Writing a comprehensive business plan serves as a blueprint for new and established business owners.
For small businesses, this is a fundamental step that allows you to write down your goals, vision and strategies.
Crafting a business plan does not only help you pitch your services to investors or financial institutions; it’s also a way for you to learn more about your business venture and map out strategies that will lead to business growth.
Therefore, in this blog post, we’ll look at what a business plan is, why you need it as a small business owner and how to write a comprehensive business plan.
What Is A Business Plan?
A business plan is a document that states a company’s goals, strategies for achieving them and the resources needed. With a business plan, new business owners can attract potential investors, lenders and partners to their business.
Moreover, businesses use their business plans to guide business operations and make informed decisions.
Why Do Small Business Owners Need A Business Plan?
Making a plan is the process of setting achievable goals and setting strategies up for achieving them. Just like Benjamin Franklin would say, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”
A business plan is not just a written document that helps you attract investors and financial institutions, it’s a roadmap that guides you through your business operations, helps you make room for scaling and shows you how to serve your customers well.
Let’s look at a few reasons why small business owners need to write not just a business plan but a detailed and comprehensive one that contains all necessary details.
Determines the possibility of your business
When writing a business plan, a business owner, through research, can discover if the market gap or business idea is viable enough to grow. This includes market demand, competitors and target audience. A business plan helps you understand all the complexities that come with starting a business.
Create a clear vision and mission statement
Writing a business plan is like a personal assignment you have to complete before starting your business. While writing a business plan, you can take your time to create a clear vision of what and why you’re building. This also helps you to build a positive work culture from the get-go.
Serves as a roadmap
A business plan helps you outline your business goals, strategies and resources needed. This serves as a roadmap for business operations and helps business owners stay grounded with their business goals no matter how big they grow.
Attracts funding
A solid business plan is like a personal pitch to investors, partners and lenders. It determines the viability and potential of the business. It also shows that the business owner has thought through important details about the business.
How To Write A Winning Business Plan
We’ve looked at what a business plan is and why you need one as a small business owner. Let’s look at how to craft a winning and comprehensive business plan.
The executive summary
The executive summary is a summary of your whole business plan. It contains your business name, your mission statement, the product or service you’re offering, what goals you hope to achieve both in the short and long-term, how much capital you need and how you’ll allocate it to the business.
The executive summary is the first part of your business plan, but it is always best to write it last. This is because it sums up your whole business plan. Also, the executive summary helps give the reader an overview of your business plan.
A poorly written executive summary already cancels out every other thing. Therefore, you need to take your time while crafting this section.
Company description
This section provides your reader with an insight as to why you’re in business.
What is your business about?
Why did you create it?
What problems do you want to solve?
This section provides an idea into your business, the industry and its goals and mission.
With a detailed section about your company, investors, lenders, and even your potential team members can see the reason why you’re building a business.
Product or service- Comprehensive business plan
This section gives a clear and detailed description of your product/ service. This includes details on production, pricing, and what sets your product apart. This section needs to comprehensively emphasize the competitive edge you have. Does your product or service offer better pricing, better quality or has a unique touch to them, detail it all in your business plan.
Market analysis
Market analysis is the assessment of different factors that affect a specific market, such as pricing, customers, and competition.
A comprehensive business plan always includes a detailed market analysis.
This section contains the current market industry, its size and trends.
It also takes a look into competitors, analyzing their strength and weaknesses and a gap in the market that your product or service can fill up.
The market analysis section should also contain a detailed write-up on the customers you’re targeting.
Understanding your target market is a crucial part of creating a business plan.
Organization and management structure
This section explains to the reader the organizational structure of your business. Is it a sole proprietorship, or do you have partners?
Use an organizational chart to visually represent your company’s structure.
Introduce the key members of your team, their qualifications, skills and how they are a part of your business growth and success.
Marketing and sales strategy
Write down the marketing strategy for your business. This should include channels and platforms that you plan to find, attract and retain customers. The marketing and sales strategy section should explicitly state your lead generation process and your marketing tactics such as social media, email marketing, content marketing and even traditional advertising.
Financial requirement
The financial section is a very important part of your business plan. This section includes your budget, how much capital you already have and how much you need. A detailed financial plan helps you to convince lenders, investors or partners of the viability of your business and how much cost, revenue and profit you’ll make over the next few years.
Additionally, the financial section helps you to fully understand the kind of capital your business is going to take from you. Writing this section comprehensively makes it easy to allocate the budget where necessary.
Appendix
Use the appendix section to include any other additional information such as resumes, product images, legal documents and data from your market research. This section allows you to provide charts, infographics and images supporting your overall business plan.
Conclusion- Comprehensive business plan
Writing a comprehensive business plan for your small business can be overwhelming, but its not something you need to do in a day.
Take your time, and outline the different sections needed to work through it. The best part of creating a business plan is that you get to have a full understanding of the business you’re about to embark on.
Furthermore, it tells investors, partners and financial institutions that you’re serious about your business.
Take your time to read this post, create an outline and start writing your business plan today.
What issues are you facing with your small business?
Drop your questions in the comment section, we’d be happy to help.
