A business plan is a strategic document that sets out the vision, objectives and key strategies, the market trends and overall feasibility. Unlike making one from a blank piece of paper, many resources are available online to make the process less daunting. With these tools it will be possible to create the concept map and present the content in a professional way even if you have absolutely no experience.
Recognising the Essential Elements of a Basic Business Plan
catholic to conventional business planning and there are some general rules of a business plan as it includes some sections that are mandatory. Here’s a deeper look at each section:
1. Executive Summary
- Purpose: It’s a brief description of your business and provides the context for your plan.
- Content: Engage your business name, physical address, your business’s purpose, and what you sell or do. Describe your goals together with what you’d like to do or accomplish in the near and distant future.
- Tip: Write this section last in order to give it a correct reflection of the information contained in the entire plan.
2. Company Description
- Purpose: To help the readers to easily understand what your business is all about.
- Content: Mention the form of your business (like LLC, corporation), the owner and about the history of your business. What sets your business apart from other businesses?
- Tip: As part of your presentation, you have to make use of your vision and values to appeal to the affective domain with potential funds or alliance partners.
3. Market Analysis
- Purpose: Writing an industry analysis enables you to convince the readers that you grasp the nature of the industry and its environment adequately.
- Content: Understand industries and markets, audiences and possibilities, competitors’ opportunities and threats. Always give statistics that supports the arguments you are making.
- Tip: Use the sources such as IBISWorld or Statista for industry reports and gain valuable-information on the subject.
4. Products or Services
- Purpose: To explain the offering on the table or the product that you are catering for the customers.
- Content: Specify what your products or services are, and what value they hold for customers, the prices at which they will be offered and within which stage of the product lifecycle.Explain how they satisfy the customer needs and how do they differ from others.
- Tip: It is also good to insert numbers and tables and even prototypes wherever they are relevant to ensure that whatever example you are using is live in the sight of your readers.
5. Marketing Strategy
- Purpose: Use the following to describe how you will acquire and maintain customers for your business.
- Content: Talk about your marketing communication in social media, e-mail and search engine optimization, your sales approaches and customer-interaction techniques. Also fold in the marketing promotions that we are planning on putting into the marketing plan.
- Tip: Develop a calendar of marketing activities you could use for the purpose of tracking time and deadlines.
6. Financial Projections
- Purpose: To give the investors an expected financial performance in an attempt to meet their expected returns.
- Content: Ensure you provide anticipated income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet for a least three fiscal years. It is imperative to explain the major assumptions made when coming up with such projections.
- Tip: To make an understanding of financial data easier, try to transfer it to special charts or graphs.
Easy Tools for Creating a Business Plan
Here’s an expanded list of tools that can help streamline the process of creating a business plan
1. LivePlan
LivePlan is very easy to use and can help design one-page plans, for a more efficient planning. It also includes financial forecasts, which generate charts with input data by default.
- Industry-specific templates: In fact, LivePlan offers more than 500 templates and you can select according to your business type.
- Step-by-step guidance: Every part of the plan is accompanied by guidelines and templates for you to know what kind of information should be provided.
- Financial forecasting: The application contains an integrated FIRE system that is used in generating the precise financial forecasts which do not require the deep knowledge in the sphere of accounting.
- Metrics tracking: After preparing the business plan, actual performance of the business can be easily monitored using LivePlan’s metrics feature.
Pros: Good for any type of organization, simple, has advanced financial features.
Cons: Contains a paid section after an initial set of material can be accessed for free.
Cost: Starts at $15 per month.
2. BizPlan
BizPlan lies in the fact that the process of business planning is as straightforward as possible. It’s ideal for startups looking to streamline the planning process:
- Drag-and-drop templates: The MOBILITY feature is another useful which makes the planning process easier by enabling the user to rearrange sections of the plan.
- Pitch builder: With the information provided in the tool, you can create a pitch deck that acts as an investor outcome of the business plan.
- Financial modeling: Out of the tools available, BizPlan creates simple cash flow and sales projections making it easier to present detailed financial plans.
- Part of Startups.com: In addition to the BizPlan subscription, you also get access to all Startups.com tools: fundraising, legal, and others.
Pros: Astonishingly simple, suitable for young businesses, equipped with the investor kit.
Cons: Monthly subscription; does not contain as many templates as some similar services.
Cost: $29 per month or part of Startups.com for $29/month.
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3. Enloop
Enloop automatically creates financial forecasts based on input supplied by the user.It also provides the scoring platform results which inform users on how competitive your business plan is based on other business plans in the system.If you need a free one and still want all the bells and whistles, Enloop could be for you. It offers:
- Auto-generated business plans: Enloop being an intelligent plan generator, it synthesizes your plan for you together with the financial reports.
- Performance scoring: The tool generates great score for your business plan and some recommendations on how to increase it.
- Customization options: In a nutshell, you can easily edit templates and sections in the plan so that the approach will fit the needs of your business.
- Financial ratios: The pre-built financial ratios enable those users who have no background knowledge in financial forecasting and planning to do so without the need for doing calculations that may result to the wrong figures.
Pros: Free for basic use, creates plans automatically, shows financial ratios as well.
Cons: Lacks customisation for the pro users and need additional transactions for the paid plans.
Cost: Includes basic version, and paid one from $19.95 per month.
4. Canva
Canva offers more than just design tools; it’s a valuable resource for creating visually compelling business plans, including PowerPoint formats to effectively deliver important information.
- Templates for business plans: Business plan design is one of the easiest to implement since Canva comes with numerous pre-existing templates.
- Drag-and-drop editor: This editor let you enhance your plan with adding new and customizing the position, size and other characteristics of graphs, charts, pictures and other visualization means.
- Branding options: When using Canva, you can also add your brand’s colors, logos, and fonts into your business plan hence making it friendly to the eyes of your company.
- Collaborative features: It also means that several team members can work simultaneously to adjust the plan and its diagrams in real mode.
Pros: No cost, suitable for the people who need graphics, convenient.
Cons: Not as detailed in the money management and more effective for production of presentations.
Cost: Free with a premium version at $12.99/month.
5. Google Docs
For those looking for a simple and free way to create a business plan, Google Docs offers:
- Collaboration features: Google Docs lets many users make changes at once, so teamwork is possible when creating a plan in Google Docs.
- Pre-built templates: There are free downloadable business plan templates that can be found in Google Docs that already outline the common sections of the business plan, such as executive summary section, business description section and so much more.
- Add-ons: Some features, for example, Grammarly or Lucidchart, can enrich your document and along with the better structure, improve grammar, and even suffice diagrams and flowcharts.
Pros: Free application available for download to join the team works great.
Cons: Does not have specific business planning features and financial forecasting capabilities.
Cost: Free.
6. Trello
Trello isn’t a traditional business planning tool, but its visual and task-oriented approach makes it useful for organizing your business plan:
- Task boards: Even though using boards is beneficial there are some cons to it You can create boards for different sections of your plan like marketing finance and operation and then divide them into tasks.
- Team collaboration: Trello incorporates different levels of collaboration to facilitate group working whereby members work on various part of the business plan.
- Visual progress tracking: Using Trello’s cards to breakout into sections I find it very easy to track progress and move the cards around after section tasks are done.
Pros: It’s free, provides the option to use visuals and is perfect for planning tasks.
Cons: Unformatted for scheduling tools that are relevant to financial plans and templates regarding business planning.
Cost: It’s free to use with the options to upgrade from as low as $5 per month.
7. Microsoft Word and Excel
Many entrepreneurs still prefer the classic combination of Microsoft Word and Excel for creating business plans:
- Word: Suits the representation of complex parts of the document, such as the executive summary and the market analysis since it offers alterability in full.
- Excel: Business suited for financial modeling and support with emphasis on creating the financial models.
- Templates available: Both Microsoft and other companies allow a free download of business plan templates, which can be easily adapted.
Pros: flexible, reliable, applied in business organizations.
Cons: Limited functionality for automated designs; it needs a manual setup and design.
Cost: Available as a free download, if you own a copy of Microsoft Office.
Tips for Writing Your Business Plan
Careful planning and preparation are necessary when creating a successful company plan. Here are some useful advice:
- Start with an Outline: Make the hope map extensible by following the key components discussed above to facilitate good organization of the hope map and cover all sectors without forgetting essential subtopics.
- Keep It Concise: In order to achieve clarity avoid the use of lengthy texts use bullet points and small paragraphs to pass information.
- Use Templates Wisely: You can use available templates from the Smartsheet or LivePlan tools to minimize the work while guaranteeing inclusion of all necessary parts with obligatory sections usually implied in a business plan.
- Be Flexible: Your business plan should be dynamic and therefore there should be constant review of the processes when you see new light on the business or when there is a change of mind.
- Seek Feedback: You should show your draft to other people who can criticize or give feedbacks before making the final copy.
- Practice Your Pitch: After a plan is written, the author should try to summarize it like when doing a pitch to investors or business partners; the way a plan is presented greatly matters.
Implementing the tools and tips outlined below will help create a straightforward business plan, serving as a compass for your venture and a clear model for investors. It not only aids in establishing the business but also in addressing challenges during its growth.
