In 2016, sole proprietorships made up 60% of all businesses in the UK, with a total of 3.3 million in operation. This is because there is something very appealing to many of us about working for ourselves – being a sole trader offers a level of freedom and autonomy that isn’t usually on offer when working for someone else. You can do everything on your own terms, you can work whenever and wherever you want, and you get to make all of the big decisions.
However, along with its benefits, going it alone has its own challenges, too. The main one is that when you go it alone you don’t have a whole team behind you, which can sometimes make the sole trader’s journey a lonely or difficult one. However, these difficulties can be overcome, and a business plan can be a great tool to help with this.
Having a business plan can help you as a sole trader in three ways – by helping you to prioritise and stay organised; to keep you motivated, and to help you to find ways to delegate or outsource work. We go into more detail about each of these below.
Use Your Business Plan To Prioritise and Stay Organised
The main difference between being a sole trader and having employees or partners is that you’re doing everything by yourself. You are the CEO, the finance director, the sales person, the marketer, the administrator, and so on. There is nobody directly in your team for you to delegate jobs to.
This may sound great on the surface – you have complete control over your business, everything is going to be done your way, and you can be as self-reliant as possible without waiting for other people to get things done on time and in the correct way.
However, because you will be doing everything, it will be essential for you to prioritise your workload. You’ll need to make sure you get everything done in time, especially the most important jobs, and make sure that nothing slips through the cracks or gets forgotten about. For sole traders, a business plan can help you to keep organised. You can use your plan to outline the activities you need to carry out, the timeframes in which they need to be done, and the goals they will help you to accomplish. Our blog post 5 Ways A Business Plan Can Help You To Prioritise explains this in more detail.
Use Your Business Plan To Stay Motivated
If you find yourself working alone most of the time, it may sometimes feel difficult to stay motivated. There might not always be someone around to give you a bit of a lift when things aren’t going smoothly, or to remind you of how much you want to be successful, and what success means for your business. However, keeping your business plan to hand can help to remind you of the goals you’re trying to reach, and your achievements so far. Take a look at our blog post How To Stay Enthusiastic About Your Start-up for some guidance on keeping the passion alive.
Use Your Business Plan To Delegate or Outsource Work
Remember, you don’t have to do everything all on your own. You can reach out to knowledgeable and supportive friends for advice, or to bounce around ideas. You can also use business services such as telephone answering services to do some of the work for you. This will help you to compete with other, potentially larger companies, and free you up to do other things.
Use your business plan to highlight the tasks you could outsource, find ways to reduce your workload or work in a more efficient way. This can help free up more time for you to spend on your most business-critical activities.
If you’re a sole trader and you need some help with writing your business plan, so that you can get organised and enjoy working towards building your own success, cbm will be happy to help you. Contact us online or call 01604 420 420 for more information.