If you intend to own and operate a hotel, you must have in place a solid, actionable and realistic business plan. Here are some key steps to consider:
Defining your hotel business plan
Understanding the purpose
Studies indicate that having a well-crafted business plan can help your organisation grow up to 30% quicker.
Take your time over your business plan, but keep in mind this is not set in stone and you can make changes if necessary. In fact, many find they need to continuously adapt their business plans to reflect the changing needs of clients and the economy.
Include an assessment of the risks and challenges of owning a hotel. It will show you have researched the potential issues you might come across during your career in hospitality and safeguards are in place.
Identifying your target market
You will need to carry out thorough market research to determine exactly who your target market is – i.e. your typical hotel guest.
This can be something you do yourself, for example by sending out surveys or using social media. Or it could be a project you outsource.
Once you know who is most likely to want to stay in your hotel, including their age, background, career, gender, and as much other information as you can find, you will be able to craft a marketing plan that speaks to these people.
Conducting a SWOT analysis
Carrying out a SWOT analysis is a crucial task that will help you understand a business in greater detail.
Once you have the information gathered from this analysis, you will know which areas you need to work on and improve, and where you excel and therefore stand out from the competition. Your USP could be developed from this.
If you can include your SWOT analysis results in your hotel business plan, lenders and investors will be able to see you have thought about every outcome of what you intend to do, and you will know precisely which route to take to move forward.
Developing your hotel business plan
Crafting a mission and vision statement
Mission and vision statements might seem at first to be the same thing, but they are actually different.
The mission statement outlines everything your business is doing right now to reach its objectives. This will be just two or three sentences that talk about what your hotel business does, how it does it, and perhaps why it does it.
The vision statement is usually just one sentence that outlines the ambitions and goal of the hotel. The two might be linked, but are not the same.
Outlining your hotel business model
When writing your hotel business plan, there are a variety of sections to include, such as:
Creating a marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy is at the core of how your hotel project is going to grow and be successful.
Good market research will set you on the right path, as you will be able to tailor your advertising to those who are going to be interested in what you offer.
Establishing a financial plan
Every business needs a robust financial plan. Your financial plan will give you information about where you are now and what you need in terms of profit to get where you want to go.
It will illustrate any savings you could make, and it will also help you determine an accurate and profitable pricing model.
Structuring your management team
The “management” portion of a business plan provides details about the company’s leadership, personnel, resources and ownership structure.
Management team members and their specific contributions to the company’s success should be detailed here.
Implementing your hotel business plan
Executing your hotel business plan
To execute your hotel business plan well, it has to be accurate. It should also be flexible to accommodate the ever-changing guest experience needs.
Although you will want to follow the plan as much as you can, you need to be able to adapt it. Work through each step you have identified in the order that it needs to be accomplished, and slowly but surely, your hotel business will emerge.
Tracking and analysing your progress
You must take stock of your current situation and analyse your progress regularly. To do this, you will need to have goals in place.
These might be financial, for example, or they might relate to the number of staff or clients you have. Unless you have specific goals to work towards in a certain timeframe, progress could be challenging to track.
Making adjustments where necessary
With the right monitoring, you can make changes where necessary and adapt your plan to ensure modifications are taken into account before you move too far from the correct path.
If a business owner is too fixated on sticking to their original plan, business growth could become stagnant.
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