What constitutes a good business plan.

Business plan constitutes an inked format of carefully calculated set of choices & decisions in association with assessment & evaluation of factors that holds the potential of regulation of resources, investment & profit. These inked formats are systematically organized, arranged and classified into various categories. Each category provides a detailed structure of what it is devised to represent. It’s important to understand what to present in each category and more important to know what categories must be included in a business plan. You can always add-on a category but there are some categories that are essential to a business plan. Categories are not anything complicated it’s just a titled paragraph that makes it easy for reader to get the gist before reading the paragraph. Categories also makes it easier to locate certain information in a document of such length and particulars. No arises a question what are these basic categories that forms a business plan? In other words what sections must be included in a business plan? Let’s discuss the most essential categories / section that a business plan must have.

♦ Company Summary:

This section is the first part that a business plan must hold. It provides the brief description of your business / company or a start-up. It provides info of what you / your business is all about and what are its goal. Remember this section shouldn’t hold any financial information and functional information. This is just for the bio of your business and its purpose not for the financial and inner workings details.

♦ Executive Summary:

This is the spine of any business plan. Executive Summary is in itself a whole detailed documents with various sub categories. This section is where it is required to present the whole idea and working of your business or start-up. Note that this section either doesn’t require any financial details but only the complete detailed elaboration of how the business works and what it’s about. The vital subcategories are

Management Team.
This section include details about your management team.

Customer Problem.
This section provides info about your start-up / business, i.e. it tells what customer problem you are solving.

Products & Services.
This section provides the details of your product/service that you desire to deliver to your clients.

Targeted Audience.
Every product or service is required by different sort of people. Let the readers know of what will be the audience that might buy your product or render your services.

Potential audience.
This section moves a bit further than targeted audience. Here might become would. This is the audience that will most likely buy your product or render your services.

Sales & Marketing Strategy.
This section will contains the details of you plan to reach your potential audience.

Competitor Analysis.
This section will provide the complete analysis of your competitors and what would be your counter measures if any one decides to “go to the mattresses” with you.

♦ Financials:

This is the only section where you must present all your financial statistics. Financials includes details about all investments and previous investors (if any) and the reports of revenue and profit that your business generate or is believed to be generating.

If you have a start-up not a business the story changes a bit, you don’t have to include your investments or investors cause there are none at this point and there is no revenue reports all you have is estimate of what revenue could be generated if a business were to be started. However, if you have a seed funding or equity or any sort of investment incoming you must mention it.

♦ Important Add-Ons:

There are various add-on categories that are required to transform a good business plan in to a better one. The above discussed are must for a business plan but there are add-ons like Exit Strategy or Stop loss protocols and contingency strategy that are by all means as much necessary as hand to body. Without these “hands” plan would still live but wouldn’t be as efficient.