To incorporate any great idea into the mainstream business world, you need a great business plan that clearly defines your goals, purpose and direction of this idea. To put this idea into motion, however, the business plan that you write has to corral funding, a seemingly tricky phase for many small business professionals possessing excellent ideas they simply cannot put to paper adequately enough to get said funding. In this piece, we’ll discuss the quickest way to structure your business plan to sufficiently win funding for your .com domains, and also act as your operations manual.

Instead of putting historical facts and other alluring pieces of information that you believe will fascinate investors, take your time to include factual information about your business that gets to the point. In short, should you have plans to create a better tire, giving the investors history of the wheel will prove ineffective in securing funds. Your business plan mitigates your funding needs for you; succinct and factual information must be present from beginning to end, along with prudential steps below.

Have A Complete Competitive Analysis

You are probably entering a business field that has at least one competitor residing in the world who is slowly chewing up the market as we speak; your competitive analysis must be a literally thorough investigative piece that discusses how your competition is selling as you plan to while pointing out potential flaws in their marketing or selling methods and how you’ll perform better than they will.

Since social media marketing is a cornerstone for offline and online businesses, you should include your competition’s current marketing efforts on Facebook or other networks and how you’ll target customers in this manner.  Since many .com domains fail before actually launching, nurture this step with care.

Define A Clear Funding Purpose

Simply saying that ‘my idea needs funding’ won’t suffice; you need to break down where each dollar will go, how you arrived at your funding figures, and why you believe your first year salary should be as stated. If you lack experience or education in your field, expecting a $100,000 first year salary for yourself is slightly unrealistic; your personal pay should definitely be commensurate with experience as any job you’ve had.

Also, if your business requires company vehicles, plan on making them as eco-friendly as possible to win ‘green’ points with VC’s and other potential investors.

Mistaken by many new business owners, your .com domains, and their attached businesses, don’t prosper after the doors open; it begins when you’ve put the idea down on paper and begin the process of structuring your business plan. Granted, you may not be able to immediately pay your initial staff, yet having your top-level department heads hired before you’ve set financial goals is exponentially helpful in creating what is called a ‘think tank’.

You’d probably benefit by also hiring freelance IT specialists to handle data integration and the likes. Here is how, from this initial round of hiring, you can get your remaining staff appropriately hired to work for your exciting business or newly formed company:

Delegate Your Department Heads

You’ll definitely need to hire department heads that have specific skill sets relevant to your business and the many facets within your daily operations. You should have, at the very least, a human resource department, accounting department, customer relations department and as many different managers to oversee various individualized operations as necessary. Hire these based on skills they possess in hiring, managing accounts, and related experiences to your business as these will be your individual hiring forces.

Set Hiring Guidelines

Anything related to the hiring process (i.e. urine screens, background checks) needs to be written into your human resource manual and agreed upon by all department heads who intend to have their say in manning their departments. If certain positions will require security clearance, make sure the appropriate professional or outsourced resource is in place to handle these in-depth background checks.

Finally, make sure your application is clearly defined with written statements disclosing the procedures used to hire within your business so every applicant understands what could potentially be asked of them.

Once you have clearly set hiring standards, you’ll need to perfect the pay structure for each skilled and unskilled position you intend to fill. Each department head should have their say on industry standards for pay, COLA increases, performance evaluations, bonuses and vacation time pay if offered. Once you’ve constructed this pay scale, it needs to be clearly written into your human resource manual and followed by every member of management; changes to this pay scale down the road need to be sent through memo so everyone, including employees, is aware of the change.

Wrap-Up

Obtaining funding for your .com business plan means that key areas financially experienced investors will go towards first needs to be perfected before shooting for funding that your business plan will harvest for your start-up. It may behoove you to hire an editor for proper grammar and sentence structure.

Staffing your small business is a multistage process that involves understanding how to hire, pay, dismiss and promote employees in all departments. Provided your business has the properly educated and trained managerial staff, taking care of written hiring procedures should be effortless if attention to detail is carefully remunerated.

Featured images:

License: Creative Commons

image source

Roger Klawinski is a freelance writer and experience domainer from Indiana. You can follow him on Google+.