A guide to writing a business plan, which can be a major factor in securing loans and investments for businesses. The guide covers what should be included in the plan, as well as what information should be placed in each section of it.
Every day, thousands of people try to get their hopes and dreams to take flight. Would-be small business owners desperately seek investors, lenders, and people who have faith in their visions, all the while established businesses try to expand their horizons into new markets. Some of them make it; more of them don’t. It’s not necessarily because they have an inferior product or that their goals aren’t reachable… often, they simply don’t have their ideas organized in a way that the people who are funding the project can follow. Without the money, the greatest ideas won’t go anywhere.
The best way to show potential investors or lenders exactly what you have in mind with a project or business is to draft a business plan that you can present to them. A business plan is a written account of what you hope to accomplish, how much it will cost, and who else in the area is already doing the same thing. It organizes the whole of the project in a way that can be easily referenced and understood by those who aren’t working intimately with the project itself.
So What’s the Plan?
How much information should be included in a business plan? Strictly speaking, you can include as much or as little as you want, but as a general rule you want your plan to contain both the up and down sides of what you’re wanting to do while giving a general view of how much everything will cost as well as an estimate of how much money will be made. The plan should be around 40 – 50 pages long; if it goes much longer then you might lose your readers in details and jargon, and if it’s much shorter then there’s a good chance that you left something out.
When writing your business plan, use the following guide to make sure that you tell the story that you want to tell to the people holding the pursestrings.
Executive Summary
The executive summary is one of the most important parts of your business plan; it should be the first thing in the plan, but should be written last so that you don’t leave out anything on the pages that follow it. Write a 1 – 2 page overview of the plan as a whole.