Long Term Plans

Basic Philosophy

Why are long term plans so important? I truly believe that making some long term plans not only simplifies your life but also increase your sales. Increasing sales and simplicity is a good thing. No one wants to try and reinvent a plan every week or every month You can easily change your whole scope of organization and inventory management by changing the way you look at a product.

First off, realize that you cannot be in a hurry to get your product out there on the market. If you do some planning and then stick to the plan it will give you a lot of peace of mind. Here is the concept. Take each product that you have and develop a detailed plan for its marketing, purchase, inventory or manufacturing. This is what will set you apart from other businesses and allow you to spend time on how to make your product better rather than running around putting out fires.

Ideally you need to choose one product and decide a plan around a one year goal or a five year goal. Actually, you can use any length of time you need considering your product and the way you purchase it. I will use the 5 year plan because the results are particularly encouraging to see. So let’s take this step by step and figure out how to make your life simple. Follow this template of steps with each product you plan on and you will quickly become organized and sell more items.

Here are the steps and we will break them down each item at a time:

Choose product
Choose timeframe
Identify acquisition
Identify its marketing
Automate it
Create the paperwork
Keep track of it
Tweak

Choosing Product

This is the easiest part since you have already done the homework and research in what product you want to carry earlier in this book. Choose one of your products and let’s work out its plan. Write the product name on the
worksheet.

Choose Timeframe

Again very easy, insert the timeframe into the worksheet. Try to stay away from a one time item. This whole worksheet will not work for a one time sale. It’s mostly slated for an item that you have a large amount of. Again for example we will use a 5 year time frame.

Identify Acquisition

This is a pretty fancy way of saying “where do you get these items?” If you
manufacture the item you need to work through the manufacture worksheet. If you import this item, write in the quantity of goods you get per purchase and how long it takes to get to you from the initial order time. Why do we do this? If you’re manufacturing or importing, you have to know how to consistently have your product available to meet the market plan.

Identify the Marketing

This is the “meat and potatoes” of the project. You have to think through this part and decide how you want to market a particular product. If you going to market your product solely by online auction you need to note that. But you also need to decide which online auctions you are going to use. Is eBay your only choice or is there some other alternative that can help your bottom line? For example eBay is the clear runaway leader in online auctions. However, Yahoo should not be ignored. For example if you planned to sell 10 units a month using eBay and then added a goal of an additional 2 units on Yahoo, that would increase your monthly sales by 20%. That may not seem like much now, but if you look at the final number 5 years down the road, the results are staggering.

Other avenues of a particular marketing strategies always need to be looked at and evaluated. You will love the results as your track your progress.

Now if your chosen marketing strategy is retail, you also want to figure in some additional strategies to supplement your sales. For example, say you’re selling some children’s items to targeted boutiques in New York city. Getting into stores is generally time consuming and takes a lot of patience. It is definitely achievable. However if you make a plan to augment your retail plan with an online auction plan you can increase the amount of product leaving your inventory. This is covered in more detail in the tweaking section as well. The worksheet is more designed to help you choose one or two strategies to market your product and think more outside the box.

If you’re considering getting financing for your small business, banks love detailed plans that give them some reassurance of how you operate and how you plan. A good plan allows you some peace of mind in selling. That gives you plenty of time to put out fires and deal with problems that always arise when you’re in business.

Automate It

This is one of the neatest parts of this whole worksheet. What you want to do is to be able to develop a plan that allows you not have to rethink a marketing strategy every week. Let’s use an online auction as an example. The first thing you would want to do is to write a very good and well thought out ad complete with pictures. You want to use this ad over and over again so it has to be clear, concise and well thought out. Then when you launch your ad you want to set your auction software to automatically renew this auction either weekly or each time the unit sells. What does this do for you? Well it takes one less decision making event out of your life. If you automate your ad, you will never forget to start an auction and will always have a consistent presence online. If you use multiple online auction sites, automate all of them and use your time to monitor the statistics of how they are doing. Books about statistics in selling are available in great quantities to help you tweak your plan.

Selling it is not where the planning ends. How are you going to ship it? Do you have a ready supply of boxes and shipping material ready to go? Is your shipping account ready and organized? Do you have a good idea of what it costs to ship this item to each part of the country? I always order my boxes in advance and have them ready to go before the first auction hits the internet. Shipping quickly and effectively makes you a hero to your future customers.

Another part of automating your product applies to manufacturing. If you make a product such as jewelry, a certain amount of your time has to be spent in the construction process. Figuring out how much time needs to be spent in assembly and what parts to make and what time should be factored into your automation plan. For example I know in order to sell a certain amount of chairs in a month that I need to spend two hours a day making each part of that chair so that I have everything I need for final assembly.

Create the Paperwork

Following this section is a worksheet to help you pull all this information
together. Each item that you sell should have its own separate worksheet.
This way you can look at the worksheet and have all your information in one
spot. This is a very powerful tool and will help you from being scattered and
trying to figure out what to do next. Copy a bunch of these worksheets and
have them ready to go.

Next are the instructions on how to fill it out and a sample to see how the
information works.

Instructions

Product: Insert the product name or product line.

Timeframe: Choose (circle) your desired timeframe.

Acquisition: Write in or circle the way you are going to obtain your product. If you have the company name print it as well. This is particularly helpful if you’re importing and have looked at a lot of different companies.

Marketing: Choose the desired marketing plan. Include any details that you need to help you such as names or companies.

Automate: Fill in the appropriate blanks. Take your time in deciding now
how to automate will save you tons of time later.

Tweak: After you have sold some items go back to this worksheet and figure out ways to tweak the sales by 5% to 10%. List them here. Every month you can look at these for ideas and adjust accordingly.

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