Long Term Plans

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.

1.        Choose product
2.        Choose timeframe
3.        Identify acquisition
4.        Identify its marketing
5.        Automate it
6.        Create the paperwork
7.        Keep track of it
8.        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. Its
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 your
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.

pdf link to auction org
sheet

Insert Long term plans worksheet, this
is located in my documents, project
file, long term plans worksheet

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