1. Facebook Marketing Specialist – Businesses are gradually realizing the importance of creating a presence on Facebook; however, they need support for marketing themselves on Facebook.  If you are an expert at Facebook and know marketing well then this can be a great business opportunity for you.

2. Tutoring Business – Due to lack of time and skills parents usually face difficulty teaching their kids; however, they do want their kids to score well.  Tutoring can be a great business opportunity for someone with required qualification and expertise in a subject.

3. Coupons Business – The year 2011 can be easily called the year of coupons and deals as it saw companies such as Groupon, LivingSocial and others growing exponentially.  There is still scope left for lots of such businesses which can help connect local businesses and customers by distributing their coupons.

4.  Senior Care – A growing number of seniors presents a tremendous business opportunity in terms of providing care to these people.  The senior market in itself is really huge as it involves not only providing care but other services such as catering, assistance with tasks such as paying bills, shopping etc.

5. Copywriting Business – Everyday thousands of new websites are created and all of them need great copy to convert site visitors to customers.  If you think you have the ability to write content that can persuade a site visitor, starting a copywriting business can be a great idea.

6. Mobile Apps –  The huge popularity of iPad and introduction of several new tablets has created a new market altogether; the market of apps.  Put this along with mobile phones and you have a giant market opportunity that is waiting to be exploited.  Mobile phone and tablet users use apps for just about everything be it business or entertainment, learning or fun.  As a mobile app developer you can create and sell your apps directly to the users or provide app development services to people who want to create an app.

7. Kids Photography – While photography is a hobby for a lot of people it can also be a great business opportunity.  The need is to find your niche and one such area is kids photography.  People cherish memories and are ready to pay for the right kind of services that can help them preserve precious moments.

8. Videography Business – The rise of YouTube as a marketing platform presents a great business opportunity for people who know how to shoot great quality videos.  As with photography businesses, you will need to find your niche in videography business also as it may involve anything from shooting an event such as a seminar to shooting a product demo.

9. Online Business – Starting an online business can never go down in popularity as everyone wants to make money online.  Blogging is one such online business that is easy to start and manage and with people always on the lookout for information and great content one can make some good money blogging.

10. Pet Business – People love their pets and are ready to spend on them because they are so special.  Pet business ideas range from pet grooming to training and food to pet photography.

So, that was our list of small business ideas for 2012.  If you have more small business ideas that you want others to know do share them with others by leaving a comment.

1. Go to https://appleid.apple.com/

2. Click on “Find out” link under “Not sure if you have an Apple ID?”

3. Fill out your first name, last name and the email address that you want to use for receiving iCloud verification email.

4. On the next screen, select “Email Authentication” option and click “Next”.

5. Now, go to your Email Inbox and you will find an email from Apple on how to reset the Apple ID password.  Click on the “Reset your Apple ID password” link in the email.

6. You will be shown more than one Apple IDs that are associated with your email address.

7. Now, choose the Apple ID that you would NOT like to use for receiving iCloud verification email and click “Next”.

8. Reset the password for this account by providing a new password.

9. Login to Apple ID by visiting https://appleid.apple.com/ and clicking “Manage your account” link.  Use the Apple ID that you would NOT like to use for receiving iCloud verification email and the password that you had just set.

10. Click on “Edit” link under “Primary Email Address” section, provide a new email address.  Click “Save”.

11. Click Sign Out.

Once you have changed the email address for the Apple ID that you would NOT like to use for receiving iCloud verification email, it’s time to set things right in the Apple ID that you would like to use for iCloud services.  Just log in to your account https://appleid.apple.com/with Apple ID that you would like to use for receiving iCloud verification email.  You should now see the link to resend verification email under your email address.  Click on that link, confirm your email address and you will be all set to use iCloud.

1. Ensure that you have the data plan that allows Internet tethering.  You can simply call up your telecom carrier to confirm this.

2. From the home screen of your iPhone, go to Settings>General>Profiles and have a look at the listed profiles.  If you see any profile by an app listed here just try finding out what that app’s purpose is.  If that app claims to save data usage charges or alters data usage in any way you have found the culprit.  In my case, it was Onavo which had altered my carrier’s data profile.

3. Tap on the concerned profile to go to its details and tap on “Remove” to remove the profile.

Now go to Settings>General>Network and you should find the missing “Personal Hotspot” option back.

If you still find the personal hotspot missing it is likely that the app has altered the network profile and all you need to do is reset network settings.  Just go to  Settings>General>Reset and tap on “Reset Network Settings”.  After the reset, go to Settings>General>Network and make sure that “Enable 3G” and “Cellular Data” options are set to on.

I was able to get the missing personal hotspot back by following the steps outlined above and hope you will also find it useful.

What is Google Music

Consider Google Music as an iTunes in the cloud.  Using Google Music, you will be able to:

1. Upload all your music files to a centralized online repository.

2. Access your music collection from anywhere; through a web browser or any enabled mobile device using the Google Music Android application.

3. Access your music even when you are offline – the recently played songs are available without Internet connection.  Google Music also allows for selecting specific albums, artists, playlists that you want to have available offline.

4. Sync everything; your music files, playlists and even your iTunes library.

5. Create custom playlists easily and have them available everywhere.

To know more about Google Music, watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrNhKcxBbZo

Business Plan Outline

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary is the first section of the business plan, but, you will usually write it last after writing all other sections of the plan.  The Executive Summary provides the reader an overview of your business, its history and future plans.  The success of your business plan often depends on how interesting the Executive Summary is.

Market, Opportunity & Competition Analysis

In this section, you will describe the business opportunity, define the target market including its size, demographics, trends and special characteristics.  You will also need to provide an overview of the industry at large, analyze the competition and understand regulatory and other market conditions.

Business & Product and Service Lineup

In the business description part, you will give the reader an overview of the business you’re in and what will make the business successful.  You will also describe the products and services that the business offers to the customers along with the details like the development stage of the product or service, its benefit to the customers and its competitive strengths.

Management & Organization

The management and organization structure provides details about the key members of the management team, organizational hierarchy and key positions in the organization.  You will also describe the key roles and provide details of who is going to man those roles.  Apart from the management and ownership of responsibilities, you will also need to provide the legal structure of your organization and details of its ownership including the business type, owners and type of ownership.

Marketing Plan

The Marketing Plan section will provide the reader insight into your sales and marketing activities.  You will need to provide details about each element of marketing mix in your business i.e. the Product, Price, Place or Distribution and Promotion.  You will define how you are going to reach out to the potential customers and how you will make sure that the product is available to the channels accessible to your target market.

Operating Plan

The Operating Plan section of the business plan is used to define the business operations process, describe the location of the business and land, building, plant, machinery, equipments and human resources required to successfully deliver products and services to the customer.  This section also provides details about other elements of the delivery or manufacturing process such as the suppliers and the core delivery process itself.

Financial Plan

The financial plan or financial management section provides the reader an insight into the financial history of the business, if available, and the future financial projections.  You will need to include your detailed financial statements such as the balance sheet, pro forma profit and loss account and cash flow statement for the next three to five year depending on the requirements.

Apart from the core elements of the business plan outline mentioned above, you will also have other data, information, and research reports that you will need to keep handy.  You can use the appendix section to provide all the additional data and information.

A good business plan outline is just meant to guide you on how to write a business plan; however, each business plan is unique and you will need to decide on the importance and relevance of each section according to the needs of your business.

While there are several ways to create an operating plan, we recommend starting with a SIPOC which is a handy tool to understand the entire business process starting from the source of inputs to the receiver of output.  SIPOC is an acronym for Supplier, Input, Process, Output and Customer.  You can use a SIPOC to draw a process that shows your business activity at a high level as well as break it down to each activity level.  Creating a SIPOC is fairly easy; see an example of a Pizza business below (click to enlarge the image).

Writing a Business Plan: Operating Plan Essentials

Once you have created the SIPOC for your business, you will know some of the most essential components of your operating plan and answers to questions like:

• Who are the suppliers?
• What goes into making the final product or service?
• What equipments, machinery etc. are required to create the product or service?
• How each unit is produced?
• Which activities are performed on a daily basis?
• What are the human resource requirements of the business?

Apart from these, you can also find out several other aspects of your business, for example, the time taken to complete the production process, people involved in each stage of the production process etc.

What Should be Included in an Operating Plan

An operating plan is a unique description of your business’s production process and should only cover issues specific to your business.  While we have provided an operating plan outline, you may not be able to include all the parts or some of them may not be applicable to your business at all, for example, describing how the inventory will be managed is critical to a retail business; however, it may not be required for a consultancy business at all.

Another point to consider here is the purpose of the operating plan.  If you are going to use the operating plan as an internal tool, you should try to make it as detailed as possible.  However, if you are going to use it as part of the business plan to raise funds then you need to make it easy to understand and avoid getting into complexities of business.

Business Plan Writing: Operating Plan Outline

After SIPOC, the next stage is to describe all the findings in your operating plan for the reader.  An operating plan, depending on the type of business, needs to cover some or all of the following:

Production or Manufacturing Process

Every business, irrespective of whether it manufactures something or not, produces or provides an item of value of that the customer pays for.  In this part of the operating plan, you may want to explain the process of producing a unit of output, the time required to produce each unit, the labor requirements, etc.

Plant, machinery and equipments

In some business, the physical plant, machinery and equipments play a major role.  For non-manufacturing businesses such as a retail outlet, the plant is the space used to attend customers and store and display products.  In all cases, you need to describe the land, buildings, machinery, tools etc. that are required to run your business and why they are important.  Explain how your business will obtain all these things, for eg: lease for land and building, financing for machinery etc.  For some business such as a restaurant, the location itself is very important and you may want to describe the benefits associated with the location of your business in the operating plan.

Production capacity

Describe how many units your production facilities and human resources can produce in a given period of time.  Is  your production process scalable to produce more units, if required?

Human resources

How many people do you need to employ and are there any special skills required in them.  What is the availability of skilled labor and how are they employed by your business, full time, part-time, contract basis?  In case your business offers some kind of services, for example, auto repair, it is important to explain in your operating plan how do you ensure consistent supply of skilled labor.

Materials and Suppliers

Explain in your operating plan, what materials are required to produce your product or service, who are the suppliers, are there any special arrangements with suppliers, do you have a backup source in case a supplier fails to provide the raw material, and what terms you have negotiated with the suppliers.  It is important to keep a healthy relationship with your key suppliers and also maintain a backup for times when your primary supplier fails to deliver the required materials.

Inventory

Explain how you will manage the inventory.  Inventory management is critical for businesses, and trivial too, as maintaining high inventory levels can be a huge cost in itself and maintaining low inventory levels sometimes leads to missed sales.  In your operating plan you need to describe how do you ensure that optimum levels of inventory are maintained at all times.

Customer Service and Support

Some business types need to provide support and customer service after the product or service has been sold.  This becomes essential in case of technical products or services.  In some cases, the support and services become revenue generating mechanisms for the business, for example, a company selling CRM software may also sell implementation and training services.  In all such cases where customer service and support is the core differentiator, a revenue stream or a necessity, you need to include it as part of your operating plan.

The objective of creating an operating plan is to let the reader know that you understand the requirements and methods of producing your product or service.  A good operating plan should introduce the production process and essentials to the reader in a way that is easy to grasp.

Financial Plan: The Essentials

The financial plan for an established business will need to include the historical financial data, usually for the last three to five years, depending on the time business has been in operation.  This will include the profit and loss statements, cash flow statements and balance sheets for each year.  It will be good idea to include the externally audited statements because that will add credibility to the numbers that you are going to present.  The potential investors want to look at the past financial data to understand how the cash is managed in the business, for how long the business has been in profit (or loss), major expense lines, the assets owned by the business, and the liabilities of the business.

In addition to the historical data, the investors also want to know how the business will perform financially in the future.  For this you will need to provide financial projections for the next three to five years.  The projections data will be provided in the same format as the historical data i.e. you will need to provide the Pro forma profit and loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements for the next three to five years.

A startup’s financial plan will be different as it will only show the projected data.  The projections should be based on your research about the cost of setting up the business, major capital expenses, cost of operations, expected revenues etc.

Tips for Creating a Financial Plan

• If you don’t know how to crate financial statements you should hire a skilled person to do that for you.
• Do a through research before making assumptions for your projected financials.  Mention the assumptions clearly along with logical reasons within the financial plan so that the reader also knows what your assumptions are and why they are correct.
• The first year projections should be broken down to monthly levels.  The projections for second and third year can be given on a quarterly basis.
• The projections, especially the cash inflow and outflow, should match up your funding requirements.
• It is advisable that you don’t project for more than three years unless you are asked to do so by the potential investor because it will involve too many assumptions.
• Try to include some charts because visual representation highlights the facts in a better way.  This should be done especially if your financials are in good shape.
• You should learn how to read and create financial statements in case you don’t know that because you will needing this skill on a regular basis.

If you are just starting to create a financial plan without any prior experience, it will be good idea to look at a sample financial plan from a related business before moving ahead.

Creating a small business marketing plan is also important because it forces you to think about the existing offerings in the market and how you will differentiate your product or service from them and then how you will convince prospective customers to make a purchase.  While there are some standard approaches to marketing, your small business marketing plan should be unique and developed considering the market conditions, target customers, product offering, budget etc.  Overall, the purpose of a small business marketing plan is to find out if all the elements of the marketing mix have been taken care of in your business.

How to Write a Small Business Marketing Plan

While creating a small business marketing plan, you should include details that answer the following questions:

1. How the industry and market looks like?

The answer to this question should include information about the growth rate of the industry, the competition in the industry, the leading players, top products or services, and the available niches.  All of this information can be easily found on the Internet, trade publications and through industry’s trade associations and you should try to research all these places while creating your small business marketing plan.

2. Who are your potential customers?

This is where you will identify your target customers.  The first segmentation should be based on whether you will be selling to business or consumers.  If you will be selling to consumers, you will need to identify:

• the reasons why they will need your product or service
• what motivates them to buy
• who influences the purchase decision
• how do they make purchases – offline, online, credit, cash etc.
• how often do they use and buy a similar product
• is there any special factor leading to purchase such as an occasion

You should also collect demographics and other personal data such as the gender, age, income, education etc.

If you will be selling to businesses, you will need to find out similar details such as the types of business that will buy your product or service, why will they need it, who are the key decision-makers, who finalizes the purchase etc.

All this information will be useful for choosing the right method for promoting your business to your potential customers.

3. Where are your customers located?

It is important to identify the geographic focus for your business which can be local or city-level, statewide, regional, national or international.  The reason why you need to identify the geographic focus is because each of them requires different advertising and promotion methods and different budgets too that will need to be covered in your small business marketing plan.

4. What are your distribution channels?

This is where you will define how you plan get your product or service to the market.  Will you appoint a sales force, distributors, wholesalers, retailers or you will be directly dealing with the customer through a storefront, website etc.

5. Where and how will you advertise?

In this part of the marketing plan you need to identify where and how you can reach your potential customers.  The places for advertising could be the Internet, shopping malls, highways, television, radio, magazines etc.  The methods of advertising could be banners, billboards, email, videos, podcasts etc.

6. What is your pricing strategy?

Pricing strategy becomes crucial in cases of highly competitive markets.  You should review your competitor’s pricing and then based on your costs, come up with a price that the market will be ready to bear.  Pricing strategy will also be influenced by how you want to position the your business in the market as well.  You can be a low-cost and high-volume player or focus on the higher end of the market that is ready to pay a higher price.

7. What is your sales strategy?

You marketing plan will also need to include your sales strategy.  A great marketing program is a waste until a sale is made.  In this part, you will define how sales will be handled in your business.  Will the marketing and sales be taken care of by the same individual or team?  What is your sales process?  What sales activities will be performed on a day-to-day basis?  Which sales tools do you intend to use?  You will also need to define the terms of sales such as payment and credit policies.

Marketing and sales is the revenue generation engine of a business.  Having a right small business marketing plan will ensure that your business is always in business.

The management and organization section should include your management team’s profile, the organization structure and details about the ownership of business.

Management Team

This part is used to introduce your management team to the reader.  You should begin with brief biographies of the key members of the management team including yourself, the founder.  The details that you should include about each member of the management team are:

• Name
• Position in the organization
• Key Responsibilities
• Education
• Work history
• Special achievements

The idea to present all this information is to sell your management team to the reader so don’t forget to include any important detail.  You should provide accurate information as the investors often checks references.  Also, you should not make generic statements such as Mr. X handled a large business development team or significantly increased the profits of the company that he worked with previously.  While highlighting achievements, make quantifiable statements such as “Mr. A handled a team of 50 business development people spread across three parts of the country” or that his work led to increase in profits by sixty percent.

In case you have an advisory board consisting of notable members be sure to include them here.  Having an advisory board with well known and successful business people goes a long way in establishing the credibility of your business.  It shows that you are not  trying to do everything yourself as well as you recognize that you don’t know everything and will have access to professional help when needed.

Organization Structure

An investor would be interested in knowing your organization structure to assess that you know all the key areas and positions required to make your business a success.  The organization structure should be presented using an organization chart that outlines all the key positions in the organization, who is currently serving at that position and a brief description of each position.  It’s not a problem if you have some key positions vacant in your organization’s structure and you shouldn’t hide that or hesitate in showing that to an investor.  It is not unusual for a startup to have some of the key positions vacant and investors also understand that.  The important part is to recognize that gap and have a plan for filling up that position as quickly as possible.  Also, you should be able to explain who is taking care of the responsibilities of that vacant position currently.

Ownership

Last but not the least, the investors also want to know the ownership details of the business.  In this part, you will need to provide details about the legal structure of your business and ownership distribution.  Include in this part, details like:

• Business type – Incorporation, partnership or sole proprietorship
• Owners – Names of owners and their percentage ownership
• Ownership type – Preferred stock, common stock, general partner, limited partner
• Authorized and outstanding equity or equity equivalents such as options

Having a capable management team and a well thought out organization structure is vital for making a business successful.  It ensures that right people are deployed to right jobs that match their skills, experience and knowledge.

Business Description

The Business Description section will actually be a detailed version of the elevator pitch that you will present in your business plan’s executive summary.  This is where you present to the reader the specifics about the business you’re in and what it does.  You will also explain the need for your business and why do you think your business will be successful.

The answer to the question about the need for your business will be derived from the needs or problems faced by the potential customers which you would have already described in the Business Opportunity section.  This needs to presented along with the key factors that you think will make your business a success.  While writing these factors, try focusing on your business’s competitive advantages which could be a better product/service, brilliant executive team, strong R&D resources etc.

Product and Service Description

In this section you will answer the question “What are you selling?”  You will need to provide a detailed description of the products or services that you will be selling.

By description, we don’t mean that you need to provide an endless list of features of your product.  Just provide a list of key features and focus on the benefits to the customers; for example, if you were selling cars, you would like to emphasize on  the fuel efficiency, the acceleration, driving comfort etc. rather than providing the technical specifications.  Remember, users don’t pay for features, they pay for the benefit or satisfaction that they get from the features present in a product or service.

Apart from the basic description, you should provide details about:

Development Stage: Which stage the product or service is currently in?  Is it just an idea, a prototype or a fully functional offering that is ready to be sold.

Competitive Strengths: Explain how your offering is superior than those of competitors and how it will better satisfy the needs of customers.

Intellectual Property: Are you going to crate any intellectual property such as patents, trademarks, copyrights etc.  This is a key aspect to focus on if you are writing a business plan to raise funds from venture capitalists.  Even if you are not writing the plan for raising funds you should focus on creating some type of intellectual property as it acts as an entry barrier to the competition.

Future Plan: Describe the future plan for development of products and services.  How you will improve the current offering?  Provide details about the research and development capabilities that you have.

Needless to say that the claims that you make about your business, product or service need to be backed with solid data.  You don’t have to include all that data here as that should be a part of the Appendix.

It is said that businesses are more comfortable explaining the features of their products than their business itself.  To check whether you have written a good business, product or service description, make one of your friends, who doesn’t know anything about your business, read the description.  If he/she can understand what business you are in and what are you trying to sell by reading the business, product and service description then you have got it right.