How to Write a Business Plan
Featured, Small Business, Small Business How to Guides Monday, March 21st, 2011When thinking of writing a business plan for small business, most entrepreneurs are faced with the question, “How to Write a Business Plan?” The answer lies in knowing your business inside out and knowing the structure of a good business also called business plan outline. Here we present an easy and simple business plan outline that can be used to write a business plan for businesses of all types.
Business Plan Outline
The Executive Summary is the first section of the business plan, but, you will usually write it last after writing all other sections of the plan. The Executive Summary provides the reader an overview of your business, its history and future plans. The success of your business plan often depends on how interesting the Executive Summary is.
Market, Opportunity & Competition Analysis
In this section, you will describe the business opportunity, define the target market including its size, demographics, trends and special characteristics. You will also need to provide an overview of the industry at large, analyze the competition and understand regulatory and other market conditions.
Business & Product and Service Lineup
In the business description part, you will give the reader an overview of the business you’re in and what will make the business successful. You will also describe the products and services that the business offers to the customers along with the details like the development stage of the product or service, its benefit to the customers and its competitive strengths.
The management and organization structure provides details about the key members of the management team, organizational hierarchy and key positions in the organization. You will also describe the key roles and provide details of who is going to man those roles. Apart from the management and ownership of responsibilities, you will also need to provide the legal structure of your organization and details of its ownership including the business type, owners and type of ownership.
The Marketing Plan section will provide the reader insight into your sales and marketing activities. You will need to provide details about each element of marketing mix in your business i.e. the Product, Price, Place or Distribution and Promotion. You will define how you are going to reach out to the potential customers and how you will make sure that the product is available to the channels accessible to your target market.
The Operating Plan section of the business plan is used to define the business operations process, describe the location of the business and land, building, plant, machinery, equipments and human resources required to successfully deliver products and services to the customer. This section also provides details about other elements of the delivery or manufacturing process such as the suppliers and the core delivery process itself.
The financial plan or financial management section provides the reader an insight into the financial history of the business, if available, and the future financial projections. You will need to include your detailed financial statements such as the balance sheet, pro forma profit and loss account and cash flow statement for the next three to five year depending on the requirements.
Apart from the core elements of the business plan outline mentioned above, you will also have other data, information, and research reports that you will need to keep handy. You can use the appendix section to provide all the additional data and information.
A good business plan outline is just meant to guide you on how to write a business plan; however, each business plan is unique and you will need to decide on the importance and relevance of each section according to the needs of your business.
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Posted by BETA Daily
on Mar 21 2011. Filed under Featured, Small Business, Small Business How to Guides.
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