A business plan

A business plan is a written description of your business's future, a
document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you
jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your
business strategy, you've written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan.
Business plans are inherently strategic. You start here, today, with
certain resources and abilities. You want to get to a there, a point in the
future (usually three to five years out) at which time your business will
have a different set of resources and abilities as well as greater
profitability and increased assets. Your plan shows how you will get from
here to there.
Why We Write a Business plane:
For whatever reason, the trend in business plans these days is to go
back to the fundamentals, with good projections and solid analysis. An
"easy to read quickly" format is more important than ever. If you want
people to read the business plan you develop--and most people do--then
my best advice to you is keep it simple. Don't confuse your business
plan with a doctoral thesis or a lifetime task. Keep the wording and
formatting straightforward, and keep the plan short.
But don't confuse simple wording and formats with simple thinking. The
reason you're keeping it simple isn't because you haven't developed
your idea fully. You're keeping it simple so you can get your point across
quickly and easily to whoever's reading it.
Inside a Business plan:

There are three primary parts to a business plan:
 The first is the business concept, where you discuss the industry,
your business structure, your particular product or service, and how
you plan to make your business a success.
 The second is the marketplace section,in which you describe and
analyze potential customers: who and where they are, what makes
them buy and so on. Here, you also describe the competition and how
you'll position yourself to beat it.
 Finally, the financial section contains your income and cash flow
statement, balance sheet and other financial ratios, such as break-
even analyses. This part may require help from your accountant and a
good spreadsheet software program.
Breaking these three major sections down even further, a business plan
consists of seven key components:
1. Executive summary
2. Business description
3. Market strategies
4. Competitive analysis
5. Design and development plan
6. Operations and management plan
7. Financial factors
Explaination:

Executive Summary
Within the overall outline of the business plan, the executive summary
will follow the title page. The summary should tell the reader what you
want. This is very important. All too often, what the business owner
desires is buried on page eight. Clearly state what you're asking for in
the summary.
Business Description
The business description usually begins with a short description of the
industry. When describing the industry, discuss the present outlook as
well as future possibilities. You should also provide information on all the
various markets within the industry, including any new products or
developments that will benefit or adversely affect your business.

Market Strategies
Market strategies are the result of a meticulous market analysis. A
market analysis forces the entrepreneur to become familiar with all
aspects of the market so that the target market can be defined and the
company can be positioned in order to garner its share of sales.
Competitive Analysis
The purpose of the competitive analysis is to determine the strengths
and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, strategies that
will provide you with a distinct advantage, the barriers that can be
developed in order to prevent competition from entering your market,
and any weaknesses that can be exploited within the product
development cycle.

Design & Development Plan
The purpose of the design and development plan section is to provide
investors with a description of the product's design, chart its
development within the context of production, marketing and the
company itself, and create a development budget that will enable the
company to reach its goals.
Operations & Management Plan
The operations and management plan is designed to describe just how
the business functions on a continuing basis. The operations plan will
highlight the logistics of the organization such as the various
responsibilities of the management team, the tasks assigned to each
division within the company, and capital and expense requirements
related to the operations of the business.
Financial Factors
Financial data is always at the back of the business plan, but that doesn't
mean it's any less important than up-front material such as the business
concept and the management team
How Long Should Your Business Plan Be?
Depending on what you're using it for, a useful business plan can be any
length, from a scrawl on the back of an envelope to, in the case of an
especially detailed plan describing a complex enterprise, more than 100
pages. A typical business plan runs 15 to 20 pages, but there's room for
wide variation from that norm.
Much will depend on the nature of your business. If you have a simple

concept, you may be able to express it in very few words. On the other
hand, if you're proposing a new kind of business or even a new industry,
it may require quite a bit of explanation to get the message across.
The purpose of your plan also determines its length. If you want to use
your plan to seek millions of dollars in seed capital to start a risky
venture, you may have to do a lot of explaining and convincing. If you're
just going to use your plan for internal purposes to manage an ongoing
business, a much more abbreviated version should be fine.
A Better Business Plan Can Lead
to New Customers
These four steps can help get you on your way to
enhancing and expanding your client base.
One thing almost all small businesses need is more sales. John Doerr, a
venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said that at a
recent event I attended. Everyone in the audience -- which was made up
of several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and service providers --
agreed.
I wondered: How can good business planning help you find new
customers? The key is to take a step back from your daily routine and
reconsider your strategy, as well as its impact on sales. While you were
busy building your business, your market may have changed, even
slightly, or your customers may have changed. You can sometimes
identify these changes by asking individual customers out to lunch,

searching online or joining a workshop or class to give yourself some
new angles.
After that, the goal is to reconfigure your business plan by adding new
sales initiatives as concrete tasks among your milestones. Each initiative
should involve specific responsibilities that can be assigned to specific
people, with start dates, end dates and budgets. New startups will want
to be thinking about the following points from the start, making sure to
add these initiatives to your business plan with detailed explanations
about how you will track these goals and follow through on them.
Here are four steps that should set you on a path to finding new
customers -- and hopefully to higher sales.
1. Sell more to existing customers.
Generally, that's the quickest path to healthy growth. The best example
I've ever seen is the computer store that contacted its entire customer
base and reminded them all that they were most likely overdue for
upgrading their data storage, networking gear, printers, software and
computers. This company created a special promotion and cleared some
old inventory in the process.
How could something like that work for your business? The computer
store story illustrates how customers can be grateful for reminders, and
be ready to say yes to improved performance. Essentially, there are
three parts to it: Determining what you can offer that relates to your
customers and business offering, how to turn it into an event and how to
get the message out to customers.

And when you come up with something, put it into the milestones of your
business plan. Give it a start date, end date, and a person in charge.
Estimate additional sales so you'll know, for next time, whether you
underestimated or overestimated.
Related: Expand Your Contact Database to Find More Customers
2. Review your pricing.
Price is the most powerful marketing message you have. What's most
important isn't the high or low of it, but how it matches your strategy.
Some businesses are built around visible low pricing to bring people in
and generate higher unit sales, while others offer more quality and need
a higher price to communicate that message. I see far more businesses
underpriced than overpriced. A problem with frequent low pricing is that
your business may wind up losing customers who assume your product
or service isn't great because the price doesn't match it.
And if you decide to revise pricing, make sure you reflect that in your
sales forecast, and in your marketing messages. Synchronize what
you're saying to your customers with what your price says to your
customers. And then, most important, make sure you deliver the value
you promise. Put that into your plan as a task in the milestones.
Related: How to Find the Pricing Sweet Spot
3. Review your marketing messages.
That means both the core content of your message, and how you deliver
it. Some small businesses are turning to social media -- particularly
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn -- to spread their messages in new
ways. Others are resurfacing older methods such as email marketing,

direct sales, and even direct mail marketing because they've been
neglected for a while.
Find a way to make this effort concrete and measurable in your plan.
Add specific measurement, whether it's ads, page views, web visitors,
retweets, Klout.com score, friends, links or whatever. And make sure to
track results and follow up on results.
Related: How to Find Sales Leads on Social Media
4. Expand into nearby markets.
That means either selling something new and different to your existing
customer base or selling what you've always sold to new kinds of
customers. Either option is usually more realistic than trying to develop a
completely new product or service while trying to sell it to a different
client base than you're used to. You have to look at your own business
and think creatively.
Whatever you decide to do, make sure to add it to your business plan.
As much as possible, include measurement and tracking so you can tell
if you've successfully implemented the new plan. Then you follow up and
review actual results regularly so you can see what's going right and
what isn't, and make the necessary adjustments.
Updating Your Business Plan
When should I update my business plan?" The answer to that question
is always. You should be updating your business plan every month,
every week and every day; whenever things change, you update your
plan. And things always change. You should update your business

planwhen you're alone in the shower, when you're caught in traffic on the
way to work, and when you're walking alone. Update your business plan
when listening to customers and other managers.
While this might seem like chaos, it's actually the opposite; the
constantly-updated business plan is what makes order out of chaos. It
becomes a long-term planning process that sets up your strategy,
objectives and the steps you need to take by constantly being aware of
the results of these steps.
Managing the Planning Process
The Annual Update
Update your plan thoroughly at least once a year. You can start with an
old plan and revise, but make sure you're taking a fresh look--distance
yourself from the trees and look at the forest.
 Talk to your customers and potential customers.
Review your value proposition. What are your customers buying?
What problems do you solve? What other solutions can they choose?
 Try to come up with a new market segmentation.
Segmentation is the grouping or divisions you see in the market. For
example, if you normally view your market by type of product, look at it
by channel or buyer. If you divide by region, divide by size of buyer
company. Think up a new segmentation to give you a fresh view.
 Look at the larger potential market for the problems that need
solutions.

Look at contiguous businesses. Look at changing trends and
technologies.
The Monthly Update
Accounting and financial analysis normally works in months since the
books close after every month. Make sure you have a monthly review of
the difference between planned results and actual results for your sales,
profits, balance and cash.
 For each of the standard pro-forma projections, always maintain a
table with the plan, another with actual results, and a third with the
difference between plan and actual, which is called variance.
 As an annual plan marches through the months, you can use the table
reserved for actual results to include changes in budget that affect the
near future. For example, if the annual plan starts in January, then by
the end of May you have an actual Sales Forecast that includes actual
results for January through May and the latest revised forecast for
June through December.
 You must also review the activities, deadlines and planned results that
don't fall into the financials. A good plan is full of milestones,
assumptions and tasks, all of which should be measurable. Make sure
you review and update these measured results every month.
Managingthe Major Revisions
The business planning process involves an important paradox. Strategy
works only when consistently applied over a long period, which means
that you can't implement strategy without following a long-term plan.

However, blindly following a long-term plan can also kill a company that
stubbornly insists on following a plan that isn't working.
Resolution of the paradox is called management.It involves judgment.
The owners, operators and managers of the business have the
responsibility of distinguishing between consistently applying long-term
strategy and blindly following a failing plan. There are no easy rules for
this, but the first place to look for clues is in false assumptions. Has the
real world proven wrong the assumptions on which your strategy is
based? This kind of subjective judgment is what makes business
management so important. The planning process, with its regular review,
is critical.
Every Business Plan is Wrong
You have to realize your business plan is wrong. All business plans are
wrong. Plans are about the future--and nobody gets the future right very
often, so keep the plan fresh and watch closely as reality moves forward.
A planning process constantly watches the difference between the plan
and actual results. Reality swallows our assumptions and we need to
keep track of where, why and how we were wrong. This kind of tracking
becomes the key to management.
A Good Business Plan is Never Done

A business plan

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