Guide To Business Plan Writing

A business is a complex enterprise. To succeed, you need a plan. To convince others that you will succeed, you need to communicate your plan.

When you develop your plan, you need to incorporate all of the complexity. You need to match your technology (or concept) with your market, your intellectual property, your team, your competitive advantage(s), your research and development, your production, your distribution, your marketing and your strategy. You need to ensure that the complexity translates into profitability and return on investment.

Once you have your plan in place, you need to communicate it. You need to convince the right people to support you by joining your team, contributing to your venture, partnering with your company and/or investing in your vision. You need to translate your model for an interconnected enterprise into a linear document. You need to convince and inspire a skeptical audience with a short attention span and specific expectations.

This guide will take you through the entire process, from planning your business to writing your plan. Because each business is different, with unique strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and challenges, this guide will advise and direct, but leave you the freedom to express your vision as you see it.

The Purpose of a Business Plan

The purpose of a business plan is to communicate what your business will become and why it will be successful with the precision and depth only afforded by writing. The purpose of the plan is to inspire with a clear and succinct statement of the opportunity and to reassure with pages of detailed analysis and reasoned strategies. The purpose of the plan is to demonstrate that your concept is novel, your risk (relatively) low, your potential return on investment high, and your management team capable. The purpose is to show that you and your team are prepared for success as well as whatever challenges you may encounter along the way and to convince readers to contribute to your vision, whether they do so as partners, collaborators, advisors, employees, and/or investors.

The foundation of the business plan is a blueprint for your operation. It contains all the details about how, where, and when. It shows how all of the parts fit together. It shows that the technology matches the market, matches the customers' unmet needs, matches the future trends, matches the freedom to operate, matches the intellectual property protection, matches the competitive environment, matches the capabilities of the team, matches the strategy, matches the operations, matches the risks and matches the return on investment. A single mismatch and the business is likely to fail.

On top of this foundation is the excitement and inspiration-the reason why you are building this business. One reason is clearly return on investment. The business needs to make money for its stakeholders. But building a business is a not a passive investment. It is an active process that needs to engage those directly involved. It requires hard work and commitment. For those directly involved in its operations, the business plan needs to inspire dedication and devotion.

The Purpose of This Guide

The business plan is a complex document of enormous significance. The purpose of this guide is to break the process down into discrete steps and to show you the nuts and bolts of what you need to include-to let you focus more on the content and less on the format. The purpose is also to offer you some wisdom and experience. Like any other field of knowledge, the advanced practitioners of business planning have developed their own structure and jargon. This means that experienced readers of business plans have certain expectations. If these expectations are not met, no matter how sound the business and management team, the plan will come across as unsophisticated and nave.