Common Business Plan Mistakes to Avoid
Gateway CFO Solutions was recently featured in an article on CarolRoth.com, “Business Plan Mistakes, Mishaps, Blunders & Errors.”
We’ve been involved in a number of startups from the conceptualization stage, and have led the business planning and budgeting process for all of them. Industries include retail, construction, manufacturing, and ecommerce. In many instances, the founder/owner/team have underestimated the intensity of competition and their burn rate. In other words, top-line revenue projections are consistently overstated, with actual numbers well below budget for quite a while. This mistake can lead to big time cash problems, as the company may not have received the amount of funding it really needs to get over the hump, because their revenue projections were too high. As a general rule of thumb, we tell clients in the startup phase to cut their revenue projection in half and use that as a best case. Preparing a worst case scenario is absolutely necessary to understand the true risk inherent in a new business venture.
Check out the full article at CarolRoth.com by clicking here. There are some great tips offered by other firms as well.
What mistakes have you seen in business planning? What would you do differently in your next business plan?
