A business plan helps counterbalance your emotional response to your business so that you can step back and take an objective look at the following:
- What you’re doing and why;
- What you know for a fact, and;
- What you’re still trying to figure out.
A business plan also helps you launch faster and smarter because it gets everyone involved — partners, employees, customers, and suppliers.
Execute Your Plan
Execution is everything, and this means setting priorities, establishing goals and measuring performance. A business plan helps develop your game plan and encourages you to ask important questions, including:
- What features do customers really want?
- How much will they pay for the product?
- How can you attract customers in a cost-effective and scalable manner?
Each of these things can be addressed in the business planning process.
Communicate Your Vision
If you raise or borrow money, you’ll need to communicate your vision in a clear, compelling way. A good business plan will help you do that. Banks and lenders may look more favorably on your application if you have a plan.
Making a business plan is a valuable exercise. You need to make sure you understand all the elements of the plan and can communicate it to your team and investors. Building a complete and credible plan is a good test of whether your venture has legs. Having a business is all about doing something you enjoy without undue stress, uncertainty, and risk. However, you will never remove all uncertainties, so plan your activities in an incremental fashion, updating your plan as you learn, responding to new customers, markets, and partnerships.
A business plan helps focus strategy, manage milestones and metrics, assign and track responsibilities and performance, and manage money using projections for sales, costs, expenses, and cash.
A business plan is created to define a new business; support a loan application; raise equity funding; set objectives and describe programs to achieve them; evaluate a new product line, promotion, or expansion; refine agreements with partners; and set a value on a business for sale or legal purposes.
If you are still unsure of how to get started, we can help you with your particular situation. Get in touch with us today, and you’ll have the right partner to get started on your business plan.