The Approach to Creating a Business Plan
1. Perform Necessary Research
Use databases, articles, and direct interviews with entrepreneurs and potential customers to do research on the industry as a whole, your niche market, your competitors, and operational costs. Keep detailed, organized, careful notes. Be very careful about citing sources, as you will be referencing them throughout the business plan.
2. Develop a Strategy
Base the best practices of industry standards as a starting point. Doing so makes sure your strategy is a solid one as it has been properly tested in fields by others. You will then need to develop greater strategies which are different from the remainder of the industry. Doing so will set a company apart from competition and set the stage for your business' success. This will inform all parties to your business plan.
3. Do the Calculations
Add up all the costs of every activity your business will engage in. Include operational costs for the first year, five-year, and long-term projections. Then create revenue projections for the same time periods. Base your projections on the research you did, in light of the strategy you developed. Your projections must absolutely be realistic from square one, or the scent of naivete will make its way to investors, who will promptly drop your business plan into the wastepaper basket.
4. Write the Draft
If you have done the previous parts of the business plan process thoroughly, writing a draft will flow naturally from your existing data. The idea is to turn it all into prose, organized into the ten standard sections of a business plan: Executive Summary, Company Analysis, Industry Analysis, Customer Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Marketing Plan, Operations Plan, Management Team, Financial Plan, and Appendix.
5. Make Revisions Until You Arrive at a Final Draft
You will need to make a revision for the purpose of ensuring completeness and logic. Take out any redundancies as the business plan will need to be quite brief but should not omit any items which present a complete picture. Once you have done this, you can take the next step which would be to revise for punctuation, grammar, and the proper formatting. If you would be best served hiring a professional service to examine the business plan, you should hire one. Business planning burnout just might lead you to missing many serious flaws.
