The Business Plan – Describing Your Business Opportunity
The first real stage of writing your business plan concerns describing and articulating your business and what it hopes to achieve. This stage requires you to explain, as clearly as possible, what your business does.
It serves the purpose of outlining your personal vision for your business. So you will not only be explaining what it does, but also what you do and what your business is going to offer to the market.
Your first step is to put together an overview of your business. Firstly, you must be able to state when you started trading or are planning to begin trading. You also have to make sure that you include details of the progress you have made to date.
Then explain the kind of business you are running or are intending to run. This section must be as clear as possible so that your readers – whether they are potential investors or future employees or partners – can understand exactly what it is you do. If you can clarify what sector it is in – e.g. retail, manufacturing etc. – then this will make the picture clearer for the reader too.
Your next job is to outline any history that is important to the business you propose to run. For example, if you bought the business off someone else, it will obviously be important that the business plan shows some details of this transaction, as well as information on the seller of the business.
You must then outline the current legal structure of the business. This means ownership, the structure of the company as it stands in law, and so on.
Finish up the overview by articulating your vision for the future. This means thinking about the plans you have for the business as regards growth. It also means creating a picture of what your company will look like in the future.
After the overview, you then have to describe your product or service in detail. To get this section right, you must explain what makes it different to other products and services in the same sector, as well as the benefits it offers to the customer. To interest investors – or just to keep you on the right path as developments occur – you then have to outline what developments you are going to bring to your product or service. If you are going to run a cafe for example, you may plan to add another story in the future, to add value.
If you hold any patents or design rights, now is the time to declare them. And to finish up, describe the key features of your industry, in such a way that your product or service has a recognisable role in it.
At all times, make sure that you don’t throw in too much jargon, or industry specific terminology. If you are going to use the business plan as a means of acquiring investment, the last thing an investor wants is vocabulary they cannot understand.
So that is a detailed outline of the section of your business plan where you describe your business opportunity. This is often the most difficult section to complete. Be confident, follow the steps above and you will then be on your way towards completing your plan.
What is in a Business Plan? The Key Sections
A business plan’s contents are no secret. Many books, articles, and courses describe the major sections of a business plan. Although variations exist, there are key sections common to most outlines in business planning literature.
Executive Summary
An executive summary, generally one page to a few pages at most, covers all of the main points of the business plan to come.
Company Overview or Description
The next section begins with an overview of the current situation of the company. This covers who the founders are and why they started the company, what the products or services offered are or will be, and what steps have been taken toward the launch to date.
Market Analysis
Sections detailing research and analysis done on the market for the business come next. This should begin with an overview of the market or industry, including its size, breakup, and trends it is experiencing going forward. Data on the specific customer segments and competitors for the new business follow.
Marketing Plan
A marketing plan then covers what is generally called the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product (description of the products or services offered), Promotion (the promotional tactics to be used), Pricing (the pricing strategy for the business), and Place (the location for a retail facility or other means of distribution for the product or service).
Operations and Management Plans
The next section or sections detail the plan for how the company will operate and be managed. This must include details on who the managers are and their qualifications, whether they are partners or hired employees.
Financial Plan
The business plan continues with a description of the financial results the business intends to see, and the underlying cost and revenue assumptions. The financial section also details the amount of capital needed, what the funding will be used for, and the sources of funding that are being sought.
Appendices
Finally, a business plan concludes with appendices of documents which support the plan further. The appendices include full pro forma financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement) as well.
Business Plan – Purpose and Objectives
A detailed description of a new or existing business, including the company’s product or service, marketing plan, financial statements and projections and management principles, require a plan to be implemented. A document that spells out a company’s expected course of action for a specified period usually includes a detailed listing and analysis of risks and uncertainties. For the small business, it should examine the proposed products, the market, the industry, the management policies, the marketing policies, production needs and financial needs. Frequently, it is used as a prospectus for potential investors and lenders.
Think of it as a production line. What’s go in the start are raw materials and unfinished assemblies. Here, the raw materials include:
-Talent and initiative from employees
-Capital -Market position
-The company’s creditworthiness
-The firm’s earning capacity
-Assessment of changes in the marketplace.
It should have four major aspects:
- Its contribution to purpose and objectives
- Its primacy among the manager’s tasks
- Its pervasiveness
- The efficiency of resulting plans.
The Contribution of Planning to Purpose and Objectives: Every plan and all its supporting plans should contribute to the accomplishment of the purpose and objectives of the enterprise.
The Primacy of Planning Manager must plan in such a way that it leads to proper organizing, staffing, leading and controlling which support the accomplishment of enterprise objectives. Planning and controlling are inseparable. Any attempt to control without a plan is meaningless, since there is no way for people to tell whether they are going where they want to go. Plans thus furnish the standards of control.
The Pervasiveness of Planning: Planning is a function of all managers, which vary with each manager’s authority and with the nature of the policies and plans assigned by superiors. If managers are not allowed to a certain degree of discretion and planning responsibility, they are not truly managers.
The Efficiency of Plans: The effectiveness of plan refers to its contribution to the purpose and objectives. Plan is efficient if it achieves its purpose at a reasonable cost, when cost is measured not only in terms of time or money or production but also in the degree of individual and group satisfaction.
Procedures: Procedures are plans that establish a required method of handling future activities. They are chronological sequences of required actions. They are guides to action rather than to thinking and they detail the exact manner in which certain activities must be accomplished.
Rules: Rules are unlike procedures in that they guide action without specifying a time sequence. In fact, a procedure might be looked upon as a sequence of rules. Rule may be a part of procedure.
Programs: Programs are a complex of goals, policies, procedures, rules, task assignments, steps to be taken, resources to be employed and other elements necessary to carry out a given course of action; further supported by budgets.
Budgets: Budget is a statement of expected results expressed in numerical terms. Financial operating budget is often called a “profit plan”. This budget can be expressed in financial terms, in terms of labor- hours, units of product or machine hours or in any other numerically measurable term.
Steps in Planning: Being aware of opportunities, a manager should take a preliminary look at possible future opportunities and see them clearly and completely know where they stand in light of their strengths and weaknesses, understand what problems they wish to solve, and why and know what they expect to gain. Planning requires a realistic diagnosis of the opportunity situation.
Establishing objectives: This is to be done for the long term as well as for the short term. Objectives specify the expected results and indicate the end points of what is to be done, where the primary emphasis is to be placed and what is to be accomplished by the network of strategies, policies, procedures, rules, budgets and programs. Objectives form a hierarchy.
Developing premises: There are assumptions about the environment in which the plan is to be carried out. It is important for all managers involved in planning to agree on the premises. Forecasting is important in premising: what kind of markets will there be? What volume of sales? What prices? What products? What technical developments? What costs? What wage rates? What tax rates and policies? What new plans? How will expansion be financed? What are the long-term trends? Because the future is so complex, it would not be profitable or realistic to make assumption about every detail of the future environment of a plan.
Determining alternative courses: The more common problem is not finding alternatives but reducing the number of alternatives so that the most promising may be analyzed. The planner must usually make a preliminary examination to discover the most fruitful possibilities.
Evaluating alternative courses: From the various alternatives available proper evaluation should be done which may involve ash flow.
Selecting a course: The best alternative should be selected.
Numbering plans by budgeting Final step is giving them meaning by converting them into budgets. The overall budgets of an enterprise represent the sum total of income and expenses, with resultant profit or surplus and the budgets of major balance sheet items such as cash and capital expenditures.