How to write the perfect business plan?

A business plan aids in properly explaining your strategy, and analyzes the long-term viability of your idea, and determine what resources you will require. The business plan or company is the map to start a business (or make it grow).

In this post, step by step, we will teach you how to make a business plan, what you should include in your business plan, and how to analyze the market before going all out. You can take it as a checklist with the things that cannot be missing to perfect your business plan. We started!

1. What is a business plan?

A business plan is a roadmap for how your company will go about fulfilling its objectives. A business plan is used to outline the process for activities inside the business.

They include descriptions of the company's organizational structure and the type of investment or capital that the company will need to carry out its functions.

During the creation of your business plan, you must consider the situation of the market you want to join (or in which you work). Is it a highly competitive market? Is it a monopolized market? How much money does this market move?

If you need investors for your business, they will consider your business plan and all the objectives and ideas you show in it. But even if you don't need investors, a good business plan is the perfect roadmap for everything to go smoothly in your company with a good business plan consultant.

2. Why should you write a business plan?

Would you first invest in a simple idea or an idea studied and planned to perfection if you were investing? Surely it would cost you less to leave your money in a business idea that has been previously studied and whose study you have also been able to analyze.

For this reason, investors must have a business strategy that helps them completely comprehend where they are going to put their money.

But it is not only important for them, but we are also going to see different reasons that will surely end up convincing you that you should write a business plan for your store:

It will help you plan: creating a business plan will enable you to better identify your objectives and the scope of your organization. In addition, your business plan will highlight your company's hidden demands (money and personal and material resources that you will need ).

You will not start on blank paper. Let me explain, to write a business plan, it is necessary to do a market study. You will need to investigate your buyer persona, your competitors ... Based on this information, you will focus your strategy. You will not join an unknown market, if not a market that you have previously analyzed.

It will help you evaluate your ideas: if you have several strategies in mind that could help your business to be successful, writing a business plan will show you the pros and cons of each of the strategies, their difficulties, and benefits, and with that, you can choose the strategy that best suits you.

What professionals do you need? The business plan will help you determine what type of people should work in your company, what positions you should offer, and based on this, you can plan your human resources strategy.

In short, the design of a good business plan helps you clear up unknowns about the business you want to start. If you do not want to start a business, a good business plan will help you solve questions about the company you want to improve (it is not something you have to write once, it must be periodic, annual, biennial ...).

3. What should I include in my business plan?

Let's get to the point. This list can serve you perfectly to develop, point by point, a business plan that does not lack anything.

A) Start with a summary that includes the following points (develop it later)

Define your business: what do you want to create, a service platform? An eCommerce? A financial one ?. What do you want to sell? The first and main point is that you take your time to explain the business idea you have in your head (if it is about an already created company that you want to improve, explain what the company is).

How is your business different from its competitors? You can do something completely new, or you can do something that is already on the market but differentiate yourself by the values ​​that mark your company or the close treatment of the client, it is time to show off: what is it that makes your business the best?

Define the objectives: if a business has just started, it is clear: what you want is to be profitable. But it would help if you tried talking about numbers. How much income do you want to have in X time? How many employees do you want the company to grow? If your company already exists and works and you are looking to improve it, what percentage are you looking to increase your sales? How much do you want to grow in terms of personnel? When do you want to reach other countries?

Whom are you going to sell to? Make a detailed description of your target audience and your ideal buyer persona.

Summarize your marketing plan: how do you plan to reach your consumers? Through digital strategies? Through advertising in traditional media? Explain it!

About the financial status of your business:

• In the present: how much income are you having?
• In the future: how much income do you hope to have?
• Do you need external investment? How much?
• Structure of the team of people who will work in your company.

B) What is your company, and what do you want to achieve?

We have already talked about it in summary, what is your company, what does it seek to achieve, and what makes it different? At this point, you should develop other more technical aspects such as:

Type of business structure: are you a limited company or anonymous, are you self-employed, a corporation of goods?

Please include all the products, services, or ideas you are looking to market and explain why you are selling them. Include all the details you can (obviously, if you are a marketplace that sells hundreds of products, it is not acceptable to describe them all). Do a more general description in this case.

Define your values: why do you sell what you sell? What is the ethics of your company? We are not talking about ideology, we are talking about the need you want to cover with the products you offer and how you want to cover it. Count it!

Business objectives: you must define the short-term (1 year), medium (2 or 3 years), and long-term (more than five years) objectives of your business. These objectives should follow the acronym SMART:

• Specific (specific)
• Measurable (measurable, quantifiable)
• Attainable (achievable)
• Realistic
• Time-based (you want to get X in Y time)

About the team: structure of the current team and forecast growth in positions (you must include the personnel's salaries that you will include in your company and the expected hires).

C) Develop your marketing plan

Your buyer persona will influence your marketing plan. Depending on the type of media your buyer person consumes, you will advertise your company on one or other platforms. You should still include:

What strategies will you follow to promote your products: in a digital environment, you could opt for SEO, SEM, or social media strategies. But you can also include traditional advertising such as advertisements in the media or on street furniture (buses, subways, billboards ...).

• How will you do to sell your products against the competition?
• Branding of your company: brand name, colors, logo, and corporate typography.
• What budget will you need to carry out your marketing plan?

4. How to analyze the market before you start

You must include a very important point in your business plan: the market analysis. I have separated it into a different point to highlight the importance of this analysis: the sample of the market in which you want to sell, incorporate, and your company's situation within a market in which there is competition.

You should include the following points in your market analysis:

• Volume: what is the size of the market you want to join? Estimated sales volume?
• Study your ideal customer, their tastes, interests, and the type of products they consume. Define one or more buyer persona.
• Create a table where you write down the weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats that your business has or may encounter.
• Make an analysis of your competition, including also their weaknesses and strengths. Their strengths against your company and your strengths against the competition. Keep it real.

And with this, you have a good roadmap so that your business plan does not lack those fundamental aspects that will make your company go smoothly. Do not forget that they are useful both to find investors and to establish a map with the objectives and needs that your company will have in a period.

We hope we have helped you and that, with this post, you will be able to write an impeccable business plan! Good luck with the execution!