This episode is actually more like a class where I show you how to create a simple business plan. I am also giving you MY EXACT BUSINESS PLAN so that you can take a sneaky peak to copy the structure for your own business.

I regularly go back and treat my business as if I were just starting it, you know, it’s really easy as you do grow and scale and build your team [00:01:30] and your profit margins and all of those fun business jargon terms that we use. As that happens, it’s obviously easy to lose sight of the foundations and the good structure in your business. I see a lot of entrepreneurs ending up super overwhelmed because they don’t have the right grounded energy in their business. And it almost just feels like it ends up building up so much momentum that it takes over. And [00:02:00] I don’t want that to happen to me. 

I don’t like that. I don’t wanna feel overwhelmed. And so something that I do regularly is I actually go back and I go through the exercises that I take my students through. And I do it for myself. I essentially go through and make sure that my business is mapped out in the simplest and most effective way possible so that my strategies, my systems, my products, and my marketing [00:02:30] don’t feel like it’s running away from me.  I love that I have this very simple approach to business. 

If you didn’t know, I have a degree [00:03:00] in business, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mentoring and coaches and business programs. I’ve learned a lot. And one thing I realized is that people love to talk. People love to teach business in a way that almost feels like it’s intentionally there to overwhelm people. There’s such an overload of information coming from mentors who are teaching business and what that generally does a lot of the time, because a, a lot of the information contradicts one another because it’s very experiential, meaning that the mentor is teaching based on their experience. And that can totally contradict someone else’s experience.

What some people do, in order to make their courses & products seem more valuable, is pad it with a lot of information that just doesn’t need to be there. And what this actually does is make business seem harder than it needs to be. [00:04:30] Now, business is hard.

When I say business is hard, it’s hard because of the mindset aspect that goes along with it, we have to deal with fears, self-doubts, time constraints, and limitations in our skills. So much of our sabotage when it comes to business is going to come from our mindset and doing mindset. Work is difficult. It’s not [00:05:00] a simple task, right? Depending on the degree to which you are struggling, this can involve a lot of work. And so my whole philosophy on business has always been that if it’s gonna take so much work for us as personal branded service-based entrepreneurs to work on ourselves, the strategy in the business should be simple. And so I sat down today with my simple business strategy and I did it for myself. And like I said before, as I was doing [00:05:30] this, I was like, this is really fun. This is really cool. 

And I want everyone to do this. So I’m gonna take you through my business plan. And if you feel like it, if this resonates with you, I would love for you to create your own business plan.

If you did like this episode be sure to screenshot and share on Instagram and of course tag me, @erinmayhenry

THE SIMPLE STRATEGY BROKEN DOWN

The simple business plan that I have created is broken down into four primary [00:08:30] areas.

The first area is the overall business strategy. And really this is designed to answer the question, why the heck does your business exist in the first place? And is your idea validated? That’s very important. And we will come back to that in just one second. The second section is actually going to be the operations and product section. So you are running a what’s called a for-profit business, which means you create products that [00:09:00] solve problems for a profit, right? So then obviously as a business owner, you need to have products. 

If you’re just growing your audience and building a brand at this stage, of course, that’s still technically to a, some degree, you know, you being on your business journey, but to have a real validated business, if you will, of course, you need to be selling products for a profit, right? That’s what a business is at the end of the day. Uh, the next section is the marketing and growth strategy. So this is where I focus on how do I actually get my [00:09:30] business out in front of people, cuz if you know me, or if you’ve been in any of my programs or listen to anything, community development, visibility, building an audience, I think this is one of the most important aspects of having an online business. And so of course we wanna make sure that we are strategizing around this. And the fourth section is sales strategy by product. 

So if I’m going to have products, how the heck am I selling them? So we’re gonna go through each of these individual sections and I’m just going to explain exactly what I’ve done. So you can go [00:10:00] do it for yourself. And I’ll also explain why each section is so important. 

1) OVERALL BUSINESS STRATEGY

So the first section is just your overall business strategy. And again, it really is asking one simple question, why does my business exist? You know, I think a lot of people come from the perspective of like, I wanna start a business cause I wanna have time freedom and I wanna make money and all of these things. And that’s great. That’s great as a personal intention, right? However, at the end of the day to be a sustainable [00:10:30] and viable business, your business needs to solve problems. Your business needs to provide solutions and transformations and therefore we need to understand why our businesses exist in the first place. 

And we do that by going through not two, two exercises first, which you might have heard me talk about before. And if you’re in the membership, you absolutely know this is the PVT model. And the second is a series of validating questions that help us to understand whether our business is actually viable. But I did include [00:11:00] a little section at the start that I do just wanna read out to you. And that is a personal mission statement when I was studying business. In the various environments that I have learned about business, a lot of the people that I’ve been learning business from all agree that having some type of mission behind what you’re doing is incredibly important. 

[00:11:30] Yes, you wanna solve problems, but the broader scope of that why do you wanna actually solve this problem? Why is it important to you? And I really do think this is an important aspect of any business plan. Because again, if, if the, why is I just wanna make money, it’s really hard. It can be really hard to care about your customers in a way that is going to make them feel totally seen and heard. It’s really hard to consistently innovate on ideas [00:12:00] and to think about your business creatively. You know, if I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with wanting to make an income, a big part of my mission is to help people live a freedom lifestyle, but I wanna teach business in a different way. So I think it’s important. The first thing that you do is sit down and actually write a mission statement for your business. 

Why are you personally, the person who’s going to do this? And why does it mean so much to you?

Mine is… 

I want people to enjoy their lives more. I feel like we live in a society where [00:12:30] people have forgotten how to have fun and play life seems to be so centred around being busy, hustling, working for more, more, more. I love the idea of being able to grow and make loads of money, but not at the expense of living life in the process. I believe that so much creativity and innovation comes from playing and experiencing life, artists, poets, musicians, and entrepreneurs alike, I believe will do some of their best work when their life is filled with abundance and adventure[…] I wanna teach people to chill out trust that it will happen if they keep moving forward and enjoy life today because tomorrow is not guaranteed. 

And as you can see, this is my overall mission of slowing things down, and making business simple. And that’s why we’re here today. You know, I want you to live your life in the process. I don’t want it to be all about the hustle and [00:14:00] grind. So that one day you can enjoy your life because one day may very well not come. You may either get sick or get burnt out, something could happen. And so I love to teach business in a way that prioritizes pace and people going at an individual pace that feels good for them and to make things simple so that they can work on themselves and enjoy their life in the process of building something incredible online. So that’s my mission. So I want you to sit down and start thinking about what is your mission? What is your why [00:14:30] behind the way you do your business? 

You might have a very similar business model to a lot of other people, but there has to be that solid intention and why behind it for you personally. 

Now the next part of the business section of the business plan is what’s called the PVT model. And this is just a very simplified approach to understanding what your business does. Now, if you think about it, businesses solve problems, whether it is solving the problem of someone needing a car for transportation, [00:15:00] feeling hungry. And so they need food, a counsellor helping someone, or a couple to get over their marital issues. Every business is designed to help people progress through their problems or their opportunities. And so the PVT model is just essentially a little graph which you’ll see on my plan, where you talk about what the problem is that your business is solving. 

And then of course on the opposite side of that, there is going to be a transformation. If there is a problem, there is a desired [00:15:30] transformation and it’s generally just the opposite or to some degree, the opposite of what the problem is. And then your business is the vehicle between those two points. Your business is the thing that takes someone from their problem to the transformation. Now don’t be confused. Your vehicle is not your product at this stage. It’s the overall thing that you do or you teach. So for me, my PVT model is generally the problem is that people are stuck in life. They’re feeling unfulfilled. There’s no room to be creative. They’ve got kept earning [00:16:
00] potential and no time freedom, what they want. The transformation is feeling proud of themselves. Living a life of fun, creativity, time, freedom, making an impact and doing work that feels good and helps people in the process. 

And so of course my vehicle is building a personal brand and a service based online business. That is what my business does. 

The next section of this is to actually validate that. This is a part that a lot of people miss out on when they are starting a business. They forget to actually validate [00:16:30] that their idea and their business are clear and concise and actually have legs to stand on in their market. 

So there are four questions that you wanna think about: 

• Does my business solve a problem for an audience who have relative similarities? 

• Does my business operate in a market where people are already having success? 

• Are there customers already buying products similar to my business? 

• Is there urgency around my business PVT? Are people wanting to buy now? 

2 ) OPERATIONS & PRODUCTS: How are you actually gonna make money? 

You’ve validated your business. You know what problem you’re solving, you know your vehicle, the thing you’re teaching, whatever the thing that people have to do, how you can package that is the next thing. 

So what you’ll be looking at, if you look at my business plan is what’s called an Ascension model, a product suite, a value ladder, whatever you wanna call it, it’s got a thousand different names. It’s essentially just a table where you list your products in the price of those products from highest to lowest. 

3) MARKETING & GROWTH STRATEGY

What’s the point in having this epic business and creating all these awesome products if you’ve got no one to sell them to, right? And on the flip side, you’re probably not even gonna be able to create awesome products, if you don’t have an audience to research, validate your ideas, and speak to them about their problems. [00:26:00] To understand their psychology you have to research research research. It is such an important part of business. 

The buyer’s journey for the chill entrepreneur company is broken down into three stages:

1) Attract

2) Build 

3) Convert

Next, I have primary content pillars. 

Now, as I’ve spoken about, obviously my whole entire purpose for my business is to help you to build an audience and build a business. But I believe there are a lot of aspects that go into that. And so I have three kinds of primary [00:29:00] pillars. These are my primary pillars that are relative to my business, but then I give myself the freedom [00:30:00] to just talk about whatever I want. As long as I ask myself one simple question with everything I create… 

Is this going to be valuable for my audience? 

4) SALES STRATEGY BY PRODUCT

So we have our business intention, we have our products, we have our growth strategy. How do I actually link these two things together? How do I tell my amazing audience about the products that I’ve created for them to solve their problems? If you don’t sell people, don’t buy. I know you, I would love to live in a world where I just created content all day long and people just magically found my products. It doesn’t work [00:31:00] like that. Having sales strategies to sell your products is so important. And the simplest method that I use is I just go through my same value ladder, product, suite, whatever you wanna call it. And I make sure that I have one to two strategies for each individual product. 

Whether you’ve got one product, whether you’ve got five products, whether you’ve got anything in between or 20 products, it doesn’t matter, you know, having a way to sell those products. Even if it is just that it’s available on your website, that’s technically a sales strategy. It’s not a great one, but it is [00:32:30] a sales strategy. 

[00:35:30] Develop your business, develop your products, develop your marketing, sell your stuff. That’s where your focus should be going in the first year, two years, three years of your business. Yes. Later on, you might have to start thinking about scaling and hiring a team and more solid systems. But in the beginning, when it is generally just you, and you’re wondering where to put your attention into, these four areas are super important.

Copy My Business Plan

If you’re feeling a little lost and confused about what actually matters in your business, this business plan will fix that!