Start New Business With a Business Plan

How to Write a Business Plan

Planning a business and writing a business plan is more than just having a location picked and a product or service to sell. Financing, marketing strategy and future growth all require a well-researched and thought out business plan.

There are many articles and resources available on the Internet explaining how to write a business plan, but writing a business plan is more than merely following a business plan template or copying someone’s business plan examples. A business plan can be as simple as a few notes scrawled on a paper napkin, or it can be a 40-page document with multiple sections and subsections describing every minute detail of a company’s operations, products and finances.

Writing an effective business plan is easier if you take time before starting the writing process to conduct your research and gather the information you will need to incorporate into it. Business owners of new startups or established companies can benefit from thinking through and researching such success-determining issues as:

• Marketing strategies
• Regulatory environment
• Capitalization requirements
• Financing opportunities
• Organization
• Risks
• Competition

From this list you quickly realize that a business plan is more than a document a business uses to get financing or to attract investors. It is a roadmap of how your business will operate in order to succeed. Before you can begin writing your business planning roadmap, you need reliable information about your industry, your competitors, your product and your customers for inclusion in it. An industry analysis, competitor analysis, product feature comparison and market research will give you the information you need.

Too many businesses start out with inadequate planning. No one goes into business to lose money. If you start a business, your expectation is that it will be profitable and that it will succeed. Writing a business plan forces you to focus on the strategies that will make your business a successful one. That is why learning how to write a plan is so important for new businesses or established businesses that might be venturing into new markets or launching new products.

Business plans come in all shapes and sizes, so what you choose to include in your business plan will depend upon your audience, the question it seeks to answer or the problem it seeks to resolve, and your personal preferences. The most frequently included elements of a business plan are the following:

1. Executive summary
2. Business description
3. Business environment analysis
4. Industry analysis
5. Competitive analysis
6. Market analysis
7. Marketing plan
8. Operations plan
9. Team and management plan
10. Financial projections

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