Business Planning Insights to Confidently Advise Entrepreneurs
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Welcome to the LivePlan blog for Advisors and Educators!
Whether you’re a financial advisor, CPA, small business consultant or lender, business instructor or mentor, LivePlan has a wealth of tools to streamline your work.
LivePlan is the leading business planning and financial forecasting software for small businesses, used by over 1 million owners, and thousands of advisors who help them launch or scale their businesses.
U.S. Census Bureau data shows there are over 300,000 accountants, 80,000 business instructors and 20,000 business consultants in the United States alone – not to mention millions more around the world.
We’ve launched the Advisors & Educators section of the LivePlan blog as a resource hub for these professionals – everyone who works as a business strategy consultant, provides advisory services, or mentors entrepreneurs. While this isn’t a complete list, LivePlan’s customers include:
- Private Consultants
- SBA-backed Consultants
- Public Accountants
- Educators
- Incubators & Accelerators
- Small Business Lenders
- Enterprise Organizations
Bookmark this page and be sure to check back frequently. Here are just three of the many topics we’ll be posting about:
1. Free training for advisors and educators
LivePlan’s mission is to help people succeed in business. Central to that mission is the work we do with consultants, accountants, teachers and others to help them harness LivePlan’s pitching, business planning, and forecasting tools for their entrepreneurs.
Our support team hosts free LivePlan Learning sessions to help you get the most out of LivePlan’s software. For those not already using LivePlan, the sessions can give you an in-depth look at its features in use and their numerous applications in the business planning process.
Recent LivePlan Learning topics have highlighted business pitching and financial forecasting exercises that advisors can train their entrepreneurs on using the LivePlan software; getting the most out of clients’ accounting data; and adding forward-looking forecasts to compliance-centered advisory work.
The complete LivePlan Learning schedule is here.
2. Business planning resources for the advising process
In addition to live webinars, we’ll share relevant content from LivePlan’s Resource Library in the form of quick tips and detailed steps to more effectively plan and forecast with your clients or students.
Our resource guides include comprehensive instructions for harnessing The LivePlan Method for Strategic Advising, a five-step program for building scalable, efficient and valuable client advisory services with LivePlan.
But you can also expect insights and tips to help you quickly build an advising strategy for your entrepreneurs, as well as advice from our team about creating effective pitches, lender-ready business plans, and financial forecasts that can easily be adjusted over time.
(By the way, if digging in straight away is more your style, you can take an interactive tour of LivePlan, or reach out to book a quick demo with our team. Be sure to ask for a free trial!)
3. LivePlan product updates
Behind the scenes at LivePlan is a product team that works every day to make our software more dynamic and intuitive.
We work iteratively to develop new features, always with the goal of helping small businesses advisors scale their services by making life easier for their clients.
Here’s one recent example: We recently unveiled the Forecast Metrics option, displaying key financial metrics within the LivePlan Forecast, adding important context for your clients as they review their performance. Entrepreneurs can keep the “big picture” in sight by drawing a more clear connection between changes made to the forecast and the impact those changes have on the bottom-line projections. Forecast metrics make it easy to leverage these insights without having to search through the financial statements.
As we add or refine any LivePlan features, you can check back here for the latest.
Another great way to stay up-to-date is by getting the LivePlan newsletter for the latest updates and information from our team once a month.
We’ll leave you with feedback from a few of the thousands of advisors and educators we work with. Thank you for reading, and don’t forget a LivePlan team member is always available for a demo or free trial.
“LivePlan guides how I shape and deliver the class, and how I implement those newly discovered tools. Each year I dig deeper on what LivePlan has to offer.”
-Corey Pulido, East Carolina University
“By going through each line item in LivePlan, (entrepreneurs) can see the potential outcomes and their numbers come to life on paper for them.”
-Meghan Wood, SBC Consulting
“LivePlan truly assisted us in transforming our business plan training.”
-Heather Lux, Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp.
