Tips to Avoid Common Business Plan Mistakes Small Businesses Make
---Susan Wilson Solovic, CEO - SBTV.com, author of "The Girls' Guide to Building a Million Dollar Business"

Starting and building a small business is challenging and risky. Statistics show more than half of all small businesses fail in the first three years. Writing a business plan is an essential first step for any business start-up to enhance your opportunity for success.

A business plan helps you evaluate the strength of your business concept. Is this business a sustainable business that can create revenue and make a profit? Additionally, a business plan also serves as kind of a blueprint to help guide you as you build your business by establishing goals and objectives so you can stay on track. A lot of small businesses lose focus in the early years, and as a result, they become a failure statistic.

If you are struggling with creating a business plan for your business, here are some common mistakes business owners make and how you can avoid them.

1. Procrastinating. The thought of writing a business plan is overwhelming and can be intimidating. As such, business owners put if off and it never gets done. My best advice: Just do it! Get started and think of it as a process rather than another task to mark off your "to-do" list.You won't have all the answers at first, but it is the exercise of finding the answers that is important.
2. Outsourcing the Plan. As the business owner, you are the one who has to deliver the plan results so you need to be intimately involved in the process of writing the plan. If you hire someone to write it for you, it's just a bunch of paper. It's okay to work with professionals to advise you, but it's not a good idea to hand off the project and walk away.
3. Inflating the Opportunity. Entrepreneurs are eternal optimists. Therefore, it is easy to get caught up with our business idea and inflate the opportunity. Naturally, we'd like to think everyone is a potential customer. In reality, that's never going to be the case. Yet, start-ups get over-zealous and they think they can sell millions when in reality it is more realistic to think in the thousands.
4. Underestimating Start-up Costs. It always takes more money than you think, so you really need to do your homework. In addition, don't forget about your personal income needs when you estimate your costs. Most businesses don't start off making money so your personal financial needs should be part of your calculations.
5. Overestimating Growth. Rapid, hockey stick growth is not reasonable in today's economy. Your projections should match reasonable market trends. Moreover, it usually takes longer to build a business than you anticipate. If your plan calls for rapid growth, you may find yourself struggling to keep the doors open.
6. Too Vague. Because pulling together all the information you need to write a good plan is time consuming, many business owners take the easy way out and are too vague. They don't have the detail they need to support their conclusions.
7. Too Detailed. A business plan is not a novel. The more concisely it is written the better.
8. Hung-up On Format. As long as a business plan makes sense, the format you use isn't critical. Unless perhaps you are dealing with a venture capitalist that requests a certain form, but most small business start-ups don't go after VC money. A banker once told me the best business plan he'd ever seen was written on the back of a paper grocery bag.

There are excellent resources on the Internet to help you write your business plan. In addition, small business development centers are located around the country and they provide counseling and assistance to small businesses. You can find one near you at www.asbdc-us.org .

Susan Wilson Solovic is CEO of SBTV.com - Small Business Televisionand author of "The Girls' Guide to Building a Million Dollar Business." Her experience has taken her from the newsroom as a television anchor and correspondent, to the boardroom as an executive in a Fortune 100 company, to a successful entrepreneur, speaker and media personality. She sits on the board of several influential women's business organizations and is a regular contributor to broadcast media and print publications on the issues facing small business owners today.

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