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Creating a Business Plan

So now we're going to get back into the homework part. We're going to start building your company. One of the first things you have to do to build a company is to create a mission statement. You have to know why you're doing this. If you don't know why you're doing that, you can't get there. So, um, it's something that a mission statement is a summary of your goals. Summary of your vision. I'm going to show you mine. This is written probably 15 or 18 years ago. It's very simple. It's to provide a better quality of living for ourselves and our families by creating a superior product for our clients born out of uncompromised artistic vision. Now, the way we write a mission statement is basically I sat down and wrote the most important things to me, line by line three or four things that were most important to me. And then I broke it into a sentence. The idea of a mission statement is it should be one sentence that defines who you are or what you stand for. Typically no less than 50 words...

. Now, this is going to be homework, so I'm gonna give everybody warning. Now, I'm gonna go back to my mission statement. So the idea is to take this Now, if you break this down, I want to provide a better quality of living for myself and my family. That was my number. One goal is I want to take care of my family. I wanted to create a superior product, so I wanted to always produce the best that I could. I'm still I will never be the best photographer in the world ever. But I am the best Sandy push that I could be right here right now. I'm way better than I was yesterday and far, far better than the day before. I can't wait to see what I'm gonna be like tomorrow. I'm sure it's gonna be amazing, right. But the idea is creating a superior product, putting your heart into that. And then, of course, it's born out of uncompromised our artistic vision. The ultimate third go in my life was to always maintain art at the medium that I understood. I can't paint, I can't draw. I am horrible at even writing letters and sentences. So for me, photography was a way to express myself that I could work with. I've had plenty of people tell me that photography is not really art. I would beg to differ. I think it just it's just ah mindset. Somebody just two days ago said something about Oh Way were talking about photography and he said, Oh, my friend is a fine art for no she said, Oh, my friend, she's a real photographer. She's a fine art photographer and in my head I was just going a real photographer. Oh, you know, there's always that that urged to stay. And how much does she make doing riel photography, you know. But I didn't because, you know, I know that there's some people who are fully satisfied. I don't care if they ever make a dime. They just want to create. I hope I live somewhere in the middle. I don't mind making money. I'm not ashamed that I make money and a good living at what ideo, But I do hope that the photography, the true essence of what I create, is that pure photography, the capturing to me of a smile and expression, the eyes. That's really what I dio and the money is to me the benefit of of doing what I do. So we understand what a mission statement is. This is now going to be homework. This is number two. So you will create a salsa box. You also need to create your own mission statement. Now, for those of you in the class and that have the book No work you have. This is actually download that's available to you and we'll go into it a little more detail. If you don't, you can do this. Guy's gonna make sure they understand everything I ever did. This book is nothing more than me writing things down so it can be done. The mission statement details the reason you've established your business. You guys have this document so you can pull from it and work from that. But do you want you, especially a couple of you, at least to share your mission statement tomorrow? So you've got some serious homework to get done, and also our audience are virtual audience. If they would like to share someone creativelive site or on Sandy, which fans? I would love to see them as well we are. These are the kind of things the homework we're gonna attach comprises two as well, just some extra bonus items. So post those on Sandy puts fans if you can, but you all have to have one tomorrow. Otherwise you're grounded. So let's make sure that happens now. Your business is important. Building a business structure is important. We're going to get into the business plan, actually writing a business plan. How many of you actually have a written business plan? Honest truth. Everybody's I'm getting no go still, Move your head and I'll never know. So most of you do not have an actual written business plan. This is the big, big big one. To me, it is a road map to your future. My business plan has changed and been modified probably 100 times since I've started. The core values always stay the same. That's my mission statement, right? My heart and soul is my mission statement. That is my core. But the plan changes based on volume. What I want and what I realized I didn't want after the fact. So having a well organized business plan is really important usually supports one goal. So in this case, we want to be portrait photographers. For the most part, for those of you that are not portrait photographers, if it's whether it's, you know, business headshot photographers or wedding photographers, it's all the same. It all comes. Any business has to have a good, solid business plan. So with your business pat plan, if you were to go to the bank and we're gonna talk about the later if you want to get a loan, they would require that you provided a business plan. So I'll tell you right now these are the things they're looking for. Your business description, your marketing structure, your finances, all in order, your management plan, the breakdown of your management and those supporting documents. Things like your your session counts, lists and things like that that we're going to cover. All of these things are parts of the whole. They're all of the things that are going to be your official documented plan. Now we're going to give you another piece of homework. I know that you can't write. I would hope by tonight because that's something that would be pretty darn impressive. But you can get it started now we're gonna break it down for those of you who don't have the really big book. We're going to do this piece by piece. I promised I wouldn't shortchange you anything. So those of you who do have the business book, I need to make sure you understand something really clearly. These air, all downloads that are available. If you have the hard copy, it's on your disk. If not, you received a download that has over 100 templates in it. This is the business plan template. Now I'm gonna give a big shout out to Sisi CC. Put her heart into this. So that would be easy for you. It is an all customizable doc document. However, you have to make sure that when you use this document, you save a copy dear desktop and then work from a saved copy. So you want to keep the original document hole? Because if these are it is an excel type document that if you accidentally change some of the formulas, the whole thing goes to pot and you don't want that. So it's really easy to cut and paste it. Just basically download that if you have the book. If you guys order the book, then you can download it. Save a copy. You can change anything you want in the document. You guys are going to be working on this tonight. I'd like you to see at least get the 1st 2 pages done, if possible. Their formulas don't hurt them. If you take away the brackets, they go away. For those of you who don't have the book, we're going to go ahead and give you an idea what it looks like. I know you can't. There's no way we could take the time to have you write all this out. So I'm going to give you a summary. I can recommend that if you buy the course, you can hear me say it over and over again. That's just a good idea from my perspective. But this is page number one now for you guys. Just so you understand those brackets, you're gonna change anything in the brackets. You can delete the brackets when you change him. Anything that's not in brackets don't touch it. So in your and we're gonna go through some of this quickly in your business plan, you're gonna have a table of contents. I will tell you right now. getting alone and I've had plenty of them. Banks want this. They want this to be professional. So you're gonna have everything written down in a table of contents. You're gonna have an executive summary. And if you're writing this down, if you're trying to keep up right, at least the main header. And that way, you know, kind of what goes in it. In an executive summary, you're gonna have your business description, your product and services, your market assessment, your team summer. Your growth highlights your marketing structure. You're gonna include traditional as well as non traditional, which is social media, which, by the way, I think is now becoming the traditional and anything in print is old school on, then your financial analysis. This right here is a week's worth of work. Just getting this all laid out. So understand that if you don't do this, if you decide to circumvent this or skip this, you're taking away the roadmap. You're basically taking away the structure, and then you're gonna say, OK, well, tomorrow's marketing and I love to market. I want to make money. If you don't have this, you don't know where you're going and you're gonna do what we call emergency marketing, which is desperate marketing with no purpose. And we're trying to give you purpose, so yeah, this stinks. I wouldn't want to write. I didn't like writing my 1st 1 or my second on my third of my 55th because I've had to rewrite this 100 times, It feels like, but this is probably one of the most important things you guys, because I could see your faces should do out of this class. In addition, you'll have your business descriptions, which has description of the industry. And again, this is a lot of words. I'm gonna fly through this. Your mission statement, your company background. Your equipment resource is your goals and objectives and your business structure. So you're gonna get that full business description. You're also especially for your purpose in the bank's purposes, you need to have an understanding of your products and services. You need to outline what it is that you offer, how you offer it, the benefits of what you offer, what separates you from everybody else. You're pricing fee. How many of you right here? Fill 100% comfortable with your pricing structure. What's that? What's structure? Well, that's a key component to success. If I told you right now, I could double or triple your prices and you would be you'd make at least double your income. Would you do it? Would you take me seriously? How many of you would trust me to do that? Most people will say yes. But if I said OK, give me your prices. Right now you have a $20 by 10. We're gonna make it $60 today. You probably have a panic attack, right? The only people I've ever really been him, how able to help make successful like that are the people who actually let me double interval their prices because they had to. At a $ about 10 you're gonna go out of business and we don't want that. So So a lot of it is faith and trust and watching other people find that success, So pricing and fee structure is really important. We've gotta work on that later in this program. Then, of course, customer service. We're gonna go. And by the way, all of these were gonna go into detail. So this program, we will cover them. But this is actually getting it in writing in your business structure. Then, of course, you need your market assessment. You have to be able to understand the niche. Who do you work for? What particular style are you working for? Your customer profile? Who is your customer? All of these, we're gonna cover, by the way, your also your competition. We're gonna talk about competition. Who is that person, then? Of course, if you have employees, you're gonna need to have a team summary in there. Who are these people? Who are your key employees? Who can you live without and who can't you live without? And then your growth highlights. Now, I know you guys are all going. This is like a novel. It is. It stinks. I'm not gonna lie. This is the hardest part of this. Glass is writing a business plan. As I said, we made it really easy for you guys. So I do honestly expect you put a little effort into it. For though world out there who is looking at all these words. I could have taken this out and not overwhelmed. You just said I mean the original book I wrote. It said, You must have a business plan that's so sweet and easy and it just so much nicer on the brain to go. Yeah, I need one of those. That's a good idea. It's much harder to look at and go. Wow, that's a lot of information, but this is where you start. It's not so much. Who cares what the bank thinks when you see yourself on paper and you see that your professional and you see that you have value and content and you have needs, that's where you're going to start to grow. So all of these things, the marketing side of it getting all of that laid out we're gonna do that all tomorrow. Financial analysis is pretty much gonna be in day three. So everything from balance flow to cash flow statements, your profit and loss analysis, you break even your expense fork. Has anybody overwhelmed and depressed yet? Because you should be. I'm gonna tell you that's it. When you're finally done, your your business outline your business plan should have in appendix as well. So have all that to be easily found. So this is the first time ever in my life. I've actually shown a real business plan. I didn't even show you mine because my business plan is probably 30 something pages once it's done. And it's far more than that because in your appendix, this is where you would have copies of everything that legal papers and all that stuff. My business plan is a full book. It's a full binder, but that's also 27 years of building it. The 1st 1 I ever wrote was because of bank told me to, and that was the first unnerve ing of holy cow. They want riel information like you really have to know how much you want to make, and you really have to care eso we want to get you through that. Like I said, I've never shown that before. This is what that just so you know, because I know a lot of people have the book. This is what it looks like. We want you to start working on that tonight, so I'm hoping you guys get through Page one and Page to I would love to see at the end of this three or 45 pages of this done, because it's just a matter of sitting down quiet time and making it all happen. For those few who are virtually watching us, we also have a lot of resource is it's very easy to find different. Resource is you can find them on the Net. There are places who have business plans that are pretty written, or at least give you an outline so that you have an idea of what the content is there because again, I know that was very overwhelming. I'm not gonna do that to you all day long. That's the worst part getting through that. But if you're not sure if you can't write a business plan, you can check. Like some of these sites, they actually have formulas on how to start their there, even programs out there that you can pay, and they will help you pace you and get you through that whole business plan. But I strongly encourage all of you to make this a priority, and you will find that mechanically, once your brain attaches to it, everything else just falls into place. It becomes very easy to maintain and grow a business. Sandy, I think Beth had a question. Do you have a question about. I'm doing this for your niche and explaining what it is that your business does. If you have a lot of aspects to your business or you focus on a lot of different types of photography, is it better? Teoh, Um, I guess, kind of do something that's a little more top level and includes everything. Or should it be broken out into to cover the different types for me, I am one of those fallen people Peg me into. I'm a baby photographer. I'm known as a baby Children's photographer. We shoot everything families, Children. Every baby I photographed photographed their families at some point in the year and then, of course, business and even weddings. It was something that I built my company on than pulled back now and back into it. So I look at a business plan is the overall if my camera is my tool, that anything I take with that camera falls under my business. So I would say in your case, I would say Just be comprehensive and make it about photography. Eventually, there are certain markets that, like, if you just were exclusively wedding, I think my business plan would change a little bit because this the dynamics of marketing and how you structure your time is very, very different. But I would say overall for most of us were kind of the jack of all trades will shoot for food kind of a thing. So So I would say Make it conference. If that's a great question, though, because remember, there are a lot of people watching this show right now that have nothing to do with photography. This business plan, this business structure works for anybody. You just have to pull out the pieces that are important to you. It's a good question. Cool. So again, those resource is air available there in your book there live links. I know that they're probably going to post some of these links as well. So ultimately, I want everybody to commit to making the business plan. So we're up to three homeworks now, Right? So far we have saltbox, the mission statement and the all comprehensive. This is this plan that's a life one, but you'll get there