Business Plans Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10. Planning for a Small Business

In This Chapter

• Creating a plan for your small business

• Deciding where to focus your business-planning efforts

• Planning to grow your small business — or not

The big guys like Google, Toyota, Apple, Microsoft, and AT&T make the business headlines. But the real powerhouses driving the nation's economy are — you guessed it — small businesses, places like Giovanni's Pizza, Main Street Marketing, Woody's Custom Furniture, and Eye of the Needle Tailoring. Small businesses like these employ more than half of the U.S. private sector workforce and create the majority of the nation's new jobs.

What qualifies as a small business? The official definition of a small business, brought to you by the Small Business Administration (SBA), is any business that is "independently owned and operated and that is not dominant in its field of operation." If your company employs fewer than 100 people and has only a few locations, consider it a small business.

For the purposes of business planning, if your company's big enough to be publicly traded on the NASDAQ or the NYSE, you're too big to be called a small business. On the other hand, if your business consists of you and you alone, you're self-employed — and you get your very own chapter (see Chapter 9).

This chapter focuses on the aspects of business planning most critical to small businesses — especially those that are just starting up or ones that are playing catch-up and writing business plans for the first time. ...