Business Planning
Business Planning
Planning is one of the most important aspects of starting and growing your business. Proper planning helps to define your business and identify goals that will help you to make good business decisions.
Develop a detailed business plan that covers the areas of marketing, management, human resources and finance. This plan will enable you to determine your vision for your business and identify opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses in order to react quickly to market changes.
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Tools: The Department of Tourism, Regional Development and Industry website provides interactive tools to assist. These include:
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Business Goals
To assist in achieving business success it is important to be clear about what you want to achieve and set SMART Goals.
Specific - what exactly would you like to achieve?
Measurable - how will you know if you have succeeded?
Action oriented - does it have an action that you can actually ‘do’?
Realistic - is it really achievable?
Time bound - does it have a deadline?
For example: To increase share of backpackers by 20% by December 2009.
Research
Market research is an important ingredient in your business planning process. It is important to find out as much as you can about your market place, competitors and potential customers. This information will help to determine the business you are in, your target market, your business goals and, what actions you need to take to achieve your goals.
Some possible questions to ask:
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Tools: A Customer profile chart might assist you in putting together information about your customers. Resources: Tourism Queensland provides research on a number of areas of the tourism industry and access to regionally specific research and information. This includes:
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Owners of the Heritage Tea Rooms, Allan and Michelle Sharpe discuss the importance of conducting research when starting a business. By taking the time to undertake thorough research of the market, Allan and Michelle were able to develop a business that provided a different and unique experience for visitors to the Townsville region.
Your Business Success Part 1 - Market Research
Research and development is key to knowing who your market is, and how to accommodate their needs. Tourism Queensland alongside the Regional Tourism Organisations are a reference point to finding out this essential knowledge.
Your Business Success Part 10 - Research and Development
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Additional resources: Regional Tourism Organisations
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Financial Management
As a tourism operator you must ensure you have a financial management plan in place. This plan should be reviewed on a regular basis to monitor your businesses cash flow and ensure business viability.
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Tools: Department of Tourism, Regional Development and Industry provides online diagnostic tools to help assess the strengths and weaknesses of your business. The Financial Benchmarking tool will assist in finding out how well your business is performing compared with other competitors.
SmartSkills provides short 10 minute online tutorial to assist you with understanding ‘finance and cash’ including:
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Seasonality
The tourism industry is very susceptible to seasonal fluctuations, some of which are beyond the tourism operator’s control. Measures should be put in place to allow for these performance fluctuations to ensure business sustainability.
Visitor arrivals vary significantly depending on the time of year. They also vary between markets.
Factors that influence seasonality:
What is affected by seasonality?
At both the destination and enterprise levels, there are several general strategies that are used, including:
The areas of greatest concern in relation to the impact of seasonality are:
How does seasonality affect your VIC, your local area and your region?
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Resources: For further information about seasonality in Australia refer to
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