Starting a Business | SEO & Google

How to Write a Business Plan

Creating a business plan is like baring your soul to the world because what is contained within the text will expose your aims, goals, aspirations and level of motivation for all to see.

Write the document for you, not others, and use it as the blueprint to success. Remember you're not writing a novel - less of the flowery prose and idealistic diatribe and more on the facts and figures.

A great business plan is really simple. No matter how complex your business, the end product should give any reader, no matter what their background, a huge insight into the business, your market, your goals and how you intend to succeed. A business plan should not be an excuse to confuse and wow readers with excessive use of management talk, industry lingo and overwhelming statements - it should outline your intentions in plain language. In terms of length, the business plan need only be as long as it takes to explain the proposition. Don't set yourself a page count and work towards that - write the plan, and if anything try and edit it down to 75% of the original size. A very long document will not help in raising funds, or encourage staff, or prove to be particularly useful in the future. In fact you will just bore people and maybe convince them that you are hiding insecurities about the business behind reams of stats, figures and a few poems thrown in for light relief.

Business plans really do reveal all, namely your own company's strengths and weaknesses, and are highly confidential documents that are not for public consumption. Be very careful who gets to see it and understand fully why a certain person needs to see it. Be sure to number each version and destroy older versions so that confusion does not arise.

A business plan is not a marketing document only consisting of forward-looking statements that will be nigh on impossible to achieve. A business plan is a working document, one that a good business refers back to again and again. It should lead your business to success and be followed, not locked in a filing cabinet once the seed capital has been secured.

What readers are looking for in a business plan is to be taken on a journey, from start to finish, of how you are going to make this business work. It's all very well concentrating on how many units you plan to sell and at what price, but don't lose sight of the fact that whatever industry you are planning to work in will have established competition. Acknowledge the competition and show categorically that you have researched the market. List your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

If you are able to obtain financial data (try the annual shareholder reports), quote this and show where your business fits into the market.

When planning how you are going to tackle the marketing aspect of the business, don't just list what you intend to do, work out a timeline (for yourself more than for others) and give people a point of reference of when certain projects or campaigns will begin and how long they will last. Break down the costs for each individual campaign and explain the rationale behind the expenditure and timing. When the plan is complete you will need to test it on someone you trust but who is not involved in the business or the same industry. Can it be read and understood by someone completely removed from the business? Whatever terminology or areas they find difficult to understand must be revised or explained - your plan must have universal appeal.

Once complete and fully edited it is time to make sure that the plan itself is well presented. Nobody is expecting gilt-edging, but having the document bound, or at least placed in a colour co-ordinated folder, will make you and your proposal all the more attractive - and the reader is also less likely to lose random pages, which helps too.


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