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To become a business mentor is perhaps one of the most challenging and rewarding things which you are required to do with your time. Providing help to those people who are just taking plunge in the business and giving them your useful advice from your past experiences, developing a friendship and then becoming a confidante are some advantages which you can get from becoming a mentor.

Despite this notion, mentoring is inappropriate for all and sundry since certain criteria needs to be fulfilled for some people in order to get the most out of the experience while for others is to take advantage of your past experiences. Probably the most important quality and aspect required to become a successful business mentor is having the capability to listen to what others have to say and pay respect to what they are confessing.

You should be capable of having sympathy with the person when needed and be capable of relating to the problems and how they are feeling about them. Your practical advice and ideas is very important but you should bear in mind that you are there to give advice and that too with honesty. When you have listened and given good advice, then it is time for you to take a back seat and let the other take responsibility for their decisions and actions.

Remember that mentoring is highly rewarding with no any doubt and it can be so if you are the best friend for the owner of small business, who is just taking the initiation. Here, you will get the opportunity to give advice and grow with the company and person and mark the difference, which you are making both to the person and business.

A business mentor should remember that his or her role is to be there for the person in order to give advice, stimulate, support and help the business to flourish while proffering the person some challenges. The perfect business mentor is that person, who has started a small business successfully and had good success with it.

The important skills for becoming a business mentor are having empathy, availability and ability for others and intention to assist others in becoming successful.

So this was all about how to become a quality business mentor. If you are interested to become a business mentor, then you need to masters all those skills which are required. All such skills have been explained above. Make yourself familiar with those skills and become a successful business mentor.

Whether you are running, or planning to run, an offline or online business the traditional basics of achieving business success apply. For instance, it is well-known that a business that has no plan is almost certain to fail. No matter how small a business is, it needs a plan. A business plan compels you to think before you act. It compels you to find out about your business area before you start; i.e. to research your business area or to establish its groundwork.

A business plan forces you to think hard about your competition and how you are going to beat them in the market. It forces you to establish whether your business idea is worth pursuing. Why start a business that is going to fail? Isn’t that stupid?

A business plan forces you to establish the expected costs and revenues of your business, and hence to determine profitability. Why run a business when, at any time, you cannot tell whether or not the business is succeeding? If you don’t know your costs or your revenues you cannot compare them together to tell whether your business is succeeding or failing.

An online business is no different from an offline business, when it comes to business planning. It needs a business plan! Yet, how many newcomers do we see trying to make it online without even understanding the concept of business planning? Is it then a surprise that too many fail?

This article discusses 12 fundamental principles that you must understand and use in your business planning if you are going to run a successful business. The principles are as follows…

1. The Requirements Principle

A business plan must comply with the requirements of funding bodies. This is particularly key when you are applying for funding, but is also necessary when you are not applying because the compliance act itself makes the business plan rigorous. Funding bodies always have requirements that a plan must meet, and some of these are: technological innovation, presence of technical risk, and presence of commercial potential.

2. The Objectives Principle

A business plan must have clearly defined objectives and it must accomplish those objectives. A business plan is a strategic business document, and fundamental to any strategic planning process is the need to have objectives which the formulated strategies must aim to accomplish.

3. The Motivation Principle

A business plan must have clear motivations which highlight its importance. The motivations of a business plan are the reasons for completing the plan. These reasons tell us why the plan is important.

4. The Background Principle

A business plan must be the work of someone with a relevant background (the founder, for a start-up business), and the plan must comply with its authors background. A business plan should be prepared by the person or team who is going to run the business. For a start-up business, this is critical because the planning process prepares the owner for running the business. If the planning is delegated to someone else then it is unlikely that the owner will understand the plan sufficiently to be able to implement it. In these circumstances, the owner abandons the plan and does his or her own thing with deleterious consequences for the business.

5. The Detail Principle

A business plan must be sufficiently detailed to inspire confident action when executing the business; yet it must be flexible. A detailed plan is easier to implement than a superficial plan. A detailed plan suggests that the plan has been thoroughly researched and thought over. Detail inspires confidence in the owner of the business (assuming that he or she prepared the plan). A detailed plan should be flexible to accommodate changing times.

6. The Conservatism Principle

A business plan must be conservative. This means that it must always underestimate revenues while overestimating expenses. The reasons for this are underpinned by risk. A business is always executed under uncertainty… we never have all the knowledge we would like to make business success certain. An immediate consequence of this is the tendency to underestimate cost, only to find that we run out of money at critical times of a business’s execution. We also have a natural propensity to overestimate revenues… to dream!

7. The Cash Balance Principle

A business plan must always have a positive cash balance. A negative cash balance means that you plan to run out of money… to be insolvent! If you cannot realistically get the cash balance positive, without padding figures, then this is a sign that the business idea is not worth pursuing.

8. The Insolvency Principle

A business plan must guarantee against insolvency… against running out of cash. There are four ways to do this: conservative estimates so that the business always outperforms its plans, detailed cost identification to minimise omitted costs, contingency planning to accommodate forgotten items, and a positive cash balance throughout the plan.

9. The Risk Management Principle

A business plan must manage risks by convincingly dealing with uncertainty, reducing it to as close to zero as possible. This is simply stating that a business plan must be thoroughly researched, including desk research and field research. The more thoroughly a plan is researched the more it rests on sound facts, knowledge, and understanding, and the less the uncertainty and risk associated with the plan.

10. The Evidence Principle

A business plan must rest on supporting evidence, and guess work must be minimised. Sound evidence increases the reliability of a business plan and reduces the risk associated with it. And the less risky a plan is the more likely it will guide a business to success.

11. The Rigour Principle

A business plan must be rigorous complete, correct, and reliable. This means that the plan must be derived from a systematic process that attends to all the issues that must be addressed. In particular, the plan must not be rushed. The issues must be sequenced and dealt with, each at the right time.

12. The Collaboration Principle

A business plan must be founded on collaboration (not confrontation) it must satisfy the collaboration principle. This means that a business plan must be based on the works of others. It must not be opinionated. It also means that a collaborative, rather than a confrontational spirit, must exist in any business planning team if the results of that team are to be worthwhile.

Final Remarks

This article has discussed 12 killer principles of business planning that any plan must satisfy if it is to be taken seriously. Five of such principles are: requirements principle, objectives principle, motivation principle, background principle, and detail principle. These principles are a must for anyone running an offline or online business. If your business is failing it is more than likely that your failure to comply with one or more of these principles is to blame.

Your theater company business plan is a article that defines your theater company business with its objectives and shows how those objectives ought to be achieved.

Lacking a business plan it is dubious that possible “angel investors” and the like will invest in your theater company business if that is what you require to start it up or if you need to take it to the next level

If you have a special backer in mind you must tailor it to their necessities otherwise how are you going to get any money out of them if what you exhibit in your theater company business plan is the reverse of what they have in mind for a theater company business

Your plan is not just for getting you the investment you need – it’s main objective should be to point the direction in which your theater company business is going.

You must keep your backer’s attention by making the article as reader friendly as possible. Use undemanding, direct language and graphics to illustrate your ideas. Make sure your copy reflects the optimistic approach of the management team. In spite of this, it is advisable to be realistic while presenting fiscal forecasts.

You must cover the businesses strengths as well as potential weaknesses and reveal how you propose to overcome weaknesses. Demonstrate you appreciate the risks involved and offer likely solutions for overcoming these risks and provide evidence to corroborate your statements. This will put in credibility to the theater company business plan.

Arrange your theater company business plan in a logical manner including clear and precise headings – don’t be frightened to fritter away paper – start new headings on a clean fresh piece of paper – it will make the document look more authoritative and make it easy to find stuff for your investor.

Keep all the figures between the main body of the plan and your appendices – if you put large sections of figures in the body of your document you will distract your investor from the flow of the business plan.

If you are starting a new business; it’s important you explain why you came up with the idea to start this new business. Give advantages of your unique products or services that you anticipate to offer to potential clients stating how you anticipate how to get their business. Give details of the market sector whether it’s a growing sector or not, give details of your pricing policy and how you intend to sell your goods/services. Highlight any rivalry out there and how you plan to compete in this rewarding market and make your financier a return on his or her money.

Stress the knowledge and awards of you and your management team and show how their skills can be harnessed to obtain growth potential and profitability. Give information on staffing necessities including Curriculum vitaes for chief management in the Appendices and, if applicable, an organisation chart to illustrate the management arrangement.