1. Research
Research and analyse your product, your market and your objective expertise. Consider spending twice as much time researching, evaluating and thinking as you spend actually writing the business plan. To write the perfect plan, you must know your company, your product, your competition and the market intimately. In other words, it’s your responsibility to know everything you can about your business and the industry that you’re entering. Read everything you can about your industry and talk to your audience.
2. Make it adaptable based on your audience.
The potential readers of a business plan are a varied bunch, ranging from bankers and venture capitalists to employees. Although this is a diverse group, it is a finite one. And each type of reader does have certain typical interests. If you know these interests up front, you can be sure to take them into account when preparing a plan for that particular audience. For example, bankers will be more interested in balance sheets and cash-flow statements, while venture capitalists are looking at the basic business concept and your management team. The manager on your team, however, will be using the plan to remind themselves of objectives. Because of this, make sure that your plan can be modified depending on the audience reading your plan. However, keep these alterations limited from one plan to another. This means when sharing financial projections, keep that data the same across the board.
3. Determine the purpose of your plan
A business plan is a written document describing the nature of the business, the sales and marketing strategy, and the financial background, and containing a projected profit and loss statement. However, your business plan can serve several different purposes. It’s also a road map that provides directions so a business can plan its future and helps it avoid bumps in the road. That’s important to keep in mind if you’re self-funding or bootstrapping your business. But, if you want to attract investors, then your plan will have a different purpose and you’ll have to write your plan that targets them so it will have to be as clear and concise as possible. When you define your plan, make sure you have defined these goals personally as well.
4. Document all aspects of your business
Investors want to make sure that your business is going to make them money. Because of this expectation, investors want to know everything about your business. To help with this process, document everything from your expenses, cash flow, and industry projections. Also don’t forget seemingly minor details like your location strategy and licensing agreements.
5. Create a company profile
Your company profile includes the history of your organisation, what products or services you offer, your target market and audience, your resources, how you’re going to solve a problem, and what makes your business unique. Company profiles are often found on the company’s official website and are used to attract possible customers and talent. However, your profile can be used to describe your company in your business plan. It’s not only an essential component of your business plan, it’s also one of the first written parts of the plan. Having your profile in place makes this step a whole lot easier to compose.
6. Have a strategic marketing plan
A great business plan will always include a strategic and aggressive marketing plan. This typically includes achieving marketing objectives such as – Introducing new products, entering new territories, boost sales in a particular product, market or price range, cross-selling one product with another, entering into long-term contracts with desirable clients, raising prices without cutting into sales figures, having a content marketing strategy, enhance manufacturing/product delivery.
Each marketing objective should have several goals and tactics for achieving those goals. In the objectives section of your marketing plan, you focus on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of the marketing tasks for the year ahead. In the implementation section, you focus on the practical, sweat-and-calluses areas of who, where, when and how. Of course, achieving marketing objectives will have costs. Your marketing plan needs to have a section in which you allocate budgets for each activity planned.
Thank you to Entrepreneur!