas. Here we go:
- Prepare an Excel spreadsheet. List out product sales, business partners etc (whatever you make money from) in the first row, then how much you make from that sale in the second row, then how many sales in the third row, total in the fourth and conversion rate in the fifth.
- Underneath these values put down your total sales. Underneath that what your total client spend is. And finally underneath that you would put yearly income goal. Now let’s start there. If you want to make $100,000 and your average client spend is say for instance $150 (averaging over product sales and new reps). You may have two rows – one for product sales and one for reps. If you want to make $100k p.a. you need to break down exactly how many sales and how many reps you need to bring in. So for instance you may have a $100 product that you sell. Put $100 under product cost, then say for example, you want to make 100 sales of those in a year which will equal $10,000. You put this in the total column and your conversion rate. If you convert 1 in 10 people you talk to, to a sale then it’s 10% (which, by the way, in our industry is above average). So your sales total is $10,000 with an average client spend of $100. Hopefully I’m making sense here without the use of a diagram.
- Underneath your yearly income goal you need to enter how many sales per week and year in order to hit your targets. So if you wanted to make $50,000 per year from your $100 product sale you would need to make 500 sales to hit your target of $50,000 per year. So enter 500 in the yearly sales target column. This equates to around 10 sales per week, so make a column for this too. If you get paid $150 per new rep that gets started and you want to earn the other $50,000 from that then you would need to bring on board 333 reps annually or 6 weekly.
- The next row under yearly and weekly sales targets would be leads required to reach your goal of 10 new customers weekly and 6 new reps weekly. If you conversion rate is 10% or 1 in every 10 people you talk to, then you would need 60 leads weekly for reps and 100 leads weekly for customers or 3,120 leads annually for reps and 5,200 leads annually for customers.
- Lastly you need to enter at the very bottom what methods of lead generation you are going to take in order to achieve your 60 leads for reps and 100 leads for customers. I’m not going to run into these here and now – that’s for another blog post. Get creative on this one but make sure you have at least four methods running consistently in order to hit those targets.
By starting with what you want to earn per year, it’s possible to break this right down into a daily plan to work out if you are prepared to do the work in order to earn the income you want to earn from your business. Remember, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Being in a Network Marketing business is definitely simple but certainly not easy. It’s all about the numbers. Another table I would prepare is for your stats so you can look back over your month and see what lead generation methods worked and which ones you can weed out. But again, I’ll cover that in another blog post. I hope this has helped and has served as a bit of a reality check of what is required. I do this kind of stuff with new reps on our Business Strategy Session after they have completed their initial training. Most people want to replace their J.O.B. income (you know Just Over Broke) as soon as possible. When they realize what it takes, it sifts the wheat from the chaff as to who is serious about it and who is just a “gunna”. Hope this was valuable – feel free to share and let me know your thoughts.
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