Business planning for beginners

I'd pay my taxes for Business Link and the NHS alone. Unfortunately, both are shortly to be massacred in the public services cuts, but this isn't a political blog and I don't want to make any more enemies that I need to so I won't continue down that route. I've just come back from a Business Link business planning course - 6 hours of valuable advice for no direct cost at all (direct costs - you can see I was paying attention to the financial forecasting section). I am almost sufficiently inspired to stop entering competitions and get down to writing my business plan, to take my leap seriously and start swimming down the river instead of floating amongst the debris.

I admit that I'm wary of finance. I'd rather devise a brand and sign up to Twitter than compile profit and loss sheets - but if that's what it takes, I shall do it and so it willingly. I'm an advocate for admin and processes (or a bit geeky, as some people call it) so, once the numerical mists have cleared, I will no doubt channel my inner accountant and calculate my forecast net profit to the nearest penny. And I have a tax workshop at HMRC next week - happy days!

The best part of attending a course, though, even better than the free coffee and homemade cake, is meeting other delegates. Today they ranged from a florist to landscape gardeners to a funky designer to a man who wants to use horses for logging. Disparate businesses with a common goal - to make a go of it, to trust in ourselves to do what we want to do. Given that the government want to encourage enterprise (and what a meaningless term that is), it's odd that the funding to encourage us should be cut, forcing us online without the benefit of networking. Oops, I'm getting political again.

A final, and slightly depressing point. The course was good but the PowerPoint slides and handouts were badly produced. Poor punctuation, strange formatting, random capitalisation, all the usual things that I am convinced obstruct communication but, in reality, most people don't seem to notice. We were encouraged to research the market, not to make assumptions about what customers want - but what if they don't care about clear copy and consistent use of language? What if other businesses and their clients are quite happy to accept sub-standard communications that I feel undermine their message? How do I promote the benefits of my service to people who don't feel the benefits are worthwhile? Perhaps it's the case for every business - market yourself, push your USP - but in my field it seems to be particularly difficult to sell yourself.