Another business plan alternative: your calendar
Reader Carrie Bodeman at As Good As New sent this alternative to traditional business planning. You might like it too. –Becky
Sometimes you have to look back to see forward.
We keep a daily log of all activity so I can look back several years at a glance. We print out a blank calendar and each day fill in our gross sales, discounts, how many customers were in that day, weather and anything else that might affect that days sales. I highlight days that we put a promotion on (mailer, facebook promo, email etc) I total each week and month and also total all Mondays, Tues etc to see how we compare year to year. I calculate total sales by customers and see our average sale for the week/month. It makes you look at a customer different when you see that person walking in the door is worth $40 or whatever!
It’s amazing how accurate it is in forecasting sales. I staple all Jan calendars together, Feb calendars together etc. from each year. If I see a week that has been historically slow, I try to figure out why and fix it! We’ve been lucky to have consistently higher sales each year in the 9 years we’ve been open!
Start a Calendar today!!!!
Thanks, Carrie!
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
I use my Outlook calendar to sort my information personally — it can just hold much more data than my real life calendar!
Jon, that’s another option. In order to get the benefit of comparing different time periods, you would need to print them out, too.
Great idea, the idea works on a Mac’s iCal doing the printout as well.
That’s a brilliant idea. Thank you for sharing that.