How To Write A Successful Business Plan (Complete Guide with Examples)

In this article, we will make sure to help you to write a successful business plan that can enable you to achieve your business goals.

So before we get into the depth of how to write a business plan let it know first what actually is it and why it is required in business.

Let’s get started:

What is a Business Plan?

A business plan is a detailed written document that illustrates how a business will accomplish its goals

Business plans are a substantial part of setting up a company that allows the layout of its objectives and fascinates investment.

These are also a way for companies to keep themselves on a track that leads nearer to their destinations.

Although business plans are especially beneficial for emerging companies, even old companies should pursue steps of the business plan. A company reanalyzes the plan from time to time to observe if objectives have been fulfilled or need to be reversed. Sometimes, a completely new business plan is made for a well-growing business.

The plan should contain at least an overview of the industry of which the business will be a part, and how it can differentiate itself from its possible competitors.

Purpose Of Business Plan:

To write an attractive business plan, you need to recognize its main purposes.

Maintain Focus:

Your business plan always prompts you the purpose of starting your business in the first place, reminding you about original goals and keeping you focused.

Secure Finance:

Your business always requires your concern with financing. It starts with the initial costs and then proceeds with business growth and new product development. According to Inc.com for outside financing, the investor always wants to see your business plan first.

Private investors, banks or any leading institution want to see how your plan works for running a business, what your expense and revenue projections are and how much your plans are logical for the future. All of this can be acknowledged by a well-written business plan.

Organize the Growth Process:

According to the University of Colorado setting up your own business can appear like a difficult task but when you organize your business into a business plan, it can encourage you that the business is in a systematic way.

Inspiring Executive Talent:

As your business rises, you need to consider including executives to your team that can assist your company to grow in the right direction. A business plan enables executive talent to observe and determine whether or not your company is profitable for time and resources.

Below are the steps for creating a successful business plan.

10 Steps Of Business Plan:

These are the steps that can help you to create a well-written business plan.

1) Create An Executive Summary:

Writing an executive summary is an important step of the business plan but it is also necessary to know what actually is the executive summary.

2) What Is An Executive Summary?

The executive summary highlights all the crucial information about your business in very short ways or you can say in summarized ways, generally, one page or less. It’s a high-level way of looking at everything and outlines the important sections of your plan.

3) Write Your Company Description:

A company description of your business plan contains three elements:

• Mission Statement.
• History.
• Objectives.

What Is A Mission Statement?

A mission statement is a reason for your business exists. It is more than what you produce or what you sell, it is all about why. It rebounds the crises of your business.

How Do You Define A Company’s History?

You do not need to make your company history a dense narrative. Instead, write it in short and clear ways:

• Founding date
• Major milestones
• Location or locations
• Number of employees
• Executive leadership roles
• Flagship products or services

Why Do Business Objectives Matter?

Business objectives show you a clear picture.

When your objectives are not simply defined, it is hard for employees and teammates to work for the same purpose.

Related Article: Why Successful People Believe They Are Better Than Others?

3) Outline Market Research And Potential:

Another significant step is to summarize your standard customers and the potential size of your market.

Target markets also called as personas, identify demographic information like:

• Location
• Income
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Profession
• Hobbies

If your target market is too wide, it can be a stop signal for investors.

4) Complete Competitive Analysis:

The competitive analysis starts with specifying other firms that currently sell the same products that you are going to set up your business with.

The idea of analyzing is to learn about every possible competitor you have may sound burdensome, but it can be exceptionally useful.

Answer these following questions after identifying your most significant competitors. It can help you to make some better and different strategies.

• Where do competing companies invest in advertising?
• What kind of press coverage do those companies get?
• How good is the customer service of rival companies?
• What are the sales and pricing strategies they are using?
• How does the rank on third-party rating platforms be done?

When you go to your competitor’s websites, go through at their About Us page, or their mission and values statement.

If you have not done your study, those investors can see right through you.

Spend some time planning about what keeps you different. If your idea is truly unique, be prepared to illustrate the customer’s main points. If your business does not have any direct competition, research other companies that give a similar kind of product or service.

The next step is to create a spreadsheet jotting down your competitors to incorporate in your plan. Your business should be named last, this is the standard method. This is often practiced as a competitor analysis table.

5) Describe Your Product Or Service:

This section clarifies the advantages, production process, and process of your product or service and what does your business offers that is better than your competitors?. When explaining advantages focus on:

• Unusual features
• Translating features into benefits
• Emotional and practical earnings to your customers
• Intelligent property rights or any documents that protect differentiation

For the production process, answer how can you:

• Produce your products or service?
• Source of raw materials or components?
• Prepare them through manufacturing?
• Retain quality control and quality assurance?
• Obtain and deliver them (supply-chain logistics)?
• Organize your daily operations like bookkeeping and inventory?

Within the product processing portion, map elements like:

• Time between purchases
• Upsells, cross-sells, and down-sells
• Future plans for research and development

6) Create A Marketing And Sales Technique:

Your marketing technique can be the distinction between trading so much that growth explodes or earning no business at all.

Growth strategies are a crucial part of your business plan. You should briefly repeat topics such as your:

• Significance proposition
• Standard target markets
• Actual customer segments

Then, add your:

• Inaugurate plan to attract new business
• Development tactics for established businesses to enhance
• Retention policies like customer loyalty or referral programs
• Advertising and publicity channels such as search engines, social media, print, television, YouTube, word of mouth, etc.

You can also utilize this category of your business plan to strengthen your strengths and what distinguishes you from the competition.

Be sure to show what you have already achieved, what you plan to do given your existing resources, and what results you expect from your achievements.

7) Assemble Your Business Financials:

If you are just setting up your business you may not have financial data (statements) or comprehensive reporting yet. However, you will need to prepare a budget.

If your company has been around for a while and you are looking for the investors, be sure to include:

• Income statements
• Profit and loss statements
• Cash flow statements
• Balance sheets
• Other figures that can be included are:
• How much of your earnings retain as your net income
• Your percentage of liquidity to debt repayment ability
• How often you receive on your invoices
• Ideally, give at least three years’ worth of reporting. Make sure your figures are accurate and do not give any profit or loss predictions before carefully going over your past statements for justification.
• Costs, profit margins, and sale prices are closely associated, and many business owners set sale prices without analyzing for all costs

The cost of your product or service must encompass all of your costs, including overhead. If not, you can not determine a sale price to produce the profit level you wish.

8) Define Your Organization And Management:

Your business is only as promising as the team that works on it.

Recognize your team members and tell them why they can either turn your business idea into an actuality or continue to progress. Also, assign them the roles you still required to hire to improve the growth of your company.

9) Illustrate Your Funding Request:

It is vital to summarize how much money your small business requires, so you can make an exact funding request. Try to be as logical as possible.

You can establish a range of numbers if you do not want to highlight an exact number.

Since a new business does not have a previous record of increasing profits, you will likely sell ownership to raise capital in the initial years of operation.

Mostly small business equity sales are personal transactions. The investor may also hope to be paid a dividend, which is a share of company profits, and they will want to understand how they can sell their ownership interest.

If you notice at the capital structure of any large company, you can see that most firms have an issue in both equity and debt. When designing your business plan, decide if you are willing to approve the trade-off of giving up total control and earnings before you sell equity in your business.

10) Compile An Appendix For Official Documents:

Finally, compile a well-organized postscript for anything and everything

• Investors will be required to accomplish due diligence
• You or your employees will need easy access to move forward
• Deeds, local permits, and legal documents
• Business registries and professional licenses
• Patents and intellectual properties
• Industry associations and memberships
• State and federal identification numbers or codes
• Key customer contracts and purchase orders
• As you include documents in the appendix, create a miniature table of contents and footnotes throughout the rest of the plan linking to or calling attention to them.

So here these are our research about the business plan and its purpose, also we provide you steps of writing a successful business.