Enterprise Nation

Lately there have been a number of threads in the Enterprise Nation forums started by people who are concerned that their new business venture hasn’t taken off as quickly as they might have hoped. David Wike has some advice on this very matter.

Wike’s Wisdom

A while back I wrote an article for Enterprise Nation titled ‘Bin The Business Plan’. The title was somewhat tongue in cheek but I was making a serious point. Just because you have written something in a business plan it doesn’t mean it will happen. Perhaps the area where things drift off target most frequently is the sales forecast. We put in a sales projection that seems entirely reasonable to us because we know we have a good product or we offer a good service. The thing is, we have to convince the customer of that. And we have to convince them that they actually need what we are selling.

Before we can win over customers, we have to find them. Hoping they find us is a bit like sitting in the middle of a field with a bucket and waiting for a cow to wander up to be milked. We have to go out looking for customers using all the techniques that are discussed in articles and the forums on Enterprise Nation.

Whatever you think is a reasonable sales forecast based on your market research, I suggest discounting it in your cashflow forecast for the first year or two. Most business start-ups that I have come across have taken a couple of years to get going fully. Off hand I can think of one only that was almost an instant success. And that wasn’t down to fancy websites or extravagant marketing campaigns, it was almost entirely through word of mouth.

In a recent post in the forum, Enterprise Nation’s in-house number cruncher, Alan Young, said, “… it's possible to have overly high expectations when we first start out in business. It's the best move I ever made, but it has taken 9 years to build my business to the level it is now, and 50% of that overall growth has happened in the last 12 months.”

The moral of the story is ‘Don’t panic Mr. Mainwaring’, keep believing in yourself, keep plugging away and you too could become an ‘overnight success’ as a result of nine years of hard work!

• David Wike