Originally Posted by Sundi

Finally! I've been looking for this post all morning! I thought there was another but I can't seem to find it. My question is about a business plan. Now that I've spilled the beans to my husband he wants me to write one. I've seen a typical business plan and I'm not interested! (Pages and pages with graphs and charts and numbers - the type you would put together for a loan to start a new business.) I don't want a loan, thank goodness! Can somebody give me some ideas to get going? I would assume that "our type" of business plan has to be just as unique as our industry. I would like to hear from some of you who have employee J O B S because that changes everything. How long are you planning to do both? Are you going to wait until your income reaches a certain level or you sign a certain number of clients or you have $X in savings to switch to full time VA? At what rate do VAs add clients when the first get started? I'm sure you veterans have things coming to mind I haven't even thought of yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Although I can see my husband swaying I have yet to yell *TIMMMMBERRR* and we haven't shaken on it yet! Make it a great day! Sundi

Sundi, I currently work a 9 to 5 and haven't quite figured out my game plan for transitioning from it to working as a VA full time. So if you figure something out, please share. However, I have typed up what I feel is a very solid business plan. I, like you, do not foresee having to ask for a loan so I was able to leave out a lot of the "un-necessaries". But even with doing that, coming up with a plan was far from simple. I worked on it for weeks before I was happy with it. And now I consider it to be more of a guide than a plan. When the plan/guide was in draft stages, I would write down everything that I thought was important to being successful in business. Some of it would be common sense stuff like "good customer service", but I wrote it down anyway because I wanted to identify everything that I didn't want to lose sight of. I identified every single thing about my business from services, to marketing techniques and target markets, to customer service strategies, retention strategies, and so on and so on until I ended it with long and short term goals. Once I identified all of those things, it was simply a matter of grouping like items, placing them under the appropriate headings, and "fluffing" the language for appearances sake. It was a lot of work but I am sure that anyone who has written one will agree, well worth it. It's like a road map to success that I can edit, add to, and delete from as often as necessary in order to reach my goals. I hope that this helps just a little bit.