The Perfect Business Plan

I see hundreds if not thousands of business plans and the standard varies enormously from brilliant to embarrassingly bad. So here are a few suggested guidelines that I hope will help entrepreneurs and particularly those just starting up to produce a professional business plan.

The first and probably most important piece of advice is to focus on the audience and the objective of the plan. Most plans are written in an effort to raise finance from a bank or another source of investment so it’s important that you bear in mind the information they need to make their decision and also that your audience probably receive numerous plans all asking for investment so:

• Outline the basics; what will your business do, within which sector are you going to operate, what are your overall objectives.
• Explain the returns an investor could reasonably expect to make
• Make it concise and to the point avoid jargon and make sure there is an excellent executive summary which explains all of the key points. If you need to add a lot of detail keep that separate from the main document in an appendices section
• Ensure that the plan flows logically from one section to the next
• Conduct thorough research and try to be realistic about the future revenue that you predict, if you have ridiculously optimistic sales forecasts then everything else in your plan will come under question
• Explain any key assumptions that you make
• Include a contents page and format the document so that it is easy to read and looks professional. Don’t include graphs and pictures just for the sake of it but if they are relevant they do help to make a plan look more interesting.