Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens...
Jimi Hendrix
Business Services: Business Plans
What is a Business Plan?
A business plan is a formal document that summarizes the key components of your business, and it is one of the strengths of WritingHelp.com. You will need it to obtain financing to support plant expansion, to focus management on key marketing or financial goals, and to establish short and long term goals for the company. A business plan inherently adds discipline to your management and is indispensable to investors, banks, and other financial institutions. Some uses for a business plan include:
  • Obtaining financing for company expansion
  • Obtaining financing for a start up enterprise
  • Planning strategy and new markets
  • Focusing and moving management in a certain direction
  • Approaching individual investors or venture capitalists for financing
  • Setting goals for various departments
Writing business plans is one of our specialties. It has many elements that have to be addressed thoughtfully with a specific readership in mind. This one document is likely to be the single, most vital tool you have to obtain the funds you need for financing or to get your management team on board to meet company goals. With our broad business experience, we can add content value to your plan as well as make it outshine almost all others.

Why have a business Plan?
Business plans are the key document that outside entities use to determine the health, ongoing feasibility, and future prospects of a company. They are critical to any formal presentation about your company and are likely to be the focus of any decision making by the following groups.
  • Banks
  • Investment Houses and Venture Capitalists
  • Individual Investors
  • Small Business Administration
  • Boards of Directors
  • Management
Your business plan will save you time and effort by adding focus to your business activities and providing a concise means of presenting what your company is all about to people that matter.

Elements of a business Plan
Executive Summary: You should write this last. It should not exceed one page, and it should highlight the key points you want to stress from the body of the plan. This is the most important page in your plan, and if it is not done well, the rest of the plan is likely to be ignored by investors or financial institutions. Your executive summary should give at least preliminary answers to these questions:
  • Does the business make sense?
  • Is there a market for your product/service and can it be profitable?
  • Is the plan well thought out?
  • How do you distinguish yourself from your competition?
  • Do you have a solid management team?
You should write this summary, rewrite it, edit it, and edit it again. It is that important.

Company Description: This is generally a very pedestrian section of the plan including such basic items as the name of the company, its place of business and contact information, the legal form of the business (e.g., partnership, corporation, sole proprietorship), what phase the company is in (start up, expansion), a brief description of what you do, and some challenges your business and the industry are currently facing.

Management Team: Oftentimes, the is the section readers go to immediately after the Executive Summary. The reader wants to know who is running the show and if the management team is complete. What is their background and experience? Do you have the right fit? Do you have outside consultants and are there any glaring gaps that need to be addressed? Obviously, if this is a small start up business and you are the only key employee, you must stress your credentials. If you are a mid-sized company looking for a $2,000,000 finance package for expansion, you must be much more thorough in your presentation. Depending upon your circumstances, you may need to address key several positions such as:

  • Chief Executive Officer
  • Chief Financial Officer
  • Vice President of Marketing and Sales
  • Plant Manager
  • Manager of Information Technology
  • Director of Human Resources
  • Primary Outside Consultants
The role, experience, specific accomplishments, education, and reputation within the industry of the key players should be addressed. If you are missing an important member, you must describe what you are doing to correct the situation.

Marketing Plan, Target Market, and Long Term Goals: Depending upon the size of your company, the precise purpose of your plan, and who is going to read it, you may have to break this out into separate sections. In this section you must show that there are clients who want your product or service, where they are, and how you plan to make them yours. You should address geography (e.g., you are a residential construction company and will be building new homes in Prince George County, Maryland) and the make up of your target geography; you should address demographics and what your client looks like (e.g., higher income professionals looking to build custom homes; income level; age bracket); and you should address how you plan to approach the clients and get their business (e.g., websites, mailing campaigns, brochures, presentations at the Chamber of Commerce and other venues, and existing client referrals). The point is to make sure that there is an existing need for your company and you have the ability to tap into it. Finally, you may want to address longer term goals here as well (e.g., construct warehouses and one or two story office buildings) and how you plan to accomplish those goals.

Competition: It is very important to "be real" in this section. No matter your product or service, you have competitors and to say otherwise is a red flag to any reader. To them, it will mean that you have not studied the industry or market and do not understand the realities of your business. In this section, you should identify who your competition is, what strengths and weaknesses they have, market share, and how you can separate your company from the field. You can do this by comparing pricing, product features, your management team, your relationships with suppliers and distribution chains, your operational strengths, and your customer loyalty.

Operations: This section addresses how you actually run your business. It has more nuts and bolts than the others. It talks to technology, manufacturing processes, supply and distribution, quality control, inventories, and cost and other financial controls. It adds substantive oomph for the reader who wants to dig deeper and who is taking your plan seriously. This section shows that you know what you are doing in operating your business and is often critical in persuading potential partners or financiers to join your team. Note, however, that while it should be specific, it is not an operating manual for the company. It is an overview showing how the company operates.

Financial Information: If you are an existing business, you have probably done much of this already. You are likely to have an income statement, a balance sheet, budgets, and such things as cash flow projections, sales projections, and a great deal of costing information. Depending upon your business, you may have inventory controls, break-even analyses, and sales and capital expenditure projections as well. Many of these statements can be included as an appendix to the basic plan. This section is often used to address the funding you seek, how that funding will be used (e.g., capital expenditures, operations, additional inventory, or launching new products or services), and how much the principals have invested.

General Tips on Writing a Business Plan
Do This:
Write it well: This is where WritingHelp.com comes in. If your plan is sloppy, is missing or has inaccurate information, or has grammatical or readability issues, your work will be wasted. They won't tell you this, but your readers will think 'if they can't even write a plan, how can hope to execute it?.' Make sure you pass the plan through several hands for review and editing. Fact check and fact check again. Make sure your projections are feasible and defensible. Your readers are going to ask tough questions, so you should be even harder on yourself at the outset.

Keep it short: The business plan is intended to be a synopsis of all elements of your business. It is not meant to be an operational manual or an expansive treatise detailing each component of the business. If it is too long, it will simply be discarded as not on point.

Be accurate: People who read your plan are likely to ask probing questions about it. You must fact check and fact check again. You projections will have to be substantiated and your assertions must be supported. Although the plan should be generally optimistic, it should not be implausible.

Be honest about the competition: You are probably not the only company in this field. While you must distinguish your company from the field, you must acknowledge that you are not the only player and that the other companies bring important talent and resources to the table.

Don't Do This:
Don't be Redundant: Nobody will read a thirty page business plan if you are a company with ten employees and sales under $1,000,000. It is simply too long. If you are a small business with perhaps twenty employees, keep the plan to the point. Ten to fifteen pages will suffice. You can include attachments to augment your financials and charts to back up the body of your plan as needed, but don't overdo it.

Don't Lie: Everybody knows that business plans are generally optimistic. Optimism, however, is not deceit. Don't exaggerate likely revenues, minimize expenses, overstate key employee qualifications, and the like. Your plan will lose impact and the very credibility you wrote it for in the first place.
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