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The first section of your business plan is your Executive Summary.
Because most investors are inundated with business plans, they often give them no more than a cursory review. Accordingly, it is critical that the first page of the Executive Summary stimulates and motivates the investor to learn more about your company.
The Executive Summary entices the investor to learn more about your company. The Company Analysis in turn educates the reader regarding your company’s history and provides context as to the current state of your company.
The Customer Analysis section of your business plan assesses the customer segment(s) that your company serves. In this section, you must convey the needs of your target customers. You must then show how your products and services satisfy these needs.
The Competitive Analysis section is the most misunderstood section of the business plan, mainly because entrepreneurs and investors often define the term “competitor” differently.
The Marketing Plan demonstrates how a company will penetrate the market with its products and services. The Marketing Plan should include “the four P’s” – Product, Promotions, Price, and Place.
Up until this point, the business plan has defined and scoped the company’s vision, described the company’s history, assessed the industry, customers and competition, and mapped out a marketing plan to attract customers. The Operations Plan presents the Company’s action plan for executing this vision.
Even the best new concept or existing plan will fail if executed poorly. The Management Team section of the business plan must prove to the investor why the key company personnel are “eminently qualified” to execute on the business model.
The Financial Plan explains how the execution of the company’s vision will reap great financial rewards for the investor. As such, it is the section that investors often spend the most time scrutinizing.
How a Template Can Help You
Using simple business plan templates suited to your business sector and created by a reputable company, can eliminate a lot of time putting together the outline, format, table of contents, and, especially, financial model. Although there is still a great deal of work you must do, even with a template, many hours are eliminated from your preparation time with a template in hand.
The template provides example text for the entire plan, giving you a real sense of what the narrative of each section should look and feel like when completed. This gives an entrepreneur a much greater understanding of what to do than a description of the purpose of each section can.
Finally, using a template rather than writing a plan from scratch should mean that you will need much less expertise in accounting. Although an understanding of accounting methods and an ability to read financial statements will be important for you to develop over time as manager of the business, creating pro forma financial statements generally requires much more financial skill than entrepreneurs start with.
How to Use a Template Correctly
All of the text in the template must be adjusted to reflect the specific local, market, and competitive situation your business faces. Even general research which may serve your purposes should be double-checked and updated if necessary. Proofread through the entirety of the plan and be sure to remove comments or tracked changes when finished to be sure there is no reference that you worked from a template. The result should be as professional looking as any business plan created from scratch, if not more so.
The financials must be adjusted as well, starting with startup costs specific to your situation and research, and then including the operating costs and revenue streams you project. Ideally, you will be adjusting a limited number of pages in the financial section, with the effect of these changes populating through all of the pro forma financial statements.
If you are searching online for a business plan template to put your business plan writing on the right track, you have a number of company's products to choose from. Generally available for under $100, a business plan template can save you dozens of hours of work and is well worth the small investment. Here are tips as you decide how to choose what template to purchase.
Choose the Company, Then the Template
A good piece of advice is to start by choosing an experienced, reputable company for a template. Look for a company that has assisted entrepreneurs in creating successful (meaning funded) business plans and can speak to its track record. Look for a company that employs experienced business consultants who have worked with hundreds or thousands of clients in the past. Once you've found a company that fits these criteria, choose the template that is most closely related to the business sector you will start your company in. If it is slightly different, do not worry. It should still provide you with a head start in your writing above a more generic template and especially above writing a plan from scratch.
Major Features to Look For
Look for a template which comes with a customizable financial model in Excel to allow you to generate and modify financial statements for the plan easily. Look also for a template which includes instructions or a guide to put it to use. If this is unclear, ask the creators whether a guide or instructions are included. Customizing a template can be a confusing process if no instructions are available.
Finally, try to find a template which acts as a sample business plan by including example language within each section to guide you towards your own plan. If the template merely includes guidance in each section as to what kind of information to include, it is not any more useful than a business plan book or outline.
simple business plan templates present you with the complete format and structure for your business plan, giving you a head start on developing this document. These are some of the benefits you will reap from purchasing a business plan template:
Time Savings
Even if you've heard it before, it bears repeating that creating a business plan can be a long process. It involves a great deal of research, strategizing, and financial projections even before the business plan writing can begin. Having a template to work off of will mean you will not have to worry about structure and can focus entirely on the content of the plan.
The financial model included in the business plan template will be the biggest timesaver. With just a few adjustments, you should have a full set of financial statements specific to your situation. If the template is specific to your business sector the time savings will be even greater. Creating a financial model from scratch involves both accounting and Excel knowledge which goes beyond what the average entrepreneur has. You are probably starting a business because of an idea for or expertise in a specific industry, not because you are an expert business manager. A template is one of the tools which lets entrepreneurs who are not expert managers get a leg up as they start out.
Guidance
A template should provide guidance which will better direct your writing. Also, a good template will include sample text to show you how each section should be laid out. This should make it easier to focus in on the goals of each section.
Furthermore, as long as the source of the template is from a reputable expert or company, you can expect that using it will increase the chances that funders will read your plan. You will likely need not just one but many sources of funding to launch, and therefore will need a plan that can stand up to the examination of savvy investors or lenders as well as your Uncle Jim.
Using a business plan template means getting a head start in the business plan writing process. You will save a significant amount of time in your preparation of the plan, but the challenges you face will be the same. In the end, the success of your business plan will depend on how logically it pieces together the market opportunity you identify with the means and methods you will use to take advantage of it.
Choosing the Right Template
Using a template successfully starts with choosing the right one. Look for a template geared towards the specific industry or sector you will compete within, but don't neglect the fact that the creator of the template should be a reputable company who stands by their products and can speak to past success with them. If you have to choose between a sector-specific template and a template from a reputable company, opt for the latter every time.
The First Read Through
Start by reading through the template in its entirety to understand how the sections are laid out and what information falls where in the plan. If you jump right into writing before reading through, you will end up with redundancies or content in the wrong places, wasting valuable writing time. By reading through the plan you should have a good sense of the amount of work you will have to do on the various sections, and the key questions you will have to answer before you write.
Research
A phase of research is next. You must you study the industry, your customers, competitors, best practices for operations, and the startup expenses you will encounter. Document your findings carefully and spend a healthy amount of time on each section before moving on.
Writing and Editing
Finally, write the narrative for the plan, going through your research and the company, brand, marketing, and operations strategies you will pursue. The financial model should not require rewriting, but will need some editing to bring startup costs, operating costs, and revenues in line with your projections. Read back through the entire plan to ensure that it is now specific to your business and situation. Finish with thorough proofreading, relying not just on your own eyes, but the help of someone else to spot troublesome wording or redundancies you may have missed.
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