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Can a New Home Based Business succeed by going in Reverse? |
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There are many reasons why new businesses go belly up. This is just as true for the Internet Marketing business as for more conventional home based business. This article looks at the fundamental reason as to why some businesses succeed and the majority fail. |
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| Author: Jonathan Lake |
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Going on holiday is an example. Your goal is where you want to lie on the beach and relax. The journey to it is relatively easy. You go to the travel agent, book your ticket and hey presto, the planning is done.
A slightly more complicated exercise would be buying a new car. You may have defined the make, color accessories etc. You then go back to the beginning and decide as to how you are going to finance the deal. Depending as to how much money you have available you can go straight to your purchase or you may have to negotiate a loan. Times have changed, you will probably have to convince the bank manager that the steps you will take to pay back the loan are viable. You will have to plan ahead!
These are two simple planning exercises. As you can see, buying a new car can introduce some variables which will make achieving the goal more complicated.
What if there were a different method of planning a project which would allow you to see the steps in the path to your goal before you stumble over them.
Well there is. It is a system of planning which I was introduced to when planning teaching courses twenty years ago and is used extensively by the military. It is called Strategic Reverse Planning. It has to have a very important title as it is a very simple concept. Instead of starting where you are now. How about starting where you want to end up and then chart a route backwards.
Let us look at a simple home Internet business start up.
The ultimate goal is obviously to make money. For this system to work you must be explicit on how much money you want to make and in what sort of time frame. Do bear in mind that there is a difference between gross and net income.
Having set our goal and a realistic time frame we can then work back one step. Simply put we can estimate the amount of money we need to generate and the volume of sales needed to achieve this, taking into account the profit on each sale.
We now have a clear end point. We can then work backwards through the various steps we need to take to get to this point. These steps are mini goals towards our final one. The mini goals are not set in stone but need to be in place so that we have an idea of the resources needed, including money to reach them and additional training we might need.
There is no need to go into great detail on each mini goal at this stage as each time we achieve a mini goal we can do exactly the same process for the next steps. The plan has flexibility in that it can be reviewed at each step. Learning and experience may mean that we change the next goal point.
This method of planning not only allows a flexibility it also allows a much greater control of finance as each mini goal can be much more accurately budgeted. I realize that planning is boring but without it you might just as well jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Your plan is your parachute. The better your parachute, the more likely you are to reach your landing point.
The next article will look at how to set up a home office using this method of project planning.
About Author
I spent over forty years in health and education including research into human development and learning. One of my main interests was in distance and on line learning programs. I became interested in Internet business some eight years ago after retiring from my primary career. I am particularly interested in why so many businesses fail in the first twelve months. More information about the author can be found at www.whoisjonathanlake.com
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