Writing the Business Proposal

It’s been a huge few weeks as the development of the business proposal for “Steven North” has been under way and my oh my has there been some stressful times. There is also the fact that I’m going to be required to build a duck pond soon as there was grateful assistance given to me in the first week which saved so much stress!

It has been intense and writing a business proposal is the biggest and most important document one would write in their entrepreneurial life and there are so many requirements.

There are things to write such as whom are your competitors, what products & services you offer, what prices do you sell them for. What is your business plan, what is your budget for the next two years and the list goes on and on.

There is much information to write and read and research that this one particular document is absolutely time consuming.

Even when looking at the marketing plan, what marketing will you be doing, how will you be doing, what will you be doing to achieve the marketing, what avenues, what is your target market and so on. There are so many things that need to be achieved that it is not for the faint hearted and you know what… This is the biggest reasons why small businesses do not take off at all. People do not have the vision to take their business to the next level, they do not have the knowledge on how to achieve it. A person that is setting up a fencing company does not know anything about marketing, seriously… why should they, they specialise in fencing, getting the job done. Their priority isn’t to go to school and learn how to market themselves.

Marketing is in fact one of the most challenging things to do, especially if you are not a conventional business that fits within the third dimension structure that is falling apart (thank you Masters for giving us this information) but a spiritual based business needs to know what they’re doing. It is not a matter of paying rent, it is not a matter of “I’ve done Reiki, so let’s get people in” oh shit no! It’s sooo much more! In fact, if you do the NEIS program, they will and they have knocked back business proposals that relate to spiritual matters. Why? because ultimately it is not a viable business solution. I totally get that too!

In fact, whom the heck has the patience to do 8 hours of Reiki sessions in a day, for 5 days a week. That would drive me crazy, unless I can figure out how to read a book at the same time but even then that wouldn’t be good enough because for me, I am much more about the human interaction and guiding them through the emotional pains that is sitting deep within the heart.

So now we get to the financial aspect of things…. the budgeting and my gosh! Having spent a number of years being the Senior Financial Analyst for a few government agencies and all the other cool things that I’ve done in the government career, such as fleet management, insurance management, commercial property management, budget management and getting my insane MS Excel & Access skills a good work out. This for me is a pretty straight forward area.

Having done Zero based budgeting (allocate a $40 million budget with the opening balance of $0.00) a few times, this section was straight forward but what is the most time consuming element that I am finding this proposal is the “WHY”… Why do people want to come to the group sessions, why do people want to come and do a one-to-one sessions, why do people want to buy the music and I have to write some spiel that says… IT’S BLOODY AWESOME! but in more words than those three…

So what I have learned over these past three weeks doing this course is that I have seen how to market people in the spiritual based business and the success to that is to actually not refer to it as a spiritual based business. Why do you ask? If you read through all the academic articles on Spirituality, you will see that spirituality is associated with religion and religion is beginning to fall apart. People are walking away from religion because it has control and fear and people these days do not want religion. They want to live, they want to live life and they want to love, be free from all the control, the fear, the anger, the fighting, the racism, the ego and you can continue on with this list if you wish but you get the point. So we need to look at it in a way that is not connected with spirituality and make it the norm and that is what I’m trying to achieve at the moment. So until I figure that out… Let me know your ideas!

Well, I had better get back to this work. I need to write a marketing plan and it does remarkably look like the one above! I also need to write key roles of the business, I need to write an analysis of the financials, I need to reduce the 2 year forecast cash flow by 50% and then I also need to do the graphics work for the Meetup.com group….

Oh that reminds me readers… if you’re a user of Meetup… come join the group -> http://www.meetup.com/StarPoint9/