The Small Business Doer

I think you have to be somewhat of a biz nerd to be so excited to have your revised biz plan done. Man am I excited!

And no, it’s not only the relief of being finished writing the 7,000+ words.

I posted my business plan online in 2009 so that small business people would have a live case study of a real business in action. It’s what I wished I could have seen while I was in business school.

I’m so glad I did. I didn’t think the plan would be of that much interest for the first year or two, since there would be more talk than action. Where things get interesting is when you can see the results of the plan and compare the plan to reality. I know have some results in and can now feel comfortable telling people that if you’re starting a business and want to get a perspective of the process, you can learn something by seeing what I’ve done.

December was a quasi-frustrating month. I had big ambitions for December, I was supposed to get a lot of business growth work done. I got some done, but nothing close to what I was going for.

November was by far the best month I’ve had for both sales and net income! I’ve never done more video productions in a month before.

So yep, busy. Downside, not too much time to work on business growth, ughh!

October was a month of getting things done. Film work, business work, website content work.

I’m actually quite happy with how the month went, despite net income being a bit lower than budget and not doing as much business growth work as I would have liked. The key thing for me this month was that I was focused on the right things.

There are some good places, which I list, for how to write a business plan. Instead of covering that massive topic, I’ll instead focus on why write a business plan.

Financing your small business can be a tough go. This article discusses the many different small business loans and financing options in Canada.

Choosing what video equipment to get for creating videos is tougher than you may think, especially if you are used to picking out still cameras. In comparison to photography, videos have motion, audio, and more complicated editing. This means that in choosing video equipment, you not only have a camera to decide on, but audio equipment, lighting, and editing software.

In this article, I present some things to consider for choosing a video equipment set up when you have a budget of $500 to spend.

I’ve done my own set of books for over 10 years as well as have had others aid me in the process, whether hired help or family. In the past couple years I started doing bookkeeping for others and have learned a lot (mainly by trying to fix their problems :) !

I’ve got to say that the single, biggest issue that I’ve run into in bookkeeping is not having enough information or knowing how to find the information.

I need some feedback.

I have started to make how-tos and tutorials for Quickbooks at http://www.smallbusinessdoer.com/quickbooks/. I intend to post an average of 5 per week.

I have completed my first videos on the subject matter of using the holding account of undeposited funds to receive payments vs forgoing the undeposited funds and deposits payments directly to bank account (sexy subject, I know!)

What I need is people who have actually used Quickbooks, to watch the videos / read the post and give me some constructive feedback. I haven’t felt entirely happy with the videos, but after about a week of working on this, I figured I should get it out and create some more videos to gain more experience and feedback.

September was back-in-action month after a bit of a summer lull. This is my third September with this business, so I was assuming business would pick-up, but it was re-assuring to see that it actually did. What worried me was that something happening twice is not statistically significant, so the fact that I did good business for two September’s in a row was no guarantee that I would do well this September.

In September I was also very excited to finally get started on my info products… which can be more simply summed up as putting content on this site.