- The first section of your business plan will be the executive summary. The summary will tell readers exactly what you need from them and what you want them to do. Be concise: tell the reader in about a half page if the financials aren't too complex and certainly no more than a page. Provide a synopsis of the entire plan including the basic concept, financial highlights, capital requirements for the future and a description of where the business is right now. Finish by discussing the high points of your business history and list what you've accomplished.
- Start out this section by talking about the current state of the industry in which this business will operate. Talk about what's happening now and what the potential is for the future. Talk about the markets you will service and any new technical innovations that may help or hurt you in the future. Be sure your data is good and list sources. If you're looking for the reader to invest, you will want to use the best quality information from unimpeachable sources.
- A thorough marketing study is a critical part of your plan. You need to be thoroughly familiar with your potential customers and be able to produce a realistic estimate of what impact your project will have on that market and what sort of market share you could expect. The analysis of the market will also help you set prices, figure sales, production, advertising and distribution costs. You need to define your market clearly in order to focus your activities toward goals that are understood, not only by your management team and employees, but also by your investors.
- Check out the competition. This process involves doing an analysis to identify the strengths and weakness of both your direct and indirect competitors. Look for barriers that must be overcome in order to exploit your position within the market and look for your own barrier building strategies to protect your market share from the depredations of your competitors.
- This section offers a description of the product or products you will be selling. In this segment you need to document the development process of the product, how it is produced, how work and funding flow within the organization to support production and sales. All this will inform the budgeting process so you can create a plan to achieve your businesses goals. This section will also cover how you plan to develop your market, grow your market share and establish yourself as a go-to supplier of goods or services within your target market. Finally, you will document how you plan to develop your organization's management, sales, marketing and production teams to provide support for all this.
- This section describes the on-going operations of the business, how it will function from day to day. You need to talk about the responsibilities of team members and departments, logistics and supply, task distribution, supervision, financial management and planning. You will create a set of financial tables that the next section will build upon.
- The financials always come last in the business plan, but the argument for the feasibility of those plans is being developed all through the previous sections. Readers, especially if they are investors or loan officers, will closely examine your numbers, the tables, the formulas you use and the pages of spread sheets. This information is the key to an investor deciding whether or not your business has hope to survive and thrive.
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