Separate from a Business Plan is the Business Model. A business plan can help you clarify your strategy, identify potential roadblocks, decide what you’ll need in the way of resources, and evaluate the viability of your idea or your growth plans before you get started. Business investors must see this in your plan or they will reject it completely.
If you’re looking for funding to start a new business, or expand an existing one, you’ll need to be able to take a working business plan to your bank or investor. While writing a business plan can seem like a daunting task, there are plenty of tech tools, templates and approaches available to help you streamline the process.
The typical business plan is concise, 10 pages in length, and includes an appendix for supporting material like photos, clippings or articles. Well-executed business plans serve as a go-to guide detailing your business, its identity, its offerings, its financial status, and its path forward.
While business plans inevitably demand the use of figures, and while these can be impossible to be accurate with, at least by making intelligent guesses you can set yourself targets to work towards. A strong, detailed plan provides a clear road map for the future, forces you to think through the validity of a business idea, and can give you much greater understanding of your business’s financials and the competition.
It contains eight basic components as building blocks, and more specialized plans are built around them to capture the unique goals of your company. These are the main components of a standard business plan that you can decide to include in your own business plan.