Business Plans
What is a Business Plan?
A business plan is really a process, initially defining where the business wishes to go, how it will get there and the resources it needs.
The process is summarised in this chart:
Moving on to tracking progress and perhaps amending the goals, the route and the resource needs as a result of experiences, success and failures, in other words what has been learnt.
It should:
- Set the goals for the business
- Clarify what is necessary for success
- Communicate the management program
- Identify the components of the business, from sales, marketing, finance to people and skills
- Be shared with those who can influence and help achieve the goals
It should not:
- Be a one off exercise
- Be only a financial forecast
Writing a Business Plan
A business plan does not need to be a large document or a glossy highly polished one. It must simply paint a verbal picture of where the business is today, what it wishes to look like in the future, say an horizon of three to five years, and what needs to happen to get there.
Write in a language that implementers of the plan understand and can react to. If you can express your entire plan in two A4 pages then that is all that is necessary.
Remember that the plan needs to be referred to and updated regularly, a shorter document will make this easier.
If you are using the plan for, perhaps, a specific fund raising exercise with professional external funders such as Venture Capitalist or Business Angels, it may be necessary to write the plan in a more formal style, and certainly a detailed financial position would need to be set out.
Above all try not to make the writing and updating of the plan so personally burdensome that it does not get done, take it in your stride. After all, you are describing your business, what you want for it and how you will get it there. You would be able to do this at the drop of a hat in a discussion, so all you are doing is putting that discussion down on paper.
Back to topContents of a Business Plan
It is widely accepted that there are headline areas that need to be addressed in a business plan:
- The history of the business, and its status or situation today
- The background and skills of the managers
- Information about the market place
- The business Strategy
- How the business works - its operations
- Forecasts of results
- How the business is controlled
The importance of each of these areas will specific to the circumstances. A more detailed headings guide is given in the following downloadable Business Plan Headings Proforma, which is in Adobe PDF format.
In addition many useful books and guides to writing business plans exist, a good start may be your Bank many of whom provide helpful material (and it will probably be free).
A workbook is available from the Sunday Times, in the Enterprise Guide series The Business Plan Workbook
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