Designing the business plan
The layout of your business plan can help greatly in keeping the reader interested. Above all, the information you give must follow a logical pattern. You could present your material in the sequence shown here, using headings, so that the reader can survey your plan and navigate without difficulty.
1. A brief statement of your objectives.
2. Your assessment of the market you plan to enter.
3. The skill, experience and finance you will bring to it.
4. The particular benefits of the product or service to your customers.
5. How you will set up the business.
6. The longer-term view.
7. Your financial targets.
8. The money you are asking for and how it will be used.
9. Appendices to back up previous statements, including especially the cash flow and other financial projections.
10. History of the business (where applicable).
This list can be added to, of course, if the people who will read your business plan have a special interest to which you should address yourself. For instance, public authorities are concerned to know the effect on local unemployment: write a special and prominent section to tell them about it.
Deciding how much to write
In all business plans something, however brief, should be noted on each of the items listed above. How much you put into each section should be in proportion to the size and scope of your project as readers of your plan will see it. Busy bank officials will not want to read through pages of material if they are being asked for no more than a few hundred pounds. On the other hand, they will not be impressed if, when asked to lend £500,000, they are given only a sentence or two on the aspect that interests them most.
Getting down to it
Careful writing of your business plan will give you a better insight into your own business. You have a marvellous project; you have a shrewd idea that there is a market for it; you have obtained a good deal of advice from experts and have done sums to calculate your hoped-for profits, your cash flow and the money you need to raise. So, when you get the finance, you will be ready to go. Or so you believe! But it is odds-on you still have homework to do. Now is the time to do it. ‘Writing,’ said Sir Francis Bacon, ‘makes an exact man.’ There is nothing so effective in testing the logic and coherence of your ideas as writing them out – in full. As the future of your business depends in large part on your ideas working in a logical and coherent way, now is the time to subject them to this test.
How to set about it
Taking the numbered sections above one by one, make notes under each heading of all you have done or expect to do. For example, regarding Section 2, what do you really know about the market you want to enter? Have you done enough market research? Who will be your customers? How many will there be? How will you contact them? How will you get your goods to them? When it comes to Section 5, have you a clear, concrete picture of what you will actually do to ‘get the show on the road’?
Write it all out! Perhaps you would like to adopt the following method: taking a large sheet of paper for each of the above sections, note down the facts relevant to each of them; then sort them, test for truth and coherence and arrange into a logical pattern. You will prune hard when you come to write the document itself. In the meantime you will have organized your ideas, you will have noticed gaps and weaknesses, and the business is bound to go the better for it.
