If you have decided to start your own business, one of the first things that you need to do is to work on a business plan. A business plan is so important because it actually serves as a compass for the direction your business will take in the future. Having a plan will also help you achieve the things you want to achieve and will help your business to find success as well.

Consider the Details
One of the reasons that having a business plan is essential is that it will help you to consider the details of your business and its’ future. As you are working on your plan, you will probably find that there are many aspects of your new business that you have not considered. Getting started with a business plan will help you to save money and time since you will be able to deal with issues before they become a problem.

Helps You Get Funding
Another great reason for having a business plan is that it can help you if you are trying to get outside funds for your business. Most lenders and investors want to see that you have a clear business plan before they take a risk on your business. Having a plan already drawn up shows them that you are serious about being successful at your business. If you are going to show your business plan to potential lenders and investors, make sure that the figures you use are accurate so your plan is credible.

Management Tool
Starting a business is a huge job and it is helpful if you have something that can help you manage the business. A business plan can act as a management tool that can help you focus on where you are and where you want to be in the future. This will help you to keep your daily tasks well managed and will also help you to accomplish long term goals as well.

If you decide to go without a business plan, chances are that your business is going to end in disaster. You can use a business plan throughout all stages of your business to guide your business towards success. While it may take some time and energy to get a business plan together, in the end it will be well worth taking the time to get it done right.

Gabriel Adams
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/why-a-business-plan-is-so-important-for-your-success-127004.html

looks like Fox News has struck again

It’s oil on a beach – not nuclear waste

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Thank you Ichiban, I had no idea.

I am sure they would have had one but. BP did not own the oil rig, the american company, Transocean did. BP did not supply the BOP equipment that failed and then exploded, the american company, Haliburton did. BP was paying Transocean to drill for oil. BP is the owner of the oil not the rig or the equipment.

If I want to gain financial freedom way before retirement age or latest at the age of retirement, I need to accumulate enough wealth to achieve the lifestyle that I want. This requires planning as gathered from the Rich Dad’s series by Robert Kiyosaki. If I want to be cautious, I feel that I should have two plans.

The first plan is to plan for retirement. The second plan is to plan to retire way before the age of retirement. This is because in case the second plan fails, I still have the first plan to fall back to. In the worst scenario, I will gain financial freedom at the retirement age.

In order to implement the first plan, I need to embark on the journey to research on retirement planning. After studying and reading a lot on retirement planning, I realize that retirement planning should be done as early as possible in my life. Why?

Firstly, I can capitalize more on the compounding interest of investment return. If I invest early in my life, then my investment has more time to grow. This advantage is gone if I have only invested near my retirement age.

For example, let assume the rate of investment return is 5 percent per annum and my retirement age is 60 years old. If I invest at the age of 30 years old, then my investment has 30 years to grow at the compounding interest rate of 5 percent per annum. If I have invested at the age of 55 years old, then my investment has only 5 years to grow at the compounding interest rate of 5 percent per annum. Of course, I will gain more if I have invested at the age of 30 years old.

Secondly, I can afford to make mistakes in my investment and recover from my mistakes. When I learn to invest initially, I will definitely make mistakes here and there. Because I start to learn to invest at a younger age, I have more time to learn and recover from my mistakes. Learning form mistakes is the key to accumulate wealth based on my understanding of the Rich Dad’s series by Robert Kiyosaki.

For example, if I have made a mistake in investment that result in a loss of $10,000 at the age of 30 years old, I still can earn back the money. But if I have made the same mistake at the age of 60 years, I may not be employable to earn back the lost amount.

Even if I decide to hire a financial planner to help me, it is still my responsibility to know enough about investment so that I do not hire the wrong guy. This knowledge cannot be gained through purely reading. Some kind of practical experience is required to understand more about investments to enable one to decide on the proposed solution given by the financial planner.

Thirdly, I can be more aggressive in my investment. That is I can put my money into more risky investments. More risks usually mean better return on investment. But that may not be always true. If I can manage the risks well, I can get better return on risky investment.

For example, I can invest in currency. That is provided that I know how to manage the high risks in currency investment. Even if I have all the necessary risk management in place, there is still a possibility that the investment still goes wrong due to unforeseen circumstances. In which case, I have time to recover from the loss.

Then, I can invest in long-term investments. This is not possible if I invest near retirement age. At near retirement age, I should only be investing in assets that give me cash or near cash, as I will need the money to support my retirement lifestyle. In fact, most of my investments should be converted to the type that can give me regular income near my retirement age.

For example, it maybe impractical for me to invest in a property and hoping that it will appreciate. A property may take quite a number of years to appreciate to a substantial amount. In other words, I should not be looking for investments that give capital appreciation. I should be focusing on investments that give me regular income such as annuity.

Even though that it is good to plan for retirement early, it is important that I have addressed the more urgent needs first. I should have already planned and insured properly so that I will not face a financial disaster due any unexpected accidents or illness or any other events. Also, I should have already set aside an emergency fund equivalent to 3 to 6 months of monthly expenditure. In this way, I should be able to survive till my retirement age to see the fruits of my retirement plan.

* DISCLAIMER *
The author, publisher and distributors particularly disclaim any liability, loss, or risk taken by individuals who directly or indirectly act on the information contained herein. All readers must accept full responsibility for their use of this material.

Max Ng
http://www.articlesbase.com/finance-articles/plan-retirement-early-108631.html

Duration : 0:9:8

Technorati Tags: back-up, BP CEO, company, Greta Van Susteren, gulf, leak, oil, oil spill, On the Record, plan, spill, Tony Hayward, US

,cheerz

To me, a risk assessment is performed in ‘good times’ to evaluate the possible negative events/actions that COULD happen in all scenarios, and their impact on the organization.

The disaster recovery Plan is the actions taken in ‘bad times’ to reverse/overcome the negative events/actions that DID happen.

A good case in point is BP. They had a badly flawed risk assessment (I guess you could call their assessment of ‘there is no risk’ badly flawed). And their DRP is, unto itself, a mega disaster.

Entering the computer age, a disaster recovery plan was a concept and not much else. The idea was that a plan would be in place for the day when things went wrong. This worked at the time when computers in world numbered in the 100’s – there were not more computers than people in an office.

Organizations got bigger and computer departments were suddenly as big as the sales department, more IT consultants were bringing in more hardware and software and no one really noticed the day that computers had a greater value than the people in the office.

In that first phase when there was a mainframe, a form of backup was done on a regular basis, the backed up material was moved to a safe location and the idea was that if the mainframe went down, then spare time could be used on a different mainframe in a different location.

Now a 50 person office has 75 computers; at least.

Now there is a complex telephone system that is just a little gray box with some wires coming out of it, and no one cares what it does because it works.

All those little wires pass through a closet that was originally built just for the wires, but hey, with the space issues this company has we may as well stock paper in the closet; or the corrosive cleaning material.

The main frame is gone and instead of having one machine running everything important we have a lot of little computers each running a little task that collectively replaced the main frame.

Imagine; that mainframe used to do 50 tasks and now those tasks are spread out over 50 different PCs. Everything works because the computer kid set it all up. Then he has a falling out with his girlfriend, the secretary. Better for him, he got accepted into University 200 miles away on an athletic scholarship. Or, his parking is taken away because of some reason that made sense to the decision maker. For whatever reason he is no longer in the company and things run just fine.

What is the expression; things run just fine until they don’t?

Suddenly the person that left is understood to be the most important person in the company, because things either slowly stop, or just drop dead. If the computer guy left in a bad mood and in a hurry he could have just switched some cables. If he had time he could have programmed your data based to erased itself after running a backup (and he set the backup to not save anything).

Your phone lines can be switched so all calls go to the lunch room, or the presidents office or just randomly to different extensions. Most expensive scenario, all inbound called are forwarded to another country. Worst scenario, all inbound sales calls are sent to your competition.

The Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery plan is not something sold “one size fits all” and in fact almost all plans fail because of the impossibility to consider all the possible aspects of future failure and issues.

This is no longer the beginning of the computer age, and a disaster recover plan must be part of your business plan. I should not say it here, but an acceptable option at Managing Director level is to not have a plan because of any number of reasons, but a decision must be made.

The idea behind a modern disaster recovery plan is the Business Continuity aspect. When things go wrong, and they will, business must continue as close to normal while an effort is made to return the office to normal.

Cindy King
http://www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/understanding-the-beginning-of-business-continuity-plans-and-disaster-recovery-plans-717228.html

In the second part of our series on disaster preparedness, learn how to create a Family Plan.

Duration : 0:6:21

Technorati Tags: disaster, disaster preparedness, Emergency Kit, Emergency Supplies, Family Communication Plan, Fatima Mehdikarimi, fire, flood, ShoppingQueen.com

A Business Continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan can be created for anything. natural disasters, business plans, infrastructure projects, daily operations of a business, sports teams, really anything that has the possibility of not running right can have a plan. For this article the term will be project, which is open to your interpretation on what a project actually is.

Who takes the kids to schools when the primary driver has the flu? That is the most basic BC plan.

What do we do when we get a flat tire? That is the most basic DR plan.

These 2 examples may not be written out, but they are just as valid as any other plan, and there is usually a plan in place. And yes, you can have one half without the other or call the plan DRBC if recovering from the disaster is a higher priority than continuing business.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are developed for certain circumstances that have the probability of occurring. Spending years of work and millions of dollars to secure a data center in the Atacama mountains desert region against flooding is useless. Equally useless is spending years of work and millions of dollars to prevent a New York snow in the winter.

There are 4 primary categories that are considered important in BCDR; avoidance, mitigation, transference and acceptance. Acceptance is contested as an option because there are not many people want to build a plan that says we accept a risk and a failure and can not mitigate, transfer or avoid it. There are cases when there is no real option other than accepting that there may be failure.

A sample project is to install a new telephone system in my office.

In a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan, avoidance is building steps into your project to eliminate the risk or to protect the project from anything negative by means that you will determine.

My project may be late because it takes place from 15 December to 15 January, a time when many of my staff will take vacation. I can avoid an impact on my project by requesting an extension on the project, requiring additional resources, requesting extra money or many other options – you are limited by your imagination.

The idea behind transference is that the possibility of financial impact to the project is limited by contracting out some aspect of the work. I transfer the responsibility for part of the project to someone else. Transferring responsibility does not transfer accountability. The person in charge still has to accept that a failure is related to improper planning.

My December project may be late so I have hired a company to accomplish 3 critical tasks. If these tasks are not finished on time and in sequence, the project will not finish on time. I have signed a service level agreement with the vendor and the company will put all the resources required to deliver on time. If they fail to deliver on time they will not be paid, it the overall project is late because they fail to deliver on time they will pay me $1000 per day for a maximum of 15 days.

Mitigation is the part of the plan that takes the most thought. If mitigation is done properly then avoidance, transference and acceptance are clear. Mitigation is something you do to reduce the probability or consequences of a risk impacting your project. You may also define an acceptable level of impact that does not threaten the completion of your project Mitigation is very often costly and time consuming.

My December project requires new telephones for each of the 500 desks in our office. My regular supplier can guarantee 400 telephones at an $262.50 per phone, a 25% discount. The supplier is also reasonably sure to deliver the 500 on time and at the same price. To mitigate the risk of having 100 people without phones I agree that the supplier contract with a third party and buy 100 phones at the standard $350 price

1. Total cost of 500 phones from one supplier 500*262.50=$131,250.
2. Total cost of my phones from two suppliers (400*262.50)+(100*350)= $140,000
3. Mitigation cost $8750
4. Solution, pay the slight increase.

Second scenario for a larger company:

My December project requires new telephones for each of the 5000 desks in our office. My regular supplier can guarantee 2500 telephones at an $262.50 per phone, a 25% discount. The supplier is unable deliver the 5000 on time and at the same price. To mitigate the risk of having 2500 people without phones discuss with senior management to contract with a third party and buy 2500 phones at the standard $350 price, plus 10% for shipping

1. Cost of 2500 phones from one supplier 2500*262.50=$656,250.
   
2. Cost of 2500 phones from second supplier 2500*385=$ 962,500.
   
3. Total budget for phones $ 1,312,500
   
4. Total cost of phones $1,618,750
   
5. Mitigation cost $ -306,250
   
6. Solution – do you have $306,250 spare, or do you delay project completion?

Acceptance is the decision to accept certain risks and live with them. This means you do not change the project plan to deal with a risk or identify any response strategy other than agreeing to accept the risk if it is too costly or time consuming. A decision must be made to accept the risk, and the consequences. This decision must be made by a person with the highest level of authority. If the risk comes to pass and something fails the decision may mean late delivery of a project or failure as a team.

Second scenario similar to the one above:

My December project requires new telephones for each of the 5000 desks in our office. My regular supplier can guarantee 2500 telephones at a $262.50 per phone, our standard 25% discount. The supplier is unable deliver the 5000 on time and at the same price. To mitigate the risk of having 2500 people without phones discuss with senior management to contract with a third party and buy 2500 phones at the standard $350 price, plus 10% for shipping

1. Cost of 2500 phones from one supplier 2500*262.50=$656,250.
2. Cost of 2500 phones from second supplier 2500*385=$ 962,500.
3. Total budget for phones $ 1,312,500
4. Total cost of phones $1,618,750
5. Mitigation cost $ 306,250
6. Management does not have $306,250 to spend on the project and accepts that there may be a late delivery on some phones.
7. A mitigation plan will be put in place to make sure that the problem is handled the best way possible.

As stated above, a Business Continuity and disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan can be created for anything. The coach of a team has a replacement in mind when players are injured, Floridians board up windows when a storm comes. The most important part of your BCDR is realizing that you need one and start defining the actions that people will take when things go wrong, and at one time or another – they will.

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Cindy King
http://www.articlesbase.com/project-management-articles/business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery-categories-718828.html