A well conceived business plan is crucial to the overall success of your company. It defines your overall objectives as well as what sets your vision apart from competition in the market. A good business plan is essential if you are looking for investors.
Whether you write your business plan from scratch or use business plan software, the key to creating a great plan is to make it short and crisp, illustrating your knowledge about your target audience, as well as using the business plan as a tool that you can continue to refine as your business develops and grows.
What Do You Need to Include in a Business Plan and Why
A business plan that is short and crisp brings you more attention simply because no investor will sit down and read a hundred pages of content. A concise plan should clearly detail your plans, your problems, the solutions you propose for them, as well as your financial requirements.
Business plans typically contain various sections that detail different areas of growth, as well as the potential for your business to succeed. The most important part of your business plan is the executive summary.
Executive Summary
Your executive summary is the first thing a potential investor will want to look at, but you should ideally write it at the end. An executive summary is an overall overview of your business, and it is always placed at the beginning of the business plan.
A good executive summary begins with an overall business overview, ideally in one sentence. An investor should be able to take a look at the first sentence and know what your business is about. The executive summary should not be more than two pages, and you should include the important parts of all the details you will go on to describe later in your business plan.
Investors can ask you only for the executive summary of your business plan, and take conversations with you forward based on what they read there. Remember to include essential information about your business such as your milestones for growth as well as your current progress, your knowledge of your target customers, why your business is important, the problems you could face, as well as your proposed solutions for those problems.
Opportunity
This is the second section of your business plan, and this is where you go into details about your business and showcase your market research. Mention what sets your business apart from your competition, and why you think you will succeed.
Execution
Once you have established why your business matters and why you have the potential to succeed over your competition, detail how you will go about achieving that success. Having a clear idea as well as knowledge of what makes a business in your industry succeed or fail is essential to writing this segment.
In this section, you should also mention all your business has achieved so far and present your future forecast for how you see your business growing in the future.
Management Team
Investors love a good team. A business cannot succeed until the employees put in the effort, and this section will show your investors how you actually run your company. It is essential to provide bios of your key team members, present good management practices, as well as showcase the potential of your employees. A united and well-rounded team is a big draw for investors.
Financial Plan
If you want your business to succeed, you must know the financial requirements towards reaching that success. Your investors will want to know that you know not only how much investment you need, but why you need it as well. Having a clear and defined approach to why you are asking for your investment as well as how you intend to use the funding towards furthering your business will give you an edge in your business plan.
Appendix
If there is any information you want to add that you could not place in other sections of your business plan, or if you want to add pictures or more data, this is the section where you do it.
Your business plan should include all these sections, with your executive summary being the most important part. By writing the executive summary at the end, you give yourself the opportunity to fully explain your overall business plan succinctly and in a convincing manner.
