Business planning

What is business planning?

Business planning is thinking ahead, preparing for doing business or sales in the future - over the next month, year, or 5 years. It depends on whether you plan for the short or long term.

What do you need to consider in business planning?

Preparation. To prepare for future business, you must think of everything associated with the business you are proposing. For example; Marketing. What period has the highest sales? The New Year period. Therefore October and November is the months of production, so that the product is available for December. Labour. In the period are there people available for labour or not? Have they got to do work elsewhere or not? Is it rice harvest time? How many people are available? How many people have experience? If production can be increased, how many more people can be trained? Materials. Are the raw materials available? Are they ready to be used or not? For example, seeds for embroidery may be available all year round, however they must be dried properly so that they are free from fungus. This preparation takes about one month. Capitalising. How much money is required? What are the costs involved? For example equipment and labour. Other costs. Such as the cost of packaging, cost of bags, boxes, transport and cost of sending.

How do you analyse strengths and weaknesses in business?

Analysing the strengths and weakness is consulting about the business by looking at it in different ways

What are the strengths or highlights? They can become the selling point for advertising.
What are the weaknesses or lowlights? These can be prevented or the problem solved.
Are there any opportunities that can help to strengthen the business? You can use the opportunity to benefit the business
What are the threats? Reduce or stop the threats. Sometimes it is possible to change the threat into an opportunity. For example, handicrafts can only produce in small numbers as they are made by hand. This could be a threat. But this threat is an opportunity if we can show that this product is difficult to make, that there is only a few people who are skilled in the craft, there is only one in the world, and whoever buys it will be the owner of this unique object.

SWOT Analysis. An example of traditional weaving

Strengths

Working as a group, there are people to help think and work together, there is power in production, can therefore take large orders from clients.
With large scale production, the cost of production is cheaper. For example transport will be reduced.
There is a high need for the product, currently low number of producers, and no competitors, therefore can sell at a good price
There are people joining together in capitalising, therefore have greater access to funds

Weakness

The power for production is low. Cannot accept large orders
For low levels of production, the cost is high because to buy small amounts of materials is expensive. Costs such as transport are higher
Low, limited funds
Working as a group may have problems in management, many people have different opinions and are slower at making decisions than if it is only one person. This means that the slow results.

Opportunities

Have received support in terms of marketing from the government. For example were invited to have a stall in the product festival.

Threats

The policy of "one tambon one product" has meant that there are lots of groups, there is high competition, selling at reduced costs for the same product, fake and copied products. This effects groups which produce quality items, as often the price of that product is also reduced.