Business plans are intended to be a quick and easy way to bring your business to market. In a sea of information, business plans may be the only clear picture of your business—and the only way to ensure it makes the grade, that it gives you the time you need to turn your business dream into reality. When you go down the road map road in writing, look for the words that spell out your marketing strategy and then focus on the words that spell out your product or service line. That will help you get where you want to be more quickly and with less resistance. Most plans tend to miss on the opportunity to outline all kinds of vital aspects of each of your areas of responsibility (marketing, manufacturing, sales, distribution, etc.). Without the ability to see how your product line (and each product) helps to make your company bigger (and more marketable), you tend to skip or overlook one of the most important components necessary to launch a successful new product or service. That leads to you thinking about your business plan like your marketing plan: As time passes, you need to find the best and most valuable way in which to make sales and market your product or service. If your marketing plan says nothing about selling, then I’ll point out that in-depth research should begin here. You’re going to want to get a hold of an expert in each key area you wish to address in your marketing plan. After you’ve had your marketing plan in the works so you can give me a sense where you’re headed, then you can take your business plan out and really get to work. When developing a business plan, take the time to review and study the market and product or services you plan to offer. The next time you go down this road, you should have at least the following three things completed: an accurate market size and a list of key competitors. For example, a person who wants to open a restaurant might have to pull up your competitor’s business plans to figure out how much revenue it makes. You can then begin to fill in the details of each area, each product or service line that it has. After you have a rough sense of the potential of each area, you can begin the critical decision to do as close to nothing as possible (or with what you can do best) and then determine how to go about it. I’ll talk more about the final, more successful, version you are going to use to present your company to an investor. How to write a winning business plan? Business plan writing is not a skill one can learn overnight. There will be times during the planning process where you’ll want to have an outside expert review your final manuscript. There are good professional services that can write your business plan from the very beginning and that all you have to do is to trust in them and choose the plan they would like to work on. You might not be able to write the first draft so easily, but with the help of a professional business plan writing service you could not only get the best draft of your business plan but even improve it a great deal.
