Stay in business for the long haul: the owners of three long-time frame shop successes share winning strategies for outlasting the competition and maintaining momentum

Art Business News, Dec, 2002 by Jennifer Wong

Martin said your plan should include sales goals, an operational budget and an advertising and marketing plan. Create a month-to-month timeline. For example, in January, focus on creating your advertising and marketing budget and do a post-Christmas sale. In February, you are going to try a new line out and so on. "Everything in your business plan has to go on a timeline, or you won't do it" said Martin. "It will always be tomorrow."

The Barkers have had increases every year in their business, even during the so-called bad years, and give some of the credit to Bruce Barker's planning. Pamela said her husband gets excited creating the plan, even after all these years. He does a marketing plan, makes sales projections, notes when the training manual was updated and knows what he did last year and what to focus on this year. He makes revisions based on what is happening in the economy. The Barkers also schedule regular meetings with their bankers to go over spreadsheets and business plans. Barker said her husband's organization makes it fairly easy to acquire loans for their ever-expanding business.

4 Take care of your money on a daily basis. This means monitoring your cash flow and your budget. Learn how to do cash-flow projections. If you need help, consult a book or work with a good business consultant. This is essential, but too many businesses think the money will take care of itself if they do everything else right. Martin said lots of profitable businesses, when they hit a growth spurt, can go under because they didn't plan for cash flow.

If that seems paradoxical, consider this example. You set aggressive sales goals, and now you are doing $30,000 of business a month. That's great, but you're starting to run out of stock. You've landed a big commercial account, and they said they would pay you in 30 days but it's more like 45. However, your suppliers are used to you paying them in 10 days. You turn out this big $5,000 order but you need to pay $3,000 for supplies next week, even though you won't get paid for weeks. If you had planned for this earlier, you would have negotiated a new deal with your vendor while you were in good standing, and you would have been in a stronger position to negotiate a down payment from your customer up-front.

"If you don't monitor your money you'll get to where you are spending all day managing cash to make payroll," said Martin, "and that can close you down."

During the last recession, the Barkers knew they had to cut their expenses, but because they monitored their cash flow and knew what percentage was spent on cost of goods, payroll, etc., it was much easier for them to see where to cut, said Barker.

These hard skills involve investment up front, involving both money and time, which may seem hard to swallow for many small business owners. Entrepreneurs are extremely busy people, acknowledged Martin, but they can hurt themselves by not taking time to plan every day. "We all do it and get in too much of a hurry to take time to plan," said Martin, "but a lot of what people lose track of are things that are important but not on fire. "Soon the fire fighting takes over--and the less time you have to prevent fires, the more fires you have." Martin cited studies showing that for every 15 to 30 minutes spent planning, an hour of your time is saved.