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8 Things Every Business Plan Should Include
Some entrepreneurs may think a business plan is an irrelevant piece of paperwork that will just get lost in the shuffle, or a pointless exercise getting in the way of pursuing the fun part of running a business.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Your business plan should be treated as a birth certificate or formal constitution. This document lays out, in explicit detail, every aspect of what you hope your business will be, the ethics on which it’s founded, and your specific plan for how to sustain and grow it over time. That’s incredibly useful info!
Sure, every business is different, and different businesses mean different approaches to business plans, but below we’ll walk you through eight essential items that every business plan should include in order to be effective.
What is a business plan?
In the simplest of terms, a business plan is a blueprint or guide showcasing your business’s goals and your detailed plan for how those goals will be met. Again, this isn’t just a feel-good exercise to do: Banks, potential partners, investors, and even the state where you register your company will want to see a copy of your business plan in this kind of detail.
This will often be the document that seals or breaks your ability to land an account, loan, or merger. Not having a business plan is like not having a photo ID; your business basically can’t get in anywhere without it. Don’t think of your business plan as a best practice but rather a founding, critical step in the successful launching of your idea.
8 Things to Include in Your Business Plan
The elements of a business plan can be every bit as unique as your business. You should spend the time to think about how you want your plan to reflect the core values and ethics of your company.
Detailed planning? Core values? Ethics? If this is starting to sound intimidating, don’t worry — you’ve got this! You can start by familiarizing yourself with the small business statistics related to your market. A bit of research like this will help you make educated decisions about the parts of your business plan. That said, there are key elements that you don’t want to forgo. Add these eight essential components to your business plan:
Business Plan Elements:
- Executive Summary
- Company Description
- Market Research
- Product or Service Description
- Marketing and Customer Acquisition Strategy
- Business and Team Structure
- Company Financials
- Request for Funding
Remember that you don’t need to be worried if you don’t have all the answers to these at the moment. You have time to find them and reflect on how you want to incorporate them meaningfully into your business plan.
1. Executive Summary
The executive summary should lead your business plan and appear directly after your title page. This is where you state what you want for your venture in clear and concise language. This document will ideally be no longer than a page in length and offer a good synopsis of the entire business plan. List your business’s previous accomplishments, current market position , and financial features where these items apply.
For example, if you are a fledgling graphic design business but have already done work for big-name, recognized clients, include evidence of that in your executive summary to highlight your company’s established positive connections. This section is meant to provide a road map of your company’s placement in your industry and its hoped-for trajectory.
2. Company Description
This is the section of your business plan to talk about the essential elements of your company’s objectives and prior accomplishments. Give the reader your company’s history and mission statemen t here. What kind of operation is your business — retail, manufacturing, service-related? What sort of format have you adopted: LLC , corporation , or sole proprietorship ?
Name your company’s principals and leaders in your description and include any other support networks available to your business. For example, if you are running a small carpentry venture but have done work for major construction contractors in your area, let your readers know about these larger allies, as they lend your business further credibility in your field. It’s advisable to write this section more like a bulleted list or profile than in paragraph or narrative form.
3. Market Research
This portion of your business plan addresses your target and potential market. Here, you’ll paint a verbal picture of your ideal customer, including age, gender, vocation, education, and even hobbies. The more specific you can be in your market analysis, the better it looks to investors, as identifying too broad a market indicates too little research and too much risk. You need to offer an educated estimate of your target market’s size, monetary value, and stability, which you can determine through completing a thorough market analysis.
Use this section to showcase that you understand your competition and have sized up the opportunity related to your venture. For example, suppose you’re launching a boutique printing and graphics company in a town where there is already a larger printing group. In that case, you might detail that your operation will be positioned within walking distance of the town’s big university and offer scholastic demographics on the students who attend there to illustrate the demand for the work you’ll be doing.
Conduct a detailed competitive analysis of other businesses in your area based on your target market. What are their primary marketing channels and average costs per project? Is your industry sector affected by the gig economy ? If so, how much? It’s helpful to present the information relating to your active competitors in a spreadsheet or table to be more immediately readable.
4. Product or Service Description
This part of your business plan is your chance to spotlight your company’s products or services. Provide highly specific details about your production process, the product life cycle of what you’re offering, and especially the benefits. What is unique about what you are selling? Do you have any patents or intellectual property protection in place? Where do you get the raw materials you use to make or supply your items? Do you currently have anything in the research and development pipeline?
Offering detailed info on these kinds of questions and addressing the assembly, quality control, supply chain logistics, and daily operations associated with your products or services helps demonstrate why your business is different from others in your market — and it’s also useful for you yourself to think through if you’re just getting started.
Use this space to show just how creative and vital your company’s work is. For instance, if you are founding a consulting agency for sustainable design, perhaps showcasing that your service plans make heavy use of local quarry rock would be wise here, as this is an element other green entrepreneurs might not have.
5. Marketing and Customer Acquisition Strategy
Documenting your revenue model is a crucial component of your business plan. This section outlines your sales strategy, helps position your brand, and reduces the risk of your company barking up the wrong revenue tree or timing your product/service in a disadvantageous way. This is the section of your business plan where you’re going to detail everything from the pricing to the predicted margins of your business. What marketing strategy will your company employ? How does it differ from or exceed those of other business models?
True, much of this financial information will be speculative if you’re just starting out. However, getting specific about how you’ll handle your revenue channels should be based on existing information at your disposal — remember, you’ll want potential investors to see you’ve taken the time to be realistic in your planning and projections. Has your company made any money to date? If so, how much, and how was it generated? What relationship does your cost of goods sold (COGS) have to your bottom line and market share? Does your marketing plan include payments from customers that will be collected on a one-time basis, recurrently, based on service time spent, or some combination of the above?
A good example here might be a small electrician’s company that, unlike its competitors, doesn’t charge a “come and see” or service fee for estimates. While this might initially seem to bring in less money for the company, the traction it will give the business with appreciative customers in the long run is likely to increase the company’s demand and revenue.
6. Business and Team Structure
The section of your business plan that addresses your management team is where you have the pleasure of introducing the people that power your business. This is a chance for you to further showcase your seriousness to potential lenders, investors, or partners by highlighting each of your team member’s qualifications, backgrounds, and credentials.
Create brief biographies of three to five sentences for each of your principal team members, including why this person is qualified for the role they play in your business. For example, your small business may have a co-founder who has obtained a law degree, but you’re going to run a freelance accounting firm.
Use this space to show how that person’s background in law makes them the perfect partner and will help your company comply with federal and local regulations. Remember that your goal is to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the team you have assembled to help run your business are not only professionals but also the best people for the job.
If you haven’t made many hires yet, you’ll also want to spend a moment in this segment of your business plan forecasting your staffing needs. Who do you still need to hire to make this business as good as it can be? What do you predict will cost to hire these experts? Will you outsource any component of your team? Take time here to show that you have thought ahead to potential staffing scenarios and your responses.
7. Company Financials
Demonstrating that you have a realistic understanding of your company’s financial needs is essential. Even if you have a new business idea and don’t have formal financial statements yet, this sector of your business plan should provide your business’s established budget, cash flow analysis, any income statements and balance sheets you have, and your debt-to-liquidity ratio . Don’t forget to factor in business taxes that will impact your company and gauge the frequency with which those taxes will be imposed (some are yearly; others are quarterly).
Let’s say you are starting a small IT consulting business. You may not have much financial data yet, but you do have a wealth of information from companies you have worked for in the past and their technological trends, needs, and financial projections. Take this information and make very thorough profit and loss projections for your company based on current, factual industry data.
Remember that every projection you make in your financial plan needs to have a direct justification. It’s also wise to project conservatively on profits and liberally on losses to account for the unpredictability in your target market.
8. Request for Funding
Now for the really fun part of your business plan: officially asking for money. Your request for funding should start with what the investor will get by partaking in your small business. Spell out your capital needs, why you need them, and why providing them is beneficial to the funder.
It’s imperative in this section for business owners to outline key milestones that investor money will aid in achieving. What are the long-range goals for this money? How will investors be rewarded in the short and long term?
For example, suppose you are founding a freelance landscaping company in a city showing a steady statistical uptick in suburban, residential development. In that case, you can couch your investor’s long-term benefits in terms of the exponential growth your connections to contractors/builders suggest. In short, your investors can get in on the ground floor of what your network will give you access to. Make your funding request all about positives, and you are much more likely to receive favorable results from it.
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A good business plan can help you understand your industry and customers more efficiently, help you mark business milestones, and focus your entrepreneurial efforts in the right direction. Setting yourself up for success early through this kind of planning is the smartest step you can take toward guaranteeing the life and growth of your business.
If you find that you need help brainstorming, organizing, or formulating your new company, ZenBusiness can assist you in everything from running your business virtually to defeating burnout .
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How to Write a Business Plan Outline [2022 Guide & Format]
When starting a business, having a well-thought-out business plan prepared is necessary for success. It serves as the foundation of your business, helps guide your strategy, and prepares you to overcome the obstacles and risks associated with entrepreneurship. In short, a business plan makes you more like to succeed.
However, like everything in business, starting is often the hardest part. What information do you need? How in-depth should each section be? How should the plan be structured?
All good questions that you can answer by following this business plan outline.
What is a business plan outline?
Starting with a business plan outline helps ensure that you’re covering all of the necessary information to complete your plan. A traditional business plan typically includes—an executive summary, an overview of your products and services, thorough market and industry research, a marketing and sales strategy, operational details, financial projections, and an appendix.
Depending on what you intend to do with your plan, you may not need all of this information right away. If you’re going to speak with investors or pursue funding, then yes, you’ll need to include everything from this outline. But, if you’re using your plan to test an idea or help you run your business, you may want to opt for a lean plan. This is a simpler and faster method that is designed to be updated and used day-to-day.
If you’re unsure of which plan is right for you, check out our guide explaining the differences and use cases for each .
What are the 7 essential parts of a business plan?
No matter the type of business plan you create, these are the seven basic sections you should include. Be sure to download your free business plan template so that you can start drafting your own plan as you work through this outline.
1. Executive summary
While it may appear first, it’s best to write your executive summary last. It’s a brief section that highlights the high-level points you’ve made elsewhere in your business plan.
Summarize the problem you are solving for customers, your solution, the target market, the founding team, and financial forecast highlights. Keep things as brief as possible and entice your audience to learn more about your company.
Keep in mind, this is the first impression your plan and business will make. After looking over your executive summary, your target reader is either going to throw your business plan away or keep reading. So make sure you spend the time to get it just right.
2. Product and services
This is really the opportunity section of your business plan, with the products and services being how you plan to take advantage of the opportunity. You’ll need to describe the problem that you solve for your customers and the solution that you are selling.
Lastly, if there are any major competitive products or services already in the market, it may be valuable to mention them here. Detail how you differ, what your strengths and weaknesses are in comparison, and how you’ll differentiate from what is already available. If you have any intellectual property or patents that help strengthen your position list them here as well.
3. Market analysis
You need to know your target market —the types of customers you are looking for—and how it’s changing, and your market analysis summary will help you get clear on it.
Use this business plan component to discuss your customers’ needs, where your customers are, how to reach them and how to deliver your product to them.
You’ll also need to know who your competitors are and how you stack up against them—why are you sure there’s room for you in this market?
4. Marketing and sales
Use this business plan section to outline your marketing plan, your sales plan, and the other logistics involved in actually running your business.
You’ll want to cover your sales channels, broad marketing activities, your pricing strategy, as well as your intended market position. This will likely evolve over time, but it’s best to include anything that clearly details how you will sell and promote your products and services.
5. Organization and management
The company and management section is an overview of who you are.
It should describe the organization of your business, and the key members of the management team . It should also provide any historical background about your business. When your company was founded, who is/are the owner(s), what state your company is registered in and where you do business, and when/if your company was incorporated for example.
Be sure to include summaries of your managers’ backgrounds and experience—these should act like brief resumes—and describe their functions with the company. You should also include any professional gaps you intend to fill, as well as projected milestones for your business.
6. Financial projections and metrics
At the very least this section should include your projected sales forecast , profit and loss , cash flow projections, and balance sheet , along with a brief description of the assumptions you’re making with your projections.
Finally, if you are raising money or taking out loans, you should highlight the money you need to launch the business. This part should also include a use of funds report—basically an overview of how the funding will be used in business operations.
And while it’s not required, it may be wise to briefly mention your exit strategy. This doesn’t need to be overly detailed, just a general idea of how you may eventually want to exit your business.
7. Appendix
The end of your business plan should include any additional information to back up specific elements of your plan. More detailed financial statements, resumes for your management team, patent documentation, credit histories, marketing examples, etc. Basically, include anything that can promote your credibility as a business owner.
Business plan outline template
If you’re looking for greater insight into what goes into specific planning sections, check out the following outline. It can help you develop a detailed business plan or provide guidance as to what may be missing in your current plan.
Keep in mind that each business plan will look different depending on numerous factors , including the type of business and what you will be using the plan for. Consider the following outline to be a master version to reference and consider. Just be sure to focus on the plan type and sections that are most beneficial to your business, pitch, or overall strategic planning .
1.0 Executive Summary
1.1 problem.
A summary of the problem you are solving and an identifiable need in the market you are filling.
1.2 Solution
A description of the product or service you will provide to solve the problem.
1.3 Target Market
A defined customer base who will most likely purchase the product or service. For info on how to define your target market, check out our guide on the subject.
1.4 Competition
The current alternatives or substitutes in the market that you and your business will be competing against.
1.5 Financial Summary
Key highlights of your financial plan that covers costs, sales, and profitability.
1.6 Funding Requirements
A brief outline of the amount of money you will need to start your business. Include this if you plan on pitching to investors.
1.7 Milestones and Traction
A roadmap of where you currently are and specific milestones you plan to hit.
2.0 Product and services
2.1 problem worth solving.
A thorough description of the problem or pain point you intend to solve for your customer base.
2.2 Our Solution
A thorough description of your proposed product or service that alleviates the problem of your customer base.
2.3 Validation of Problem and Solution
Any data or relative information that supports your solution. If you’ve already run tests that verify your idea , this is the place to include your results.
2.4 Product Overview
A description of your product and/or service that explains what it does, who its for, and how it benefits your customers.
2.5 Competition
Any information explaining current competitive offerings and how your product differs from them.
2.6 Roadmap/Future Plans
A list of steps taken so far, along with an outline of steps you plan to take in establishing or growing your business.
3.0 Market Analysis
3.1 market segmentation.
Potential groups of customers separated by specific characteristics.
3.2 Target market segment strategy
Your ideal customer who would most likely benefit from your business.
3.2.1 Market needs
A description of how your target market is not effectively served and how your business fulfills a need.
3.2.2 Market trends
How consumers in your target market tend to act including purchasing habits, financial trends, and any other relevant factors.
3.2.3 Market growth
The perceived potential increase or decrease in the size of your target market.
3.3 Key customers
Your ideal customer archetype who will be the main advocate for your business.
3.4 Future markets
A snapshot of the potential market based on the last few sections and how your business strategy works within it.
3.5 Competition
A list of potential competitors. Identifying the competition isn’t always obvious and it may take some digging on your part .
3.5.1 Competitors and alternatives
A list of potential indirect competitors that provide products or services that are alternatives to your business.
3.5.2 Competitive advantage
The strategic advantage(s) that makes your target market more likely to choose you over the competition.
4.0 Marketing and Sales
4.1 marketing plan.
An outline of your marketing and advertising strategy including costs, advertising channels, and goals.
4.2 Sales plan
An estimate of the number of sales you anticipate based on market conditions, capacity, pricing strategy, and other factors.
4.3 Location and facilities
Details of your physical business location (if necessary) including location and costs of operation.
4.4 Technology
An explanation of any new technology that defines your business.
4.5 Equipment and tools
Any required production equipment or tools and the cost associated with purchasing or renting them.
5.0 Organization and management
5.1 organizational structure.
An overview of the structure of your business including roles and responsibilities of specific employees and the flow of information between levels of the organization.
5.2 Management team
A list of potential candidates you anticipate taking on high-level management roles within your company.
5.3 Management team gaps
Any positions or areas of expertise that you currently do not have candidates ready to fill those roles.
5.4 Personnel plan
A list of potential positions that you expect to require in order to run your business effectively.
5.5 Company history and ownership
A summary of your company’s history and how it relates to planning your business.
5.6 Milestones
A detailed roadmap of specific goals and objectives you plan to achieve that will help you manage and steer your business.
5.7 Key metrics
Performance measurements that help you gauge the overall performance and health of your business.
6.0 Financial projections and metrics
Standard financial documentation that showcases the current and projected health of your business.
6.1 Revenue and sales forecast
Expected revenue and sales for the next 1-3 years, broken down into month-by-month increments for at least the first year.
6.2 Expenses
Expected or incurred costs necessary to start and operate your business.
6.3 Projected profit and loss
How much money you will bring in by selling products and/or services and how much profit you will make or lose after accounting for production costs.
6.4 Projected cash flow
Money that is expected to cycle in and out of your business. This can also include your overall cash position and cash runway.
6.5 Projected balance sheet
Expected balances for business assets, liabilities, and equity.
6.6 Personnel plan
Outline of how and who you intend to hire, what compensation will be, and how employees will fit into business operations.
6.7 Use of funds
Explanation of how funds were or will be used. This is typically meant to be shared with investors or lenders.
6.8 Exit strategy
A brief description of how you intend to eventually exit from your business. Acquisition, selling, passing along to a family member/employee, etc.
7.0 Appendix
A repository for any additional information , including charts and graphs, to support your business plan.
How to organize your business plan
There’s no real established order to business plans, aside from keeping the Executive Summary at the top. As long as you have all of the main business plan components, then the order should reflect your goals .
If this is meant solely for your personal use, lay it out as a roadmap with similar sections grouped together for easy reference. If you’re pitching this to potential investors, lead with the stronger sections to emphasize the pitch. Then if you’re unsure of what order makes sense, then just stick to the outline in this article.
Should you include tables and charts in your business plan?
Every business plan should include bar charts and pie charts to illustrate the numbers. It’s a simple way for you, your team, and investors to visualize and digest complex financial information.
Cash flow is the single most important numerical analysis in a business plan, and a standard cash flow statement or table should never be missing. Most standard business plans also include a sales forecast and income statement (also called profit and loss), and a balance sheet .
How long should your business plan be?
There’s no perfect length for a business plan . A traditional business plan can be anywhere from 10 to 50 pages long depending on how much detail you include in each section. However, as we said before unless you intend to pursue funding, you likely don’t need a lengthy business plan at first.
Instead, you can start with a lean plan that can be completed in as little as 30-minutes. This one-page business plan is designed to help you get the core information down about your business. It encourages you to focus on your financials and functions moreso as a long-term management tool that’s easy to review and update regularly.
So, if you’re pursuing funding check out our full guide on how to write a traditional business plan . If you’re looking for a faster, easier, and more effective long-term planning method, check out this guide from LivePlan on how to write a lean plan in under an hour .
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry .
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How to Write a Winning Business Plan
- Stanley R. Rich
- David E. Gumpert
The business plan admits the entrepreneur to the investment process. Without a plan furnished in advance, many investor groups won’t even grant an interview. And the plan must be outstanding if it is to win investment funds. Too many entrepreneurs, though, continue to believe that if they build a better mousetrap, the world will beat […]
The Idea in Brief
You’ve got a great idea for a new product or service—how can you persuade investors to support it? Flashy PowerPoint slides aren’t enough; you need a winning business plan. A compelling plan accurately reflects the viewpoints of your three key constituencies: the market , potential investors , and the producer (the entrepreneur or inventor of the new offering).
But too many plans are written solely from the perspective of the producer. The problem is that, unless you’ve got your own capital to finance your venture, the only way you’ll get the funding you need is to satisfy the market’s and investors’ needs.
Here’s how to grab their attention.
The Idea in Practice
Emphasize Market Needs
To make a convincing case that a substantial market exists, establish market interest and document your claims.
Establish market interest. Provide evidence that customers are intrigued by your claims about the benefits of the new product or service:
- Let some customers use a product prototype; then get written evaluations.
- Offer the product to a few potential customers at a deep discount if they pay part of the production cost. This lets you determine whether potential buyers even exist.
- Use “reference installations”—statements from initial users, sales reps, distributors, and would-be customers who have seen the product demonstrated.
Document your claims. You’ve established market interest. Now use data to support your assertions about potential growth rates of sales and profits.
- Specify the number of potential customers, the size of their businesses, and the size that is most appropriate to your offering. Remember: Bigger isn’t necessarily better; e.g., saving $10,000 per year in chemical use may mean a lot to a modest company but not to a Du Pont.
- Show the nature of the industry; e.g., franchised weight-loss clinics might grow fast, but they can decline rapidly when competition stiffens. State how you will continually innovate to survive.
- Project realistic growth rates at which customers will accept—and buy—your offering. From there, assemble a credible sales plan and project plant and staffing needs.
Address Investor Needs
Cashing out. Show when and how investors may liquidate their holdings. Venture capital firms usually want to cash out in three to seven years; professional investors look for a large capital appreciation.
Making sound projections. Give realistic, five-year forecasts of profitability. Don’t skimp on the numbers, get overly optimistic about them, or blanket your plan with a smog of figures covering every possible variation.
The price. To figure out how much to invest in your offering, investors calculate your company’s value on the basis of results expected five years after they invest. They’ll want a 35 to 40% return for mature companies—up to 60% for less mature ventures. To make a convincing case for a rich return, get a product in the hands of representative customers—and demonstrate substantial market interest.
The business plan admits the entrepreneur to the investment process. Without a plan furnished in advance, many investor groups won’t even grant an interview. And the plan must be outstanding if it is to win investment funds.
Too many entrepreneurs, though, continue to believe that if they build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to their door. A good mousetrap is important, but it’s only part of meeting the challenge. Also important is satisfying the needs of marketers and investors. Marketers want to see evidence of customer interest and a viable market. Investors want to know when they can cash out and how good the financial projections are. Drawing on their own experiences and those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum, the authors show entrepreneurs how to write convincing and winning business plans.
A comprehensive, carefully thought-out business plan is essential to the success of entrepreneurs and corporate managers. Whether you are starting up a new business, seeking additional capital for existing product lines, or proposing a new activity in a corporate division, you will never face a more challenging writing assignment than the preparation of a business plan.
Only a well-conceived and well-packaged plan can win the necessary investment and support for your idea. It must describe the company or proposed project accurately and attractively. Even though its subject is a moving target, the plan must detail the company’s or the project’s present status, current needs, and expected future. You must present and justify ongoing and changing resource requirements, marketing decisions, financial projections, production demands, and personnel needs in logical and convincing fashion.
Because they struggle so hard to assemble, organize, describe, and document so much, it is not surprising that managers sometimes overlook the fundamentals. We have found that the most important one is the accurate reflection of the viewpoints of three constituencies.
1. The market, including both existing and prospective clients, customers, and users of the planned product or service.
2. The investors, whether of financial or other resources.
3. The producer, whether the entrepreneur or the inventor.
Too many business plans are written solely from the viewpoint of the third constituency—the producer. They describe the underlying technology or creativity of the proposed product or service in glowing terms and at great length. They neglect the constituencies that give the venture its financial viability—the market and the investor.
Take the case of five executives seeking financing to establish their own engineering consulting firm. In their business plan, they listed a dozen types of specialized engineering services and estimated their annual sales and profit growth at 20%. But the executives did not determine which of the proposed dozen services their potential clients really needed and which would be most profitable. By neglecting to examine these issues closely, they ignored the possibility that the marketplace might want some services not among the dozen listed.
Moreover, they failed to indicate the price of new shares or the percentage available to investors. Dealing with the investor’s perspective was important because—for a new venture, at least—backers seek a return of 40% to 60% on their capital, compounded annually. The expected sales and profit growth rates of 20% could not provide the necessary return unless the founders gave up a substantial share of the company.
In fact, the executives had only considered their own perspective—including the new company’s services, organization, and projected results. Because they had not convincingly demonstrated why potential customers would buy the services or how investors would make an adequate return (or when and how they could cash out), their business plan lacked the credibility necessary for raising the investment funds needed.
We have had experience in both evaluating business plans and organizing and observing presentations and investor responses at sessions of the MIT Enterprise Forum. We believe that business plans must deal convincingly with marketing and investor considerations. This reading identifies and evaluates those considerations and explains how business plans can be written to satisfy them.
The MIT Enterprise Forum
Organized under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni Association in 1978, the MIT Enterprise Forum offers businesses at a critical stage of development an opportunity to obtain counsel from a panel of experts on steps to take to achieve their goals.
In monthly evening sessions the forum evaluates the business plans of companies accepted for presentation during 60- to 90-minute segments in which no holds are barred. The format allows each presenter 20 minutes to summarize a business plan orally. Each panelist reviews the written business plan in advance of the sessions. Then each of four panelists—who are venture capitalists, bankers, marketing specialists, successful entrepreneurs, MIT professors, or other experts—spends five to ten minutes assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and the enterprise and suggesting improvements.
In some cases, the panelists suggest a completely new direction. In others, they advise more effective implementation of existing policies. Their comments range over the spectrum of business issues.
Sessions are open to the public and usually draw about 300 people, most of them financiers, business executives, accountants, lawyers, consultants, and others with special interest in emerging companies. Following the panelists’ evaluations, audience members can ask questions and offer comments.
Presenters have the opportunity to respond to the evaluations and suggestions offered. They also receive written evaluations of the oral presentation from audience members. (The entrepreneur doesn’t make the written plan available to the audience.) These monthly sessions are held primarily for companies that have advanced beyond the start-up stage. They tend to be from one to ten years old and in need of expansion capital.
The MIT Enterprise Forum’s success at its home base in Cambridge, Massachusetts has led MIT alumni to establish forums in New York, Washington, Houston, Chicago, and Amsterdam, among other cities.
Emphasize the Market
Investors want to put their money into market-driven rather than technology-driven or service-driven companies. The potential of the product’s markets, sales, and profit is far more important than its attractiveness or technical features.
You can make a convincing case for the existence of a good market by demonstrating user benefit, identifying marketplace interest, and documenting market claims.
Show the User’s Benefit
It’s easy even for experts to overlook this basic notion. At an MIT Enterprise Forum session an entrepreneur spent the bulk of his 20-minute presentation period extolling the virtues of his company’s product—an instrument to control certain aspects of the production process in the textile industry. He concluded with some financial projections looking five years down the road.
The first panelist to react to the business plan—a partner in a venture capital firm—was completely negative about the company’s prospects for obtaining investment funds because, he stated, its market was in a depressed industry.
Another panelist asked, “How long does it take your product to pay for itself in decreased production costs?” The presenter immediately responded, “Six months.” The second panelist replied, “That’s the most important thing you’ve said tonight.”
The venture capitalist quickly reversed his original opinion. He said he would back a company in almost any industry if it could prove such an important user benefit—and emphasize it in its sales approach. After all, if it paid back the customer’s cost in six months, the product would after that time essentially “print money.”
The venture capitalist knew that instruments, machinery, and services that pay for themselves in less than one year are mandatory purchases for many potential customers. If this payback period is less than two years, it is a probable purchase; beyond three years, they do not back the product.
The MIT panel advised the entrepreneur to recast his business plan so that it emphasized the short payback period and played down the self-serving discussion about product innovation. The executive took the advice and rewrote the plan in easily understandable terms. His company is doing very well and has made the transition from a technology-driven to a market-driven company.
Find out the Market’s Interest
Calculating the user’s benefit is only the first step. An entrepreneur must also give evidence that customers are intrigued with the user’s benefit claims and that they like the product or service. The business plan must reflect clear positive responses of customer prospects to the question “Having heard our pitch, will you buy?” Without them, an investment usually won’t be made.
How can start-up businesses—some of which may have only a prototype product or an idea for a service—appropriately gauge market reaction? One executive of a smaller company had put together a prototype of a device that enables personal computers to handle telephone messages. He needed to demonstrate that customers would buy the product, but the company had exhausted its cash resources and was thus unable to build and sell the item in quantity.
The executives wondered how to get around the problem. The MIT panel offered two possible responses. First, the founders might allow a few customers to use the prototype and obtain written evaluations of the product and the extent of their interest when it became available.
Second, the founders might offer the product to a few potential customers at a substantial price discount if they paid part of the cost—say one-third—up front so that the company could build it. The company could not only find out whether potential buyers existed but also demonstrate the product to potential investors in real-life installations.
In the same way, an entrepreneur might offer a proposed new service at a discount to initial customers as a prototype if the customers agreed to serve as references in marketing the service to others.
For a new product, nothing succeeds as well as letters of support and appreciation from some significant potential customers, along with “reference installations.” You can use such third-party statements—from would-be customers to whom you have demonstrated the product, initial users, sales representatives, or distributors—to show that you have indeed discovered a sound market that needs your product or service.
You can obtain letters from users even if the product is only in prototype form. You can install it experimentally with a potential user to whom you will sell it at or below cost in return for information on its benefits and an agreement to talk to sales prospects or investors. In an appendix to the business plan or in a separate volume, you can include letters attesting to the value of the product from experimental customers.
Document Your Claims
Having established a market interest, you must use carefully analyzed data to support your assertions about the market and the growth rate of sales and profits. Too often, executives think “If we’re smart, we’ll be able to get about 10% of the market” and “Even if we only get 1% of such a huge market, we’ll be in good shape.”
Investors know that there’s no guarantee a new company will get any business, regardless of market size. Even if the company makes such claims based on fact—as borne out, for example, by evidence of customer interest—they can quickly crumble if the company does not carefully gather and analyze supporting data.
One example of this danger surfaced in a business plan that came before the MIT Enterprise Forum. An entrepreneur wanted to sell a service to small businesses. He reasoned that he could have 170,000 customers if he penetrated even 1% of the market of 17 million small enterprises in the United States. The panel pointed out that anywhere from 11 million to 14 million of such so-called small businesses were really sole proprietorships or part-time businesses. The total number of full-time small businesses with employees was actually between 3 million and 6 million and represented a real potential market far beneath the company’s original projections—and prospects.
Similarly, in a business plan relating to the sale of certain equipment to apple growers, you must have U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics to discover the number of growers who could use the equipment. If your equipment is useful only to growers with 50 acres or more, then you need to determine how many growers have farms of that size, that is, how many are minor producers with only an acre or two of apple trees.
A realistic business plan needs to specify the number of potential customers, the size of their businesses, and which size is most appropriate to the offered products or services. Sometimes bigger is not better. For example, a saving of $10,000 per year in chemical use may be significant to a modest company but unimportant to a Du Pont or a Monsanto.
Such marketing research should also show the nature of the industry. Few industries are more conservative than banking and public utilities. The number of potential customers is relatively small, and industry acceptance of new products or services is painfully slow, no matter how good the products and services have proven to be. Even so, most of the customers are well known and while they may act slowly, they have the buying power that makes the wait worthwhile.
At the other end of the industrial spectrum are extremely fast-growing and fast-changing operations such as franchised weight-loss clinics and computer software companies. Here the problem is reversed. While some companies have achieved multi-million-dollar sales in just a few years, they are vulnerable to declines of similar proportions from competitors. These companies must innovate constantly so that potential competitors will be discouraged from entering the marketplace.
You must convincingly project the rate of acceptance for the product or service—and the rate at which it is likely to be sold. From this marketing research data, you can begin assembling a credible sales plan and projecting your plant and staff needs.
Address Investors’ Needs
The marketing issues are tied to the satisfaction of investors. Once executives make a convincing case for their market penetration, they can make the financial projections that help determine whether investors will be interested in evaluating the venture and how much they will commit and at what price.
Before considering investors’ concerns in evaluating business plans, you will find it worth your while to gauge who your potential investors might be. Most of us know that for new and growing private companies, investors may be professional venture capitalists and wealthy individuals. For corporate ventures, they are the corporation itself. When a company offers shares to the public, individuals of all means become investors along with various institutions.
But one part of the investor constituency is often overlooked in the planning process—the founders of new and growing enterprises. By deciding to start and manage a business, they are committed to years of hard work and personal sacrifice. They must try to stand back and evaluate their own businesses in order to decide whether the opportunity for reward some years down the road truly justifies the risk early on.
When an entrepreneur looks at an idea objectively rather than through rose-colored glasses, the decision whether to invest may change. One entrepreneur who believed in the promise of his scientific-instruments company faced difficult marketing problems because the product was highly specialized and had, at best, few customers. Because of the entrepreneur’s heavy debt, the venture’s chance of eventual success and financial return was quite slim.
The panelists concluded that the entrepreneur would earn only as much financial return as he would have had holding a job during the next three to seven years. On the downside, he might wind up with much less in exchange for larger headaches. When he viewed the project in such dispassionate terms, the entrepreneur finally agreed and gave it up.
Investors’ primary considerations are:
Cashing out
Entrepreneurs frequently do not understand why investors have a short attention span. Many who see their ventures in terms of a lifetime commitment expect that anyone else who gets involved will feel the same. When investors evaluate a business plan, they consider not only whether to get in but also how and when to get out.
Because small, fast-growing companies have little cash available for dividends, the main way investors can profit is from the sale of their holdings, either when the company goes public or is sold to another business. (Large corporations that invest in new enterprises may not sell their holdings if they’re committed to integrating the venture into their organizations and realizing long-term gains from income.)
Venture capital firms usually wish to liquidate their investments in small companies in three to seven years so as to pay gains while they generate funds for investment in new ventures. The professional investor wants to cash out with a large capital appreciation.
Investors want to know that entrepreneurs have thought about how to comply with this desire. Do they expect to go public, sell the company, or buy the investors out in three to seven years? Will the proceeds provide investors with a return on invested capital commensurate with the investment risk—in the range of 35% to 60%, compounded and adjusted for inflation?
Business plans often do not show when and how investors may liquidate their holdings. For example, one entrepreneur’s software company sought $1.5 million to expand. But a panelist calculated that, to satisfy their goals, the investors “would need to own the entire company and then some.”
Making Sound Projections
Five-year forecasts of profitability help lay the groundwork for negotiating the amount investors will receive in return for their money. Investors see such financial forecasts as yardsticks against which to judge future performance.
Too often, entrepreneurs go to extremes with their numbers. In some cases, they don’t do enough work on their financials and rely on figures that are so skimpy or overoptimistic that anyone who has read more than a dozen business plans quickly sees through them.
In one MIT Enterprise Forum presentation, a management team proposing to manufacture and market scientific instruments forecast a net income after taxes of 25% of sales during the fourth and fifth years following investment. While a few industries such as computer software average such high profits, the scientific instruments business is so competitive, panelists noted, that expecting such margins is unrealistic.
In fact, the managers had grossly—and carelessly—understated some important costs. The panelists advised them to take their financial estimates back to the drawing board and before approaching investors to consult financial professionals.
Some entrepreneurs think that the financials are the business plan. They may cover the plan with a smog of numbers. Such “spreadsheet merchants,” with their pages of computer printouts covering every business variation possible and analyzing product sensitivity, completely turn off many investors.
Investors are wary even when financial projections are solidly based on realistic marketing data because fledgling companies nearly always fail to achieve their rosy profit forecasts. Officials of five major venture capital firms we surveyed said they are satisfied when new ventures reach 50% of their financial goals. They agreed that the negotiations that determine the percentage of the company purchased by the investment dollars are affected by this “projection discount factor.”
The Development Stage
All investors wish to reduce their risk. In evaluating the risk of a new and growing venture, they assess the status of the product and the management team. The farther along an enterprise is in each area, the lower the risk.
At one extreme is a single entrepreneur with an unproven idea. Unless the founder has a magnificent track record, such a venture has little chance of obtaining investment funds.
At the more desirable extreme is a venture that has an accepted product in a proven market and a competent and fully staffed management team. This business is most likely to win investment funds at the lowest costs.
Entrepreneurs who become aware of their status with investors and think it inadequate can improve it. Take the case of a young MIT engineering graduate who appeared at an MIT Enterprise Forum session with written schematics for the improvement of semiconductor-equipment production. He had documented interest by several producers and was looking for money to complete development and begin production.
The panelists advised him to concentrate first on making a prototype and assembling a management team with marketing and financial know-how to complement his product-development expertise. They explained that because he had never before started a company, he needed to show a great deal of visible progress in building his venture to allay investors’ concern about his inexperience.
Once investors understand a company qualitatively, they can begin to do some quantitative analysis. One customary way is to calculate the company’s value on the basis of the results expected in the fifth year following investment. Because risk and reward are closely related, investors believe companies with fully developed products and proven management teams should yield between 35% and 40% on their investment, while those with incomplete products and management teams are expected to bring in 60% annual compounded returns.
Investors calculate the potential worth of a company after five years to determine what percentage they must own to realize their return. Take the hypothetical case of a well-developed company expected to yield 35% annually. Investors would want to earn 4.5 times their original investment, before inflation, over a five-year period.
After allowing for the projection discount factor, investors may postulate that a company will have $20 million annual revenues after five years and a net profit of $1.5 million. Based on a conventional multiple for acquisitions of ten times earnings, the company would be worth $15 million in five years.
If the company wants $1 million of financing, it should grow to $4.5 million after five years to satisfy investors. To realize that return from a company worth $15 million, the investors would need to own a bit less than one-third. If inflation is expected to average 7.5% a year during the five-year period, however, investors would look for a value of $6.46 million as a reasonable return over five years, or 43% of the company.
For a less mature venture—from which investors would be seeking 60% annually, net of inflation—a $1 million investment would have to bring in close to $15 million in five years, with inflation figured at 7.5% annually. But few businesses can make a convincing case for such a rich return if they do not already have a product in the hands of some representative customers.
The final percentage of the company acquired by the investors is, of course, subject to some negotiation, depending on projected earnings and expected inflation.
Make It Happen
The only way to tend to your needs is to satisfy those of the market and the investors—unless you are wealthy enough to furnish your own capital to finance the venture and test out the pet product or service.
Of course, you must confront other issues before you can convince investors that the enterprise will succeed. For example, what proprietary aspects are there to the product or service? How will you provide quality control? Have you focused the venture toward a particular market segment, or are you trying to do too much? If this is answered in the context of the market and investors, the result will be more effective than if you deal with them in terms of your own wishes.
An example helps illustrate the potential conflicts. An entrepreneur at an MIT Enterprise Forum session projected R&D spending of about half of gross sales revenues for his specialty chemical venture. A panelist who had analyzed comparable organic chemical suppliers asked why the company’s R&D spending was so much higher than the industry average of 5% of gross revenues.
The entrepreneur explained that he wanted to continually develop new products in his field. While admitting his purpose was admirable, the panel unanimously advised him to bring his spending into line with the industry’s. The presenter ignored the advice; he failed to obtain the needed financing and eventually went out of business.
Once you accept the idea that you should satisfy the market and the investors, you face the challenge of organizing your data into a convincing document so that you can sell your venture to investors and customers. We have provided some presentation guidelines in the insert called “Packaging Is Important.”
Packaging Is Important
A business plan gives financiers their first impressions of a company and its principals.
Potential investors expect the plan to look good, but not too good; to be the right length; to clearly and cisely explain early on all aspects of the company’s business; and not to contain bad grammar and typographical or spelling errors.
Investors are looking for evidence that the principals treat their own property with care—and will likewise treat the investment carefully. In other words, form as well as content is important, and investors know that good form reflects good content and vice versa.
Among the format issues we think most important are the following:
The binding and printing must not be sloppy; neither should the presentation be too lavish. A stapled compilation of photocopied pages usually looks amateurish, while bookbinding with typeset pages may arouse concern about excessive and inappropriate spending. A plastic spiral binding holding together a pair of cover sheets of a single color provides both a neat appearance and sufficient strength to withstand the handling of a number of people without damage.
A business plan should be no more than 40 pages long. The first draft will likely exceed that, but editing should produce a final version that fits within the 40-page ideal. Adherence to this length forces entrepreneurs to sharpen their ideas and results in a document likely to hold investors’ attention.
Background details can be included in an additional volume. Entrepreneurs can make this material available to investors during the investigative period after the initial expression of interest.
The Cover and Title Page
The cover should bear the name of the company, its address and phone number, and the month and year in which the plan is issued. Surprisingly, a large number of business plans are submitted to potential investors without return addresses or phone numbers. An interested investor wants to be able to contact a company easily and to request further information or express an interest, either in the company or in some aspect of the plan.
Inside the front cover should be a well-designed title page on which the cover information is repeated and, in an upper or a lower corner, the legend “Copy number______” provided. Besides helping entrepreneurs keep track of plans in circulation, holding down the number of copies outstanding—usually to no more than 20—has a psychological advantage. After all, no investor likes to think that the prospective investment is shopworn.
The Executive Summary
The two pages immediately following the title page should concisely explain the company’s current status, its products or services, the benefits to customers, the financial forecasts, the venture’s objectives in three to seven years, the amount of financing needed, and how investors will benefit.
This is a tall order for a two-page summary, but it will either sell investors on reading the rest of the plan or convince them to forget the whole thing.
The Table of Contents
After the executive summary include a well-designed table of contents. List each of the business plan’s sections and mark the pages for each section.
Even though we might wish it were not so, writing effective business plans is as much an art as it is a science. The idea of a master document whose blanks executives can merely fill in—much in the way lawyers use sample wills or real estate agreements—is appealing but unrealistic.
Businesses differ in key marketing, production, and financial issues. Their plans must reflect such differences and must emphasize appropriate areas and deemphasize minor issues. Remember that investors view a plan as a distillation of the objectives and character of the business and its executives. A cookie-cutter, fill-in-the-blanks plan or, worse yet, a computer-generated package, will turn them off.
Write your business plans by looking outward to your key constituencies rather than by looking inward at what suits you best. You will save valuable time and energy this way and improve your chances of winning investors and customers.
- SR Mr. Rich has helped found seven technologically based businesses, the most recent being Advanced Energy Dynamics Inc. of Natick, Massachusetts. He is also a cofounder and has been chairman of the MIT Enterprise forum, which assists emerging growth companies.
- DG Mr. Gumpert is an associate editor of HBR, where he specializes in small business and marketing. He has written several HBR articles, the most recent of which was “The Heart of Entrepreneurship,” coauthored by Howard. H. Stevenson (March–April 1985). This article is adapted from Business Plans That Win $$$ : Lessons from the MIT Enterprise Forum, by Messrs. Rich and Gumpert (Harper & Row, 1985). The authors are also founders of Venture Resource Associates of Grantham, New Hampshire, which provides planning and strategic services to growing enterprises.
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Business Plans
Business planning is a core activity that can help budding entrepreneurs or current small business owners examine and define how they would like their businesses to operate.
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Business plans topic overview.
"Business Plans" Gale Business: Entrepreneurship, , Gale, 2020.
Business plans describe the strategies and goals of a company. For those just starting an enterprise, business plans define the business and service being provided, outline sales and marketing objectives, and estimate profits and losses the company expects to encounter. For established ventures, business plans summarize the annual operating costs and assess any market changes that may affect the company. Business plans help companies outline their future endeavors and provide a detailed description of their operations for those seeking additional information about the venture, particularly investors or financers.
Business Plans of Small Businesses
Management experts encourage all types of companies to prepare annual business plans. Corporations and other large enterprises are more prone to devising continual business plans to offer to shareholders and potential investors. Small businesses rarely compile such plans unless under special circumstances. Apart from lacking the basic resources to put together an annual business plan, small companies are usually attentive to their markets and consistently plan to meet their customers’ needs. Small enterprises may prepare a business plan when seeking investors or financing, or when selling the business. Business plans of small companies tend to be more detailed than corporate plans and often focus on the means by which the business intends to succeed in its market.
Most business plans consist of the same general components. They begin with an executive summary, or statement of purpose, which identifies the reason for the plan and highlights what will be discussed in the coming pages. They also provide a description of the company and the industry it serves. The plans then analyze the market and discuss where changes should be implemented to promote continued growth. For existing businesses, plans tend to focus on how past, present, and future changes may affect ongoing business operations. New businesses mainly emphasize the need for their service in an ever-changing market, examining how their strategies will surpass the existing strategies of competitors.
Once the plans have assessed the current market environment, they explain how businesses will adapt to any issues and changes listed. Studies show that premeditative formulation of business objectives is linked to a higher success rate in achieving overall goals. Success rates can also be improved with good benchmarking techniques, which assess a business’s accomplishments on a periodic basis. Good business plans will have several alternative actions outlined in the event that one strategy fails to uphold or improve operations. After the market analysis and business objectives have been reviewed, the plans then turn to budgeting and calculate all possible costs and potential revenue. Comprehensive business plans may not be necessary for all ventures, but outlining relevant and realistic goals can be very helpful to both new and established enterprises.
COPYRIGHT 2020 Gale, a Cengage Company
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- Interest Rates in the UK
- Investment Appraisal
- Lifestyle and Technological Environment
- Non-Financial Data
- Porters Five Forces
- SWOT Analysis
- Social and Technological Environment
- Areas of Competition
- Bowmans Strategic Clock
- Diversification
- Strategic Positioning
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For startups, a well-written business planning document is important to source capital from banks and venture capitalists. A business plan also provides a clear direction for business growth . But how else does planning affect businesses? What does a good business plan contain? Let's look at the answers.
Business planning definition
Simply put, business planning is the process of developing a roadmap aimed at achieving a business goal. It involves key stakeholders coming together to brainstorm ideas and strategies and collating them into a formal, written document known as a business plan.
A business plan is an official document that outlines a business's core activities, objectives, and roadmap to achieving its goals. For example, if you are starting a new bakery, a business plan would include information about your products, marketing strategies, and financial situation. .
A good business plan helps a business focus on its short-term and long-term goals, and outlines the specific steps needed to achieve them. In summary, business planning is a key process that businesses undertake to achieve their goals and success.
Importance of a business plan
A good business plan is critical for any business, providing a roadmap for achieving success and ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and working towards the same goals. It helps businesses make more informed decisions, secure funding, and track their progress over time. Here are some points summarising the importance of a business plan:
- A business plan helps a company track its growth and stay in line with its stated business objectives. If something is going off track, the managers can review the business plan and steer things back in the right direction.
- A good business plan notifies investors how the business is operated and if it is worth investing in. It attracts investors and sells them the idea of your business.
- A business plan provides a unified working structure among employees and business owners. It keeps employees and business owners on the same page about strategic actions needed to be taken.
- A well-crafted business plan can help startups attract investment or get loans without a proven financial record. It provides investors and lenders with an understanding of the company's goals, strategies, and financial projections.
Elements of a good business plan
A business plan should include key elements that help to provide a complete overview of the business and its plans for success. Here are some important elements that should be included in a typical business plan:
- Executive Summary
- Business Description
- Market Analysis
- Products and Services
- Marketing and Sales Strategy
- Management and Organization
- Financial Projections
- Funding Requirements
1. Executive summary
This business planning element provides a brief description of the business. It gives information on the business leadership , its employees, operations, and location. It also provides the business mission statement, goals, and vision.
2. Company description
This section provides a detailed description of the business, including its mission, vision, and goals. It should also include information about the industry and target market.
3. Market analysis
Good business planning requires a well-written market analysis showing demand and supply. A SWOT analysis provides detailed information on business strengths and weaknesses along with details on the business competitor and market opportunities available.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used by business owners to identify a business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market. Conducting a SWOT analysis will guide you on what you do well, identify your weak points, maximize your opportunities, and avoid threats.
An example of a good business plan market analysis is presented in a SWOT analysis carried out by a local shirt production company called 69 Shirts (a fictional company).
Table 1. SWOT analysis example
4. Products and services offered
This element provides a description of the products and services offered by a business. It includes production information, information on patents (if available), research and development, product or services pricing, and consumer benefits.
Blooming Boutique is a retail female clothing brand located in Delaware, US. 1 By following different generations' fashion trends, and monitoring target customers' fashion preferences, the brand intends to produce female fashion wear that is appealing to customers. They also use styles, colours, and different fashion fits to draw attention to the consumer while satisfying their sartorial needs.
5. Marketing and sales strategy
This element provides information on how the business intends to distribute its products and services, for example, what marketing strategies and channels they will use. Fundamentally, it shows how a business intends to build and keep its audience.
Again, let's take the example of 69 Shirts. Here's a possible marketing strategy:
- Using social media marketing and influencer marketing - the business aims to reach the audience by telling the story behind the products and how they can help the customers. The company also focuses on price, product distinction, product promotion, and customers’ feelings.
- Running a guerrilla marketing campaign in train stations and on public transport - this is done with the aim of letting people know as much as possible about the products and how beneficial and memorable it will be for them to own the product.
6. Management and organisation
This section should describe the management team and the organization's structure, including the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
7. Financial plans
Here, the business projections and estimates are included for startups, and for an established business, balance sheets, financial statements , and important financial information should be added. It should also include a break-even analysis , which shows the level of sales needed to cover all expenses. Well-prepared financial calculations can attract investors, banks, and venture capitalists.
If the business needs funding, this section should outline the funding requirements, including how much funding is needed, what the funds will be used for, and how the business plans to repay the funding.
9. Appendices
This section should include any additional information that is relevant to the business plan, such as market research reports, product specifications, and legal documents.
Plan length varies, as does the type of plan, but a document usually ranges from 15 to 20 pages.
Business planning process
A business plan is just one step of the business planning process. The steps of the business planning process below will help you understand it:
- Define the business goals: The first step in business planning is to define the goals that the business wants to achieve. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Conduct market research : The next step is to conduct market research to understand the target market, competition, and industry trends. This research can help the business identify opportunities and threats, and refine its strategy accordingly.
- Identify resources: The third step is to identify the resources that the business needs to achieve its goals. These resources could include finances, personnel, equipment, and facilities.
- Develop strategies: Based on market research and resource assessment, the business can develop strategies to achieve its goals. These strategies should be aligned with the business's strengths and opportunities, and address any weaknesses or threats.
- Create a business plan: The strategies can then be translated into a formal business plan, which outlines the business's core activities, objectives, and roadmap to achieving its goals. The business plan should include detailed information about the products or services, market analysis, marketing and sales strategy, as well as financial projections.
- Implement the plan: Once the business plan is complete, the next step is to implement it. This involves executing the strategies and tactics outlined in the plan, and monitoring progress towards the business goals.
- Evaluate and adjust: The final step is to evaluate the progress towards the business goals and adjust the plan as needed. This ensures that the business remains on track to achieve its goals and adapts to changes in the market or business environment.
Advantages and disadvantages of a business plan
While creating a business plan is a critical step in launching and running a successful business, it's important for managers and business owners to remember that there can be drawbacks. Advantages and disadvantages of a business plan are as follows:
Business planning - Key takeaways
Business planning is a process of developing a roadmap aimed at achieving a business goal.
A business plan is written documen t showing a business's core activities, objectives, and business roadmap to achieving its objectives.
The importance of a business plan can be seen in the organized growth of a business. It allows business owners to track business growth and stay in line with the business objectives.
Some crucial elements needed in business planning are executive summary, business description, market analysis, products and services, marketing and sales strategy, management and organization, financial projections, funding requirements.
Business planning process usually involves the following steps: define business goals, conduct market research , identify resources, develop strategies, create a business plan, implement the plan, evaluate and adjust.
- Blooming boutique, bloomingboutique.com, 2022.
- Jared Lindzon, The importance of a business plan, waveapps.com, 2022.
- Susan Ward, What is business planning, thebalancesmb.com, 2020.
- Staff, Business plan basic elements, bizally.com.au, 2022.
- Rich Longo, Why you need a business plan, sbdc.duq.edu, 2019.
- Staff, Effective business plan, lancasters.uk.net, 2022.
Frequently Asked Questions about Business Planning
--> what is a business plan.
A business plan is an official documen t showing a business's core activities, objectives, and business roadmap to achieving its objectives.
--> How to make a good business plan?
To make a good business plan, it's important to research the market and industry trends, set specific and measurable goals, develop a clear strategy, and create a well-organized and detailed plan that includes financial projections, marketing strategies, and plans for potential challenges. It's also crucial to review and adjust the plan regularly to ensure it remains relevant and effective.
--> How is a business plan structured?
A business plan usually has the following structure:
--> Why is a business plan important?
A business plan is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it enables companies to secure funding from investors by providing a clear roadmap of the business's goals and strategies. Secondly, it provides a framework for companies to work towards their objectives, monitor progress, and adjust course as needed. Lastly, it helps companies anticipate and address potential challenges that may arise in the course of business operations.
--> What are the three main purposes of a business plan?
The three main purposes of a business plan are:
- To serve as a roadmap for achieving the business's goals,
- To attract funding and investment from investors or financial institutions, and
- To provide a framework for managing and monitoring the business's performance over time.
Final Business Planning Quiz
Business planning quiz - teste dein wissen.
What is business planning?
Show answer
Business planning is a process of developing a roadmap aimed towards achieving a business goal.
Show question
The document used by stakeholders to collate ideas into a formally written document that summarizes the business current state, the state of the business market, and steps to improve the business performance is called ……
A business plan
What is a business plan?
A business plan is an officially written document showing a business core activities, objectives, and the business roadmap to achieving its established objectives.
Give two importance of a good business plan
A. The importance of a good business plan can be seen in the organised growth of a business. It allows business owners to track business growth and stay in line with the business objectives.
B. A business plan also gives investors an idea of how the business is operated and if it is worth investing in. A good business plan attracts investors and sells them the idea of your business.
What is the first element of a business plan?
Executive summary
What information does the executive summary provide?
This executive summary provides a brief description of the business. It gives information on the business leadership, its employees, operations and location. It also provides the business mission statement, goals and business vision.
A business budget usually includes ….,.
A business budget includes cost from paying staff, production processes, marketing, expanding, logistics, development, researching and all other business related expenses.
What does a SWOT analysis show about a business ?
A SWOT analysis shows a business strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the business.
A good business plan helps a business focus on its short term and long term goals, and it also helps business owners focus on the specified steps put in place to help the business succeed. True or False?
A business plan is the same for all types of business.
Financial plans are not a part of business plan.
SWOT analysis is a way to carry out a market analysis.
Market analysis and marketing strategy can be used interchangeably.
A good business plan can help startups attract investment or get loans without a proven financial record.
What is the difference between market analysis and marketing strategy?
Market strategy provides information on how a business plans to distribute its products or services while market analysis gives details on business strengths, weaknesses along with market threats and opportunities.
Business planning is a process of ________ aimed towards achieving a business goal.
developing a roadmap
A business plan is an ________ showing a business core activities, objectives, and the business roadmap to achieving its established objectives
officially written document
A good business plan only helps the business focus on its short term goals.
A good business plan can help a company to:
Stay in line with the business objectives
Executive Summary is the description of the products and services offered by a business.
Good business planning requires a well written market analysis showing demand and supply.
SWOT analysis stands for ________ .
strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the market
________ includes cost from paying staff, production processes, marketing, expanding, logistics, development, researching and all other business related expenses.
A business budget
A company generating a revenue of £150,000 from a business with a total cost of £80,000 per year. How much profit does it earn?
£150,000 - £80,000 = £70,000.
Variable cost = Output x Variable cost per unit output
What is not a business variable cost?
production materials expenses
- Business Development
- Influences on Business
- Introduction to Business
of the users don't pass the Business Planning quiz! Will you pass the quiz?
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How to Write a Business Plan For Investors (That They Will Love)
You want to write a great business plan that investors will love, but you have no idea how. luckily, the experts at bizplan have given us some great tips check out this in-depth, point-by-point breakdown of how to write an awesome business plan..
April 14th, 2022 | By: The Startups Team | Tags: Development , Pitching , Leadership , Growth , Product , Management , Team , Communication , Pitch Decks , Customers , Scaling , Planning
A good business plan does more than just inform readers about what your company does, how you earn money, or what you want to do. It persuades the reader that your company is awesome, gets them excited about the opportunity to get involved, and makes them want to help you succeed.
But how do you write a good business plan for investors? You probably didn’t go to business school and if you’re a first-time founder, it can be really hard to figure out how to do something so technical. But don’t worry! This guide will walk you through how to write a business plan for investors, will help you answer the most important questions about your business, and will show you the best ways to illustrate them. We’ve also thrown in some additional resources you can turn to for help.
And if that’s still not enough, Bizplan is giving Startups.com readers 50 percent off their first month of business planning services. Check it out here .
The Big Picture
There are 14 important sections of a business plan. But that is by no means an excuse to write out your entire life story on paper. The average business plan should be around 15 pages — no more than 20.
In the past, the average business plan was anywhere from 40 to 100 pages, and guess what they found out? No one was reading all of that. So don’t let important information about your company get lost in a jumble of words. Investors look for founders who can provide the most value in the least amount of time, and your business plan is a great indication of that ability.
The Big Questions
By the time readers are done reading your business plan, they should have a clear understanding of the following: Why (Why this? Why now? Why you? Why them?) and how (How will you make money? How will you get customers? How will you grow your business?).
These questions should be answered throughout your business plan, and should prove to those reading it that your company has the right product, market, team, time, and strategy to make them a return on their investment.
So without further adieu, here is a breakdown of writing a business plan for investors:
1. Executive Summary
The Executive Summary is an introduction to the main ideas that you will discuss in the rest of the plan. If an investor read only the Executive Summary and nothing else, you’d want them to be able to walk away with a clear understanding of the main highlights of your business and why it’s exciting.
A good Executive Summary includes quick, one to two sentence overviews of the following information: mission statement, product/service summary, market opportunity summary, traction summary, next steps, and vision statement.
Pro tip: Although the Executive Summary comes first, it is often helpful to write it last because you’ll have worked through everything by then.
2. Investment Opportunity
The Investment Opportunity section is where you tell investors what your goals are, why they are integral in helping you achieve those goals, and what they have to gain from getting involved with your company. This includes:
- Your Funding Goal : How much money do you need to move forward
- Terms : What will investors get in exchange for their investment?
- Use of Funds : How do you plan to use those funds? (Hint: a 6-figure salary for yourself isn’t what they’re looking for here)
- Milestones : What will you be able to achieve with their investment?
Again, the most important question to answer here is why: Why should investors want to be a part of your company, and why is now the time for them to get involved? Identify the three to four key factors that make your company a great opportunity and make sure they’re included in this section.
3. Team Overview
This is where you introduce your team and how you’ll work together to bring the business to life. An ideal Team Overview section makes the case not only that your team is the right team for the job, but that you’re the only team for the job.
In order to do this, you need to create a bio for each member of the team. Each team bio should include: the team member’s name; their title and position at the company; their professional background; any special skills they have developed as a result of their past experience; their role and responsibilities at your company; and what makes them uniquely qualified to take that role on.
Pro Tip: This is not the time or place for cheesy fun facts or hobbies. Aim for three to five concise sentences on each team member.
4. Market Opportunity
Before you do a deep dive into what your company does, it’s important to set the stage and provide readers with some insight about why you’re starting this company in the first place. A good market opportunity section addresses two key points: The problem that your product/service solves, and the industry trends that make now the time for your company to succeed.
When writing the “problem” part of this section, consider two questions: What problems do your target customers face that your product/service solves? What annoyances or inconveniences do they face that your company helps to eliminate?
When writing the “trends” section, consider these three questions: What recent emerging trends have you developed your product/service in response to? Are there any new or emerging technologies that make your product/solution possible? Are there any specific brands you can point to that illustrate the demand for products/services like (but not too like) yours?
And to sum it all up, write a conclusion that answer this question: How do the problems customers face and the trends that are happening come together to create the perfect environment for your company to succeed?
5. Company Synopsis
The company synopsis section is where you introduce readers to your company and what you have to offer. This is the easy part: It’s where you get to talk about what you’re doing and why it’s awesome.
Consider these questions if you’re having trouble getting started: What does your company do? How does it solve the problem you’ve previously outlined? What products and services do you offer? How will customers use your product/service? What are the key features? What makes your product/service different from anything currently available?
6. Revenue Model
This is where you answer the age-old question of any business: How does your company make money? Identify all current/initial revenue sources, including pricing, COGS, and margins.
Ask yourself: Why is this revenue model the right fit for your current stage? How does your pricing compare to competitors? Are there additional revenue sources you plan to add down the line? If you haven’t started generating revenue when & how will you “flip the switch”?
7. Traction/Company Milestones
It’s important for investors to see that your business is more than just an idea on a cocktail napkin; it’s an actual, viable business. Traction is a huge part of making that case.
Here are some key categories of traction that signal to readers that your company is making moves.
- Product Development : Where are you in the process? Is your product in the market?
- Manufacturing/Distribution: Do you have an established partner for production/manufacturing? Distribution?
- Early Customers and Revenue : Do you have existing customers? How many? And how fast are you growing? Have you started generating revenue?
- Testimonials and Social Proof : Do you have any positive client reviews of your product/service? Any high profile customers or industry experts?
- Partnerships : Have you secured partnerships with any established brands?
- Intellectual Property : Do you have any patents for the technology behind your company? Is your company name trademarked?
- Press Mentions : Has your company been featured by any media outlets? Which ones?
8. Industry Analysis
The industry analysis section provides a bird’s eye view of the industry your company is positioned in, what’s happening in the industry, and where your company stands in relation to your peers. You want readers to walk away from your business plan seeing not only that you’re an expert in your company but that you’re highly knowledgeable about the industry you’re entering into.
Be intentional about the statistics you include in the plan. Include only numbers that really help to illustrate: the size of the opportunity your company is positioned to address; the demand for your solution; the growth of the audience/demand for your product that is already happening; and competitor analysis.
Now that you’ve introduced readers to your industry, it’s time to give them a glimpse into the other companies that are working in the same space, and how your company stacks up. Identify at least three sources of competition for your company and answer the following questions about each one:
- Basic Info : Where are they based? What stage of growth are they in?
- Traction : How much revenue do they generate? How many customers do they have? Have they received funding?
- Similarities and Differences : What are their strengths? How do you plan to neutralize them? What are their weaknesses? How is that an advantage to you?
- The Takeaway : What can you learn from your competitors to make your company stronger?
Pro tip: When identifying competitors, it’s important to think outside the box, and look beyond companies that are offering the exact same product or service that you are. A skimpy competitor analysis section doesn’t tell investors that your solution is unrivaled — it tells them that you’re not looking hard enough.
9. Differentiating Factors
The differentiating factors section is where you outline how your product/service is different from others on the market and how those differences will help you to maintain your strategic edge. Ask yourself: What are three to five key differentiators between your company and other solutions out there? How will these advantages translate into a long-term advantage for your company?
10. Target Audience
The target audience section is where you show readers that you know who your audience is, where they are, and what is important to them.
Some questions to help you get started include: Who are the people that your product/service is designed to appeal to? What do you know about customers in this demographic? Does your target audience skew more male or more female? What age range do your target customers fall in? Around how many people are there in this target demographic? Where do your target customers live? How much money do they make? Do they have any particular priorities or concerns when it comes to the products/services they buy?
11. User Acquisition and Marketing Strategy
Now that we know who your customers are, the next question is: How do you plan on getting them?
Ask yourself: How will you get your first customers? Who will you target first? Will you introduce your product in certain key geographic locations? Are there any existing brands that you are planning to partner with? How do you plan to raise awareness for your brand? What forms of media will you use? Why? Do you have a presence on social media? Which platforms do you use and why? Essentially, what is your marketing strategy ?
12. Future Growth and Development
Once you’ve accomplished all the short-term goals, built out your initial product offering, and acquired your first customers — what will you do to grow your business from there?
Ask yourself: Do you have any new products in the pipeline? How will these new products enhance your current offerings? Are you planning to expand into new markets (new cities, new demographic categories)? Can you provide a timeline of when you expect each new development to take place? What metrics or conditions will help you to decide when it’s time to move forward? What are some potential exit strategies for your company down the road? Will you seek acquisition by a larger company? Do you plan to take the company public with an Initial Public Offering?
13. Financial Overview
Financial data is always at the end of the business plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. In fact, poor financials can rip apart anything you initially had going for you. The charts, tables, and formulas in your financial section show an investor how well you’re doing and what your odds are for continued survival.
The three most important things to include are: cash flow statement, income statement, and your balance sheet. While these three things are related, they measure quite different aspects of a company’s financial health.
We’re Here To Help
There you have it: A comprehensive guide to writing your next business plan for investors. Sound like a big undertaking? Our friends at Bizplan.com have your back. Click here for a Startups.co exclusive discount on their services. Good luck!
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How To Write the Perfect Business Plan in 9 Steps (2023)
- by Desirae Odjick
- Dec 3, 2022
- 25 minute read
A great business plan can help you clarify your strategy, identify potential roadblocks, decide what you’ll need in the way of resources, and evaluate the viability of your idea or your growth plans before you start a business .
Not every successful business launches with a formal business plan, but many founders find value in taking time to step back, research their idea and the market they’re looking to enter, and understand the scope and the strategy behind their tactics. That’s where writing a business plan comes in.
Table of Contents
What is a business plan?
Why write a business plan, business plan formats, how to write a business plan in 9 steps, tips for creating a small business plan, common mistakes when writing a business plan, prepare your business plan today, business plan faq.
A business plan is a document describing a business, its products or services, how it earns (or will earn) money, its leadership and staffing, its financing, its operations model, and many other details essential to its success.
We had a marketing background but not much experience in the other functions needed to run a fashion ecommerce business, like operations, finance, production, and tech. Laying out a business plan helped us identify the “unknowns” and made it easier to spot the gaps where we’d need help or, at the very least, to skill up ourselves. Jordan Barnett, Kapow Meggings
Investors rely on business plans to evaluate the feasibility of a business before funding it, which is why business plans are commonly associated with getting a loan. But there are several compelling reasons to consider writing a business plan, even if you don’t need funding.
- Strategic planning: Writing out your plan is an invaluable exercise for clarifying your ideas and can help you understand the scope of your business, as well as the amount of time, money, and resources you’ll need to get started.
- Evaluating ideas: If you’ve got multiple ideas in mind, a rough business plan for each can help you focus your time and energy on the ones with the highest chance of success.
- Research: To write a business plan, you’ll need to research your ideal customer and your competitors—information that will help you make more strategic decisions.
- Recruiting: Your business plan is one of the easiest ways to communicate your vision to potential new hires and can help build their confidence in the venture, especially if you’re in the early stages of growth.
- Partnerships: If you plan to approach other companies to collaborate, having a clear overview of your vision, your audience, and your business strategy will make it much easier for them to identify whether your business is a good fit for theirs—especially if they’re further along than you in their growth trajectory.
- Competitions: There are many business plan competitions offering prizes such as mentorships, grants, or investment capital. To find relevant competitions in your industry and area, try Googling “business plan competition + [your location]” and “business plan competition + [your industry].”
If you’re looking for a structured way to lay out your thoughts and ideas, and to share those ideas with people who can have a big impact on your success, a business plan is an excellent starting point.
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Business plans can span from one page to multiple pages with detailed graphs and reports. There’s no one way to create a business plan. The goal is to convey the most important information about your company for readers.
Common types of business plans we see include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Traditional. These are the most common business plans. Below, we’ll cover the standard elements of a business plan and go into detail for each section. Traditional business plans take longer to write and can be dozens of pages long. Venture capitalist firms and lenders ask for this plan.
- Lean. A lean business plan is a shorter version of a traditional business plan. It follows the same format, but only includes the most important information. Businesses use this plan to onboard new hires or modify existing plans for a specific target market.
- Nonprofit. A nonprofit business plan is for any entity that operates for public or social benefit. It covers everything you’ll find in a traditional business plan, plus a section describing the impact the company plans to make. For example, a speaker and headphone brand that aims to help people with hearing disabilities. Donors often request this plan.
Check out real-world examples of different business plans by reading The Road to Success: Business Plan Examples to Inspire Your Own .
- Draft an executive summary
- Describe your company
- Perform a market analysis
- Outline the management and organization
- List your products and services
- Perform customer segmentation
- Define a marketing plan
- Provide a logistics and operations plan
- Make a financial plan
Few things are more intimidating than a blank page. Starting your business plan with a structured outline and key elements for what you’ll include in each section is the best first step you can take.
Since an outline is such an important step in the process of writing a business plan, we’ve put together a high-level overview you can copy into your blank document to get you started (and avoid the terror of facing a blank page). You can also start with a free business plan template and use it to inform the structure of your plan.
Once you’ve got your business plan outline in place, it’s time to fill it in. We’ve broken it down by section to help you build your plan step by step.
1. Draft an executive summary
A good executive summary is one of the most crucial sections of your plan—it’s also the last section you should write.
The executive summary’s purpose is to distill everything that follows and give time-crunched reviewers (e.g., potential investors and lenders) a high-level overview of your business that persuades them to read further.
Again, it’s a summary, so highlight the key points you’ve uncovered while writing your plan. If you’re writing for your own planning purposes, you can skip the summary altogether—although you might want to give it a try anyway, just for practice.
An executive summary shouldn’t exceed one page. Admittedly, that space constraint can make squeezing in all of the salient information a bit stressful—but it’s not impossible. Here’s what your business plan’s executive summary should include:
- Business concept. What does your business do?
- Business goals and vision. What does your business want to do?
- Product description and differentiation. What do you sell, and why is it different?
- Target market. Who do you sell to?
- Marketing strategy. How do you plan on reaching your customers?
- Current financial state. What do you currently earn in revenue?
- Projected financial state. What do you foresee earning in revenue?
- The ask. How much money are you asking for?
- The team. strong> Who’s involved in the business?
2. Describe your company
This section of your business plan should answer two fundamental questions: who are you, and what do you plan to do? Answering these questions with a company description provides an introduction to why you’re in business, why you’re different, what you have going for you, and why you’re a good investment bet. For example, clean makeup brand Saie shares a letter from its founder on the company’s mission and why it exists.
Clarifying these details is still a useful exercise, even if you’re the only person who’s going to see them. It’s an opportunity to put to paper some of the more intangible facets of your business, like your principles, ideals, and cultural philosophies.
Here are some of the components you should include in your company description:
- Your business structure (Are you a sole proprietorship, general partnership, limited partnership, or incorporated company?)
- Your business model
- Your industry
- Your business’s vision, mission, and value proposition
- Background information on your business or its history
- Business objectives, both short and long term
- Your team, including key personnel and their salaries
Some of these points are statements of fact, but others will require a bit more thought to define, especially when it comes to your business’s vision, mission, and values. This is where you start getting to the core of why your business exists, what you hope to accomplish, and what you stand for.
This is where you start getting to the core of why your business exists, what you hope to accomplish, and what you stand for.
To define your values, think about all the people your company is accountable to, including owners, employees, suppliers, customers, and investors. Now consider how you’d like to conduct business with each of them. As you make a list, your core values should start to emerge.
Once you know your values, you can write a mission statement . Your statement should explain, in a convincing manner, why your business exists, and should be no longer than a single sentence.
As an example, Shopify’s mission statement is “Making commerce better for everyone.” It’s the “why” behind everything we do and clear enough that it needs no further explanation.
What impact do you envision your business having on the world once you’ve achieved your vision?
Next, craft your vision statement: what impact do you envision your business having on the world once you’ve achieved your vision? Phrase this impact as an assertion—begin the statement with “We will” and you’ll be off to a great start. Your vision statement, unlike your mission statement, can be longer than a single sentence, but try to keep it to three at most. The best vision statements are concise.
Finally, your company description should include both short- and long-term goals. Short-term goals, generally, should be achievable within the next year, while one to five years is a good window for long-term goals. Make sure all your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
3. Perform a market analysis
No matter what type of business you start, it’s no exaggeration to say your market can make or break it. Choose the right market for your products—one with plenty of customers who understand and need your product—and you’ll have a head start on success. If you choose the wrong market, or the right market at the wrong time, you may find yourself struggling for each sale.
Market analysis is a key section of your business plan, whether or not you ever intend for anyone else to read it.
This is why market research and analysis is a key section of your business plan, whether or not you ever intend for anyone else to read it. It should include an overview of how big you estimate the market is for your products, an analysis of your business’s position in the market, and an overview of the competitive landscape. Thorough research supporting your conclusions is important both to persuade investors and to validate your own assumptions as you work through your plan.
How big is your potential market?
The potential market is an estimate of how many people need your product. While it’s exciting to imagine sky-high sales figures, you’ll want to use as much relevant independent data as possible to validate your estimated potential market.
Since this can be a daunting process, here are some general tips to help you begin your research:
- Understand your ideal customer profile . If you’re targeting millennial consumers in the US, you first can look for government data about the size of that group. You also could look at projected changes to the number of people in your target age range over the next few years.
- Research relevant industry trends and trajectory. If your product serves retirees, try to find data about how many people will be retiring in the next five years, as well as any information you can find about consumption patterns among that group. If you’re selling fitness equipment, you could look at trends in gym memberships and overall health and fitness among your target audience or the population at large. Finally, look for information on whether your general industry is projected to grow or decline over the next few years.
- Make informed guesses. You’ll never have perfect, complete information about the size of your total addressable market. Your goal is to base your estimates on as many verifiable data points as necessary for a confident guess.
Some sources to consult for market data include government statistics offices, industry associations, academic research, and respected news outlets covering your industry.
SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis looks at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. What are the best things about your company? What are you not so good at? What market or industry shifts can you take advantage of and turn into opportunities? Are there external factors threatening your ability to succeed?
These breakdowns often are presented as a grid, with bullet points in each section breaking down the most relevant information—so you can probably skip writing full paragraphs here. Strengths and weaknesses—both internal company factors—are listed first, with opportunities and threats following in the next row. With this visual presentation, your reader can quickly see the factors that may impact your business and determine your competitive advantage in the market.
Here’s an example:
Free: SWOT Analysis Template
Get your free SWOT Analysis Template. Use this free PDF to future-proof your business by identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
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Competitive analysis.
There are three overarching factors you can use to differentiate your business in the face of competition:
- Cost leadership. You have the capacity to maximize profits by offering lower prices than the majority of your competitors. Examples include companies like Mejuri and Endy .
- Differentiation. Your product or service offers something distinct from the current cost leaders in your industry and banks on standing out based on your uniqueness. Think of companies like Knix and Qalo .
- Segmentation. You focus on a very specific, or niche, target market, and aim to build traction with a smaller audience before moving on to a broader market. Companies like TomboyX and Heyday Footwear are great examples of this strategy.
To understand which is the best fit, you’ll need to understand your business as well as the competitive landscape.
You’ll always have competition in the market, even with an innovative product, so it’s important to include a competitive overview in your business plan. If you’re entering an established market, include a list of a few companies you consider direct competitors and explain how you plan to differentiate your products and business from theirs.
You’ll always have competition in the market, even with an innovative product.
For example, if you’re selling jewelry, your competitive differentiation could be that, unlike many high-end competitors, you donate a percentage of your profits to a notable charity or pass savings on to your customers.
If you’re entering a market where you can’t easily identify direct competitors, consider your indirect competitors—companies offering products that are substitutes for yours. For example, if you’re selling an innovative new piece of kitchen equipment, it’s too easy to say that because your product is new, you have no competition. Consider what your potential customers are doing to solve the same problems your product solves.
4. Outline management and organization
The management and organization section of your business plan should tell readers about who’s running your company. Detail the legal structure of your business. Communicate whether you’ll incorporate your business as an S corporation or create a limited partnership or sole proprietorship.
If you have a management team, use an organizational chart to show your company’s internal structure, including the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between people in your chart. Communicate how each person will contribute to the success of your startup.
5. List your products and services
Your products or services will feature prominently in most areas of your business plan, but it’s important to provide a section that outlines key details about them for interested readers.
If you sell many items, you can include more general information on each of your product lines; if you only sell a few, provide additional information on each. For example, bag shop BAGGU sells a large selection of different types of bags, in addition to home goods and other accessories. Its business plan would list out those bags and key details about each.
Describe new products you’ll launch in the near future and any intellectual property you own. Express how they’ll improve profitability.
It’s also important to note where products are coming from—handmade crafts are sourced differently than trending products for a dropshipping business, for instance.
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6. perform customer segmentation.
Your ideal customer, also known as your target market, is the foundation of your marketing plan , if not your business plan as a whole. You’ll want to keep this person in mind as you make strategic decisions, which is why an overview of who they are is important to understand and include in your plan.
To give a holistic overview of your ideal customer, describe a number of general and specific demographic characteristics. Customer segmentation often includes:
- Where they live
- Their age range
- Their level of education
- Some common behavior patterns
- How they spend their free time
- Where they work
- What technology they use
- How much they earn
- Where they’re commonly employed
- Their values, beliefs, or opinions
This information will vary based on what you’re selling, but you should be specific enough that it’s unquestionably clear who you’re trying to reach—and more importantly, why you’ve made the choices you have based on who your customers are and what they value.
For example, a college student has different interests, shopping habits, and pricing sensitivity than a 50-year-old executive at a Fortune 500 company. Your business plan and decisions would look very different based on which one was your ideal customer.
7. Define a marketing plan
Your marketing efforts are directly informed by your ideal customer. Your marketing plan should outline your current decisions and your future strategy, with a focus on how your ideas are a fit for that ideal customer.
If you’re planning to invest heavily in > Instagram marketing , for example, it might make sense to include whether Instagram is a leading platform for your audience—if it’s not, that might be a sign to rethink your marketing plan.
Most marketing plans include information on four key subjects. How much detail you present on each will depend on both your business and your plan’s audience.
- Price. How much do your products cost, and why have you made that decision?
- Product. What are you selling and how do you differentiate it in the market?
- Promotion. How will you get your products in front of your ideal customer?
- Place. Where will you sell your products?
Promotion may be the bulk of your plan since you can more readily dive into tactical details, but the other three areas should be covered at least briefly—each is an important strategic lever in your marketing mix.
8. Provide a logistics and operations plan
Logistics and operations are the workflows you’ll implement to make your ideas a reality. If you’re writing a business plan for your own planning purposes, this is still an important section to consider, even though you might not need to include the same level of detail as if you were seeking investment.
Cover all parts of your planned operations, including:
- Suppliers. Where do you get the raw materials you need for production, or where are your products produced?
- Production. Will you make, manufacture, wholesale , or dropship your products? How long does it take to produce your products and get them shipped to you? How will you handle a busy season or an unexpected spike in demand?
- Facilities. Where will you and any team members work? Do you plan to have a physical retail space? If yes, where?
- Equipment. What tools and technology do you require to be up and running? This includes everything from computers to lightbulbs and everything in between.
- Shipping and fulfillment. Will you be handling all the fulfillment tasks in-house, or will you use a third-party fulfillment partner?
- Inventory. How much will you keep on hand, and where will it be stored? How will you ship it to partners if required, and how will you approach inventory management ?
This section should signal to your reader that you’ve got a solid understanding of your supply chain and strong contingency plans in place to cover potential uncertainty. If your reader is you, it should give you a basis to make other important decisions, like how to price your products to cover your estimated costs, and at what point you plan to break even on your initial spending.
9. Make a financial plan
No matter how great your idea is, and regardless of the effort, time, and money you invest, a business lives or dies based on its financial health. At the end of the day, people want to work with a business they expect to be viable for the foreseeable future.
The level of detail required in your financial plan will depend on your audience and goals, but typically you’ll want to include three major views of your financials: an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement. It also may be appropriate to include financial data and projections.
Here’s a spreadsheet template that includes everything you’ll need to create an income statement, balance sheet, and cash-flow statement, including some sample numbers. You can edit it to reflect projections if needed.
Income statement
Your income statement is designed to give readers a look at your revenue sources and expenses over a given time period. With those two pieces of information, they can see the all-important bottom line or the profit or loss your business experienced during that time. If you haven’t launched your business yet, you can project future milestones of the same information.
Balance sheet
Your balance sheet offers a look at how much equity you have in your business. On one side, you list all your business assets (what you own), and on the other side, all your liabilities (what you owe). This provides a snapshot of your business’s shareholder equity, which is calculated as:
Assets - Liabilities = Equity
Cash flow statement
Your cash flow statement is similar to your income statement, with one important difference: it takes into account when revenues are collected and when expenses are paid.
When the cash you have coming in is greater than the cash you have going out, your cash flow is positive. When the opposite scenario is true, your cash flow is negative. Ideally, your cash flow statement will help you see when cash is low, when you might have a surplus, and where you might need to have a contingency plan to access funding to keep your business solvent .
It can be especially helpful to forecast your cash-flow statement to identify gaps or negative cash flow and adjust operations as required. Here’s a full guide to working through cash-flow projections for your business.
Download your copy of these templates to build out these financial statements for your business plan.
Know your audience
When you know who will be reading your plan—even if you’re just writing it for yourself to clarify your ideas—you can tailor the language and level of detail to them. This can also help you make sure you’re including the most relevant information and figure out when to omit sections that aren’t as impactful.
Have a clear goal
You’ll need to put in more work and deliver a more thorough plan if your goal is to secure funding for your business versus working through a plan for yourself or even your team.
Invest time in research
Sections of your business plan will primarily be informed by your ideas and vision, but some of the most crucial information you’ll need requires research from independent sources. This is where you can invest time in understanding who you’re selling to, whether there’s demand for your products, and who else is selling similar products or services.
Keep it short and to the point
No matter who you’re writing for, your business plan should be short and readable—generally no longer than 15 to 20 pages. If you do have additional documents you think may be valuable to your audience and your goals, consider adding them as appendices.
Keep the tone, style, and voice consistent
This is best managed by having a single person write the plan or by allowing time for the plan to be properly edited before distributing it.
Use a business plan software
Writing a business plan isn’t the easiest task for business owners. But it’s important for anyone starting or expanding a business. Fortunately, there are tools to help with everything from planning, drafting, creating graphics, syncing financial data, and more. Business plan software also have templates and tutorials to help you finish a comprehensive plan in hours, rather than days.
A few curated picks include:
- LivePlan : the most affordable option with samples and templates
- Bizplan : tailored for startups seeking investment
- GoSmallBiz : budget-friendly option with industry-specific templates
For a more in-depth look at the available options, read Get Guidance: 6 Business Plan Software to Help Write Your Future .
Other articles on business plans would never tell you what we’re about to tell you: your business plan can fail. The last thing you want is for time and effort to go down the drain. Avoid these common mistakes:
- Bad business idea. Not every idea is going to win. Sometimes your idea may be too risky and you won’t be able to get funding for it. Other times it’s too expensive or there’s no market. Aim for small business ideas that require little money and bypass traditional startup costs.
- No exit strategy. Investors reading your business plan want to know one thing: will your venture make them money? If you don’t show an exit strategy, or a plan for them to leave the business with maximum profits, you’ll have little luck finding capital.
- Unbalanced teams. A great product is the cost of entry to starting a business. But an incredible team will take it to the top. Unfortunately, many business owners overlook a balanced team. They assume readers want to see potential profits, without worrying about how you’ll get it done. If you’re pitching a new software idea, it makes sense to have at least one developer or IT specialist on your team.
- Missing financial projections. Your numbers are the most interesting part for readers. Don’t leave out your balance sheet, cash flow statements, P&L statements, and income statements. Include your break-even analysis and return-on-investment calculations to create a successful business plan.
- Spelling and grammar errors. Some businesses think hiring a professional editor is overkill. The reality is, all the best organizations have an editor review their documents. If someone spots typos while reading your business plan, how can they believe you’ll run a successful company?
Read through the following business plan example. You can download a copy in Microsoft Word or Google Docs and use it to inspire your own business planning.
Download sample business plan example (.doc)
A business plan can help you identify clear, deliberate next steps for your business, even if you never plan to pitch investors—and it can help you see gaps in your plan before they become issues. Whether you’ve written a business plan for a new online business idea , a retail storefront, growing your established business, or purchasing an existing business , you now have a comprehensive guide and the information you need to help you start working on the next phase of your own business.
Illustrations by Rachel Tunstall
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How do i write a business plan.
- Executive summary
- Company description
- Market analysis
- Management and organization
- Products and services
- Customer segmentation
- Marketing plan
- Logistics and operations
- Financial plan
What is a good business plan?
What are the 3 main purposes of a business plan, what are the different types of business plans, about the author.
Desirae Odjick
Desirae is a senior product marketing manager at Shopify, and has zero chill when it comes to helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
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a benefit of writing a business plan. 10 to 50 pages long. a typical business plan is anywhere from -. content. what is the most important thing to focus on
A typical business plan is anywhere from ______. 10 - 50 pages long. What is the MOST important thing to focus on when writing a business plan? content.
Which component of the business plan contains a number for tracking purposes: answer choices ... A typical business plan is anywhere from: answer choices.
Business Plan Elements: · Executive Summary · Company Description · Market Research · Product or Service Description · Marketing and Customer Acquisition Strategy
A traditional business plan typically includes—an executive summary, an overview of your products and services, thorough market and industry
The business plan admits the entrepreneur to the investment process. Without a plan furnished in advance, many investor groups won't even grant an interview
Most business plans consist of the same general components. They begin with an executive summary, or statement of purpose, which identifies the reason for the
For startups, a well-written business planning document is important to source capital from banks and venture capitalists. A business plan also provides a
There are 14 important sections of a business plan. But that is by no means an excuse to write out your entire life story on paper. The average business plan
Business plans can span from one page to multiple pages with detailed graphs and reports. There's no one way to create a business plan. The goal