Welcome back to the inspired method, marketing and business coaching YouTube channel. My name is Trevor and this is my business partner. Josh spur with spur and associates chartered professional accountants. And our topic for the day is Vancouver business coach, simple business planning in four hours.
Now this video is not gonna be four hours long, but just letting know you can do a business plan in four hours, especially if you come to our beat, the AZ business bootcamp, we’re holding them in both Vancouver and in Edmonton this year. So, um, if you’re interested in that go to S P U R R E L L.ca, I’ll put it on the screen there for you spurrell.ca/business-bootcamp, and, uh, check it out there. Get a ticket, come out to the event. It’s only a hundred dollars, best, a hundred dollars. You’ll spend you get eight hours of, of excellent teaching from experienced entrepreneurs, and we’ll be glad to, uh, help propel your business forward.
And of course there’s no pitches, no sales, no anything that you have to buy there. We just want to present this information to you to help Canadian businesses beat the odds. Okay. So with that being said, a quote from Pablo Picasso, good artists copy, great artists steal, boy, isn’t that true? Now, 60% of people who, who start small businesses are between the ages of 40 and 60. So there’s encouragement out there.
So you, you have been waiting a long time and, and to start your business. And you’re in that middle age portion, that was a good time for you to start, cuz you’ve learned, uh, what to do and what not to do. And, uh, you’ve got great opportunity to, to get started. Creating a business plan can seem like a daunting task, especially when you look at how financial institutions and business schools want you to create one.
Now I’ve tried to do this in the past and I get stuck about, you know, a third of the way in, because it’s just so overarching, um, how they want you to get all this information and uh, gather, put it together. Um, tell me a little bit about experience that you have with those types of business plans. They, I mean, they write these business plans in business school. As if you’re entering some business plan competition, it’s gonna be judged by some judges.
Like nobody cares. It’s like a thesis, first of all, hardly any people are gonna ever raise any venture capital. Anyways, it’s just a way to organize your thoughts. So when you’re six months in and you got custom issues, you got employee issues, you got cashflow issues. It like helps you keep focus on the things that when you were thinking clearly, that’s where you should devote your time and your energy.
Now what is the importance of a business owner to have a business plan? So I, I mean, this let’s go look at the single biggest thing, the single biggest problem, any business, the ability to find enough customers, you know, uh, you know, 42% of all businesses that fail will fail because they don’t have enough customers. But if you create a business plan, you are 50% more likely to generate more revenue than, you know, a, a competitor who doesn’t have a business plan in place.
So you’re 50% more likely to tackle the single biggest problem in business. If you create a plan and it’s my experience, it’s, you know, whether you spend four hours or 40 hours, you’re gonna get, you know, a significant benefit either way. So it’s important. Having a plan is better than not having a plan. Um, what is that quote, if you, uh, don’t don’t plan, if you, if you, if you fail the plan, you plan to fail, fail the plan, plan to fail.
Um, now why do most business owners never complete a business plan? They’re probably scared of it. Um, they probably went to business school and they think this is this, you know, 40 or 400 hour time pass and it’s gotta be a perfection. And they’re just trying to tie it back to reality. So, you know, what we’ve tried to distill is let’s take all the things that actually move the needle forward in the business plan and forget about, you know, all the rest.
Right. Because I think they’re, they’re scared of the time investment, right? Yeah. It’s huge. I, at one time and I was, uh, started one of my previous bid businesses. I was like, okay, we’ve gotta have a plan for this business. Otherwise it’s, it’s going to fail. We have a better likelihood of succeeding. And I got this business plan outline program. Oh my gosh, it was ridiculous.
Like seriously, you get it started. It took like five minutes to load on my, my computer at the time. So like, it was just massive thousands of, of questions about, of the business and the, the area and the competition and the psychographics demographics, you know, in depth. And I was like, okay, I can’t do this anymore. Um, so that never got finished. So surprisingly enough, um, now how much time should a business owner actually invest in their business plan? I think four hours on your own.
I think it’s really a law diminish returns on what you should actually, uh, what actually needs to get in there for the, the average business. I mean, you, you hit on one, you had this business plan and it started, you know, talking about the demographics and things like that. And then I have to break it down to people it’s like, yeah, they, they teach about the detailed marketing analysis.
And it’s really important if your Coca-Cola to know how to get 60% of the market share when Pepsi’s getting that. But for the average of all business owner, if they get 1% of the local market in whatever business they’re in, they’re a dentist, they’re their plumber, they’re a flooring guy or whatever that is. They’re probably the richest person in their entire family. It’s not a question of if market is big enough is how do you penetrate it to begin with right? You use indigo or Royal blue, like that’s not important. Um, now what is the most important part or the number one part of the four hour business plan?
When we do our business plans, you know, when they come through our office, there’s a bunch of things that we get the, the customer to do. And, you know, what’s the problem, vision, mission, and values, and what are some of the secondary marketing initiatives that they considered are valuable, uh, analyzing their competition, but probably the single biggest thing that we give them when we do them at S spur associates is we give them a list of milestones.
You know exactly what we’re going to do. Usually 12 milestones with the goals you can do at least one every month, we do the same thing on the inspired method brand, where they come in, they tell us what their objectives are and we give them the domino sequence as we call it. Yeah, it’s the same thing, a list of strategic objectives that are most likely to move your business forward, but also the most likely to get pushed to the back burner. Cause the customer will never ask you to do the strategic milestones.
The customer is never gonna ask you to set up a, a Google business listing. The customer’s never gonna ask you, you know, to find a call center, you can answer the, the phone. The customer’s never gonna ask you to write your SEO articles, whatever that is, right? So these are strategic initiatives that are like to move your business forward.
Customers never ask for them. Exactly. And you know, because a, I know accountability is super important to growing a successful business, which is why we exist. We exist because we know that business owners need help in growing their businesses. So if you’re interested in, uh, checking us out, giving us try, it’s, it’s free for a month folks. I mean, it cost you one, one Canadian dollar. I don’t know how much that’s worth an American dollar, but one Canadian and it give you a month of business coaching.
And, uh, it’s really easy to get started. Just fill out the form on, on the website, down there below inspired method.com, fill it out. Now, the next thing is why should a mission statement be succinct? I mean, your mission statement is something that you can fall back on throughout the day when you gotta tough situation. Should I go left?
Should I go? Right? Well, what does the mission statement say? You know, associates helping Canadian business beat the odds. So got a tough set, you know, uh, situation. What would that say we’re supposed to do? Um, and it should be succinct. So everybody on your team can memorize it. Right? And that’s the key because if you get this long politically correct thing, that’s about, you know, we’re gonna provide excellent quality and excellent service. And if it’s too generic, nobody doesn’t help anybody. It’s, it’s gotta be specific, unique, short, so people can memorize and apply it every single day. Yeah.
Providing top quality of service. Everybody says they’re gonna do that. So don’t use that as your mission statement, just a tip now, um, can you walk through a simplified method to create financial projections? So the financial projections is, you know, what we’ve learned is business owners.
When they start making projections, especially cashflow projections, they’re always gonna be wrong so way out to lunch, way, way you can pay someone to do that, but we need to understand your, would you, if you will, right? So if you are a tradesperson, every project that you do, the average is X. And I mean the average, because you know, people get lost in this where they’re trying to price off of every item on the menu where, you know, you know, some, sometimes they’re gonna be big projects.
Sometimes they’re gonna be small projects. Cause we take the time to figure out that average of what you charge and what your costs on those sales are. That and what your average gross margin is. That is a simple part that that’s what you need to drill into. And most businesses should have no more than, you know, two or three, right?
I mean, if you’re a dentist, you might have, you know, your average treatment that you’re doing, but maybe off here, you have a special one for, uh, Botox or Invisalign because the product cost is dramatically different, but most businesses are not, they’re gonna have no more than three revenue streams. And we just gotta know what the average revenue, the average cost, what you make, what your gross margin is on, on every sale. Yeah.
They know how many customers you need and, and how we can, you know, chart path to, uh, exponential growth. Now, the next question that we have Josh is what is the importance of a, of differentiation in a business plan? Like what sets you apart? You’re trying to find most things. People are trying to be, you know, everything to everyone, and there’s no one right way to do this. We’re just trying to find a way for you to not be a commodity.
So you’re doing something slightly different than a different area, you know? So if you’re a, a plumber, maybe you want to work on really complicated boiler systems in commercial settings, that’s fine. Uh, and maybe you just want to be the first guy there. And at three o’clock in the morning when a pipe breaks, both are you both are million dollar ideas.
Um, you know, you can make a million dollars doing either, but you just gotta be clear on what you’re trying to be better than all your competitors at. Because if you’re trying to, you know, be the, have the most technical guys who can work out in these complicated, you know, systems, you won’t be able to get those guys to the site as quickly as the other guy who’s focusing on the speed. So we don’t want to be a commodity. We want to be better than our competitors in a particular area.
That’s right. You, you can’t be all things to all people find your exact specialty and who you serve. It’s about what, what you do and who you serve is most important. And then we can figure that out from there, but you should come to the bootcamp because we go over this four hour business plan at the bootcamp. So go to S P U R R E L l.ca/business, hyphen bootcamp.
And we will, uh, you can buy a ticket there, a hundred bucks where again, presenting them of Vancouver and at Edmonton every quarter. Um, so you guys should definitely come out and we can show you how we, uh, do this business plan. Okay. Now next, uh, do entrepreneurs need to have in depth, detail, demographic, psychographics, market trends, and other analysis in order to make a successful plant? No. And it’s funny because that is the one thing that they focus on in business school.
They focus on this. Like they just like, they drill into it. And it’s hilarious because then you get these other government organizations who you go in there, like, well, do their market research. And then I have to like break their hearts after they have this pages and pages of market research. She’s like, you haven’t sold anything to anybody yet. Right?
You haven’t figured it out. It’s like, you know, if you get 1% of the market that you’re the richest person in your whole, family’s like, you just gotta figure out how to start selling stuff. Right. What’s actually an attractive offer that customers are gonna buy. I mean, market share is something that can be done after. This is something that after you have a seven figure business and maybe even something after you have an eight figure business where it really becomes a little bit more relevant, but at the beginning, it’s, there’s a lot.
It’s huge. And you’re here. You have nothing, you have zero share of it. Any share is all what we need. So number one, what can I sell and how do I sell it to them? That’s that’s the number one question. Um, so how often should business owners revisit their plan? Is this like a yearly thing? Or, or how often should they do this?
I would suggest annually with the caveat on that when you’re actually gonna derive some value from business plan is number one, your, you know, you’re starting out, you’re starting out or making major changes, you know, starting out is by nature, a major change, right? Um, number two, you’re trying to have really significant growth. You’re trying to go from 500,000 a year to a million a year. That’s different growth, right. Um, if you’re just trying to get from 1 million to 1.1 million, it’s just little tweaks.
You’re probably not gonna get that much to value from the plan. Uh, number three, if you’re struggling, you know, if you’re struggling, that’s the time to come back and revisit a business plan and, and number four, if you need some financing. So those are the kind of the reasons where normally you do a business plan and if you’re doing it once a year, uh, to meet those objectives. Yeah, exactly. So thank you, Josh so much for your insight and your time.
Uh, today, we really appreciate it. I know that you guys got something out of it, but definitely come out to the bootcamp because it is the place where you’re going to, um, network with a lot of entrepreneurs who are probably in the same, same position as you and people who are, you know, have sold businesses for a million dollars or more, and you can gain some insight and, and knowledge from them at the same time. Uh, it’s a great time.
We always have a lot of fun doing it, and we enjoy just, uh, sharing knowledge and information with entrepreneurs so that they can, uh, make their businesses more successful. So definitely come out to a bootcamp and we’d love to see there, um, check it out and we will see you guys on the next video. Thank.