Business Plans

A business plan is a written document that describes your business. It covers objectives, strategies, sales, marketing, and financial forecasts. 

A good business plan guides you through each stage of starting and managing your business. You’ll use your business plan as a roadmap for how to structure, run, and grow your new business. It’s a way to think through the key elements of your business.. 

A business plan helps you to:

• Clarify your business idea
• Spot potential problems
• Set out your goals
• Measure your progress

You’ll need a business plan to secure an investment or a loan..

Also, you can use a business plan to explan your business to customers, suppliers, as well as internal and external stakeholders.

There are different types of business plans and it is important to choose the right format for your company. This will depend on what you want to use the business plan for, and how often you are going to write one. In addition, you may need to take into account any limitations on your resources, such as time, manpower, and finances:

Generally speaking, there are two  types of business plans

• Traditional 
• Visual

Traditional business plans are more common, use a standard structure, and encourage you to go into detail in each section. They tend to require more work upfront and can be dozens of pages long.

They are mostly used when a company is looking for investment or when asking for a loan,

Although no two plans are identical most plans contain the following:

• Executive summary
• Company description
• Market analysis
• Organization and management
• Service or product line
• Marketing and sales
• Funding request
• Financial projections
• Appendix

There is is no escaping the fact that these traditional business plans are time consuming and will require many man hours. However, there is help at hand depending on the available skills time and finances available.

Plans are often outsourced, However, you will still need to provide all the data but the advantage is the plans are written for you, There are many websites that provide business plan writting service ranging in price from a few hundred pounds to tens of thousands. 

For those that have the time but maybe not the finances another option is to use a business plan template. There are websites that provide freemium and premium plans.

If you want to know more why not speak to us? We offer a Free Consultation so why not book an appointment?

You might choose a visual format if you want to explain or start your business quickly, your business is relatively simple, or you plan to regularly change and refine your business plan.

Lean startup formats are charts that use only a handful of elements to describe your company’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances.

• Key partnerships
• Key activities
• Key resources
• Value proposition
• Customer relationships
• Customer segments
• Channels
• Cost structure
• Revenue streams

The good news is that the very Visual plans may be as short as just one page and can take as little as 1 hour to produce. They are great to use when you need to have a quick overview of the business especially in a rapidly changing marketed when the company need to respond quickly. An example of this is the Business Model Canvas. This is a one page document divided  into 9 sections. 

The plan is  a great tool to share with your business team, brain storm and generate interaction from the team.

More details about the Business Model Canvas can be found on the creately website or in the section below

A slightly longer format is in a presentation format. The presntation would probably be less than 10 slides and allows you to add graphics and images to better explain your plan. the presentation can  and should be tailored to the audience.

If you want to know more why not speak to us? We offer a Free Consultation so why not book an appointment?

A business plan is a written document that describes your business. It covers objectives, strategies, sales, marketing and financial forecasts.