7 Tips to Better Business Plan
1) Rome Wasn't Planned, Funded, and Built in One Day. The process of putting together a coherent Business Plan will probably take longer that you estimate. If you think you can do it in a month, it will probably take two-- or more. And that is precisely why the process is valuable. Along the way you will probably stop and say, "you know, we haven't really thought our strategies out very well, have we?" or "we don't really know our competition as well as we thought we did," and you will take the time to hone your strategies and get up to speed on the competition before you finish the plan and present it.
In other words, you will have a Planned Business as well as a Business Plan.
3) Style Points Count, Too. The visual aspects of the document should not be overlooked. Color charts, tables of data to break up the text, paragraph headings, varying the typestyles all of these contribute to making the plan easier to read, and to more clearly explain the business opportunity.
4) To Write A Plan, Read A Plan People who write novels are generally those who have read many, many, stories. The learn their craft by studying the works of their favorite authors. You need to do the same thing. Look at examples of Business Plans to get in your mind the writing style, the sequence in which the ideas are presented, and the parts to a plan. After reading several plans, you will have a feel for how a Business Plan flows and how it is organized. By putting that pattern in your mind, it will be much easier for you to begin writing with confidence. Sample plans are available on the Internet at sites devoted to assisting entrepreneurs.
5) Pick A Section, Any Section. If you have never written a Business Plan before, you may have difficulty getting the project started. It will seem as though you have an awful lot of blank pages staring back at you.
To get the Plan moving, start with the section that is easiest for you, or of most interest. If you are enthused about the technical superiority of your product, write the product attributes section first. If marketing is your forte, then work on strategies. Many people like to start by writing the history of the company, or how they got the original vision to start the business (possibly because most people enjoy talking about themselves). When you begin to see words on the page, you will get a feeling of making progress, and then you can proceed to the more difficult parts of the plan with less trepidation.
6) Spend Quality Time With Your Plan People often underestimate the effort and energy it takes to write a Business Plan. They try to write it at night or when everything else at work is finished, in other words, when they are mentally and sometimes physically exhausted. A better approach is to write the plan when you have energy available to put into it: go in early and think and write for an hour before the phones start ringing.
7) First Drafts Are Always A Laugh. The first draft of your plan will undoubtedly resemble incoherent ramblings--jumbled stream-of-semi-consciousness ideas that look nothing like what you had hoped it would. Don't be disappointed or frustrated. Just put the draft away for a few days, come back to it fresh, and begin revising and rewriting. Magically, after several more revisions, the ideas will all come together and the language of the plan will flow.
