By Sheila E at August 06 2019 12:11:26
But most likely you would need to increase your fixed expenses because you're going to probably have more rent, utilities, or such as your business grows. So, you would simple put in your new fixed expense number in place of the existing one for each of the years you would be planning for. So, you see if you decided you wanted a 35% profit margin at year 5 then you could see how much sales it would take to give you that. Now it's also important to know how many more customers you would need as well so you should always look at that unless you have another way of growing your sales other than with new customers.
Contextualise Your Budget _ Of course your budget will be extremely important. But sometimes people sort of pluck figures out of thin air, not giving it the context it needs in the business plan to make real concrete sense of how that budget is going to work. So it is crucial that every time you mention financials in your business plan, to really give them the correct context. When I have worked with clients in developing business plans, there has been a budget or amount set aside for example to be spent on marketing, which has been decided a bit arbitrarily. I mean with no real research, no understanding of what that amount needs to be spent on, and what that budget will truly achieve. It seems to have been put there to fill the need to attribute a certain sum to marketing.