Small Business Planner for Moms: Start-Up Workbook (PDF)

Description

Most kitchen-table businesses don’t fail on the idea. They fail on the numbers nobody wrote down, the customer nobody named, and the hours that weren’t really there. This workbook makes you write all three down before you spend a dollar — from a mama who spent thirty years as a CFO watching good ideas fail on the numbers and plain ones succeed on them.

What’s inside

• The thinking (pages 2–16): the idea and the honest hours, business-name checks, core concept, value proposition, your one customer, brand voice, the overview, mission-vision-story, the one-page plan, go to market, where you sit plus SWOT, how a stranger becomes a customer, three competitors on one sheet, product research.
• The running (pages 17–26): products and prices, the pricing calculator with the three lines most people forget (your own wage, the platform’s cut, sales tax), where and how to sell, the marketing plan, what’s required and what it costs with your runway, a 15-step getting-started checklist, to-do and weekly, the month with its five numbers, the year, three goals with a 30/60/90 review.
• A CFO’s note on the pages where a real business gets decided.

Three formats, one price

Comes as a printable PDF, a fillable PDF you can type into and save, and a companion app — the Homefire Small Business Planner app: a pricing calculator that takes your wage, hours, materials, packaging, markup and fees and gives back the price to charge and the profit per unit, with a warning when the margin is thin or you forgot to pay yourself; a startup-cost list totalled, padded 20% for what you forgot, checked against the cash you set aside and turned into months of runway; a business-name checker; the nine-box plan that names its own empty boxes; competitors; the getting-started checklist with dates; and a month log that works out what you earned per hour. The Start Here sheet in your download has the link.

What changes at your house

You know the price before you make the first one. You know what it costs to open and how many months you can carry it. You know who the customer is, by name, and the two places you’ll find her. And you know how many hours a week the business actually gets — so it fits the life it’s run from instead of eating it.

General education from a 30-year CFO, not legal, tax or accounting advice. Licenses, sales tax and business structure vary by state.