The Importance Of A Business Plan

A Business Plan is a documented representation of where a company wants to be going, how it will get there and what it will look like once it arrives at the market. Business plan serves as a preferred tool of communication between the entrepreneurs and potential investors. In fact a business plan is an indispensable management tool can greatly improve a company’s ability to consistently establish and meet goals and objectives in a way that best serves the company’s owners, employees, and investors.

A business plan can take many a forms ranging from a glossy, professional document to a hand-written manuscript that serves to primarily document the goals & strategies of a company.

Usefulness of a Business PlanBusiness plans

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And the most important part of the story is the part about the future, the part featured in a business plan. It must distinctively communicate a company’s competence to anyone who is interested in being associated with you.

Steps involved in developing a Business Plan (Sixer Steps!)

Be it the maiden attempt or the nth attempt at developing a business plan the following steps could orient your ideas to channelize in the right direction:

Step 1: Identifying your Objective

Narrow down as to who is going to ultimately review this business plan and for whom this business is plan intended to serve. Some of the start points could be: do the readers know your company already, if so what do they know, what information are they specifically seeking in this business plan. Once the target reader of this document has been narrowed, decide what you want to communicate to the reader. If these points are clear then most conflict points have been taken care for starters.

Step 2: Outlining the Business

This forms the base for a good strategy that will work from the financial perspective. Also keep the detailed notes on the assumptions you are keeping in mind while the prospective statements are being developed and the composition of the elements that shall go into the business plan.

The last element of a business plan is the executive summary as it contains the overall essence of the plan and its contents are contingent on the rest of the document.

Step 5: Reviewing your plan

At this stage it is time soon after you have completed and reviewed you draft plan to have a third eye review of your plan for its completeness in terms of having addressed all points, in terms of logical connectivity, objectivity, cohesiveness, clarity and effectiveness to speak for itself as though it were talking on your behalf about your company. Based on the reviewer feedback try to revamp the necessary changes.

Step 6: Updating your plan

As business plans are “living” documents they must also be periodically updated to keep it up-to-date as the environment, the readers and sometimes even the objectives could