Business plan structure

I will give the specific structure of the business plan. Anyone can adopt this structure, since it is an extremely versatile tool in writing their own business plan, both in order to present it to the investor and in order to make money on it.

Honestly, some time ago I myself was engaged in similar activities a little, but having written one business plan to order, I realized that such activities do not interest me much at the moment, although the customer was very pleased with him the business, oddly enough, was already up and running. In view of this, in order not to forget everything that I have learned and to consolidate all the practical basis that I received in the course of my work, I decided to present it on this blog.

Introduction

At its core, a business plan is a detailed explanation and putting in order all the existing developments in the field of starting a business or opening any new direction in an existing business. When a person thinks about how to start his own business, he immediately begins to analyze the best business ideas, comes up with where to start a business, how to start a business, and the more thoughts on this matter appear, the harder it becomes to launch your project, in view of the fact that it pops up many details, subtleties, pitfalls and other things that distract from the idealized and inspired state of anticipation of some new activity.

In this case, the ideal solution, as Rhonda Abrams actually wrote in the book "How to draw up the best business plan for any industry and field of activity," is to create a business plan that would clearly describe what, why where and how. Also, if suddenly your business needs third-party financing, then again there is a need to write a business plan, and for different sources, sometimes in different ways. Banks, for example, concentrate their attention on the financial part of a business plan, while private investors demand full consideration of all aspects of this document. Remember the article about the reasons for the denial of loans to an entrepreneur by banks? It was there that I just covered what points need to be taken into account in the business plan when applying for a loan for your business from a bank.

In the end, it turns out that a business plan is necessary not only to obtain funding, but also for their own structured understanding of their business processes. Even if you are planning to open a gift shop, it is still at least partially, but you SHOULD use the structure of the business plan that I will give now. Business is a serious thing, not a toy, which has become fashionable to play at trainings, which is why it is still better to master business planning at least partially, because ordering a business plan from third-party companies is again very expensive in terms of money.

Business plan structure

So how do you make a business plan? It's very simple:

• First, you need to clearly write out the summary of the future project and, accordingly, the expected results from it.
• Next, you need to consider the market of the product or service in which the company will operate, indicating the capacity of this market, the share of your company, consider the main competitors and their differences from your company, and you also need to give a clear idea of ​​how who is the consumer of your product or service. ... Consider that there is an important rule in marketing - "if you say that your consumer is all people, then you do not have a consumer."
• Now we need to consider in more detail a specific product or service. In other words, you need to give a capacious and meaningful description of the product, describe its environmental properties, features of production technology, licenses that are necessary for its legal protection, give a more detailed description of all components, raw materials, materials and methods of their delivery for production.
• At this point, you need to provide a plan for the implementation of your product or service. To do this, you need to plan the approximate volume of sales and if you hand over a business plan to a bank or investor, you will also need a documented confirmation of this volume of sales. In addition, you need to paint a plan for advertising campaigns, activities for bringing goods to market, methods of marketing products, after-sales service opportunities and, of course, the costs of implementing all this.
• The fifth point is necessary in order to structure all the points regarding the provision of means of labor. Here it is necessary to indicate the names of supplies, their regional affiliation, supplier firms, volumes of supplies, the degree of stability of supplies and suppliers.
• If your business is manufacturing (by the way, I considered some interesting production ideas), then this item is a kind of production assurance plan. Here it is necessary to work out the following points: carrying out research and development work to ensure production, stages of preparation of serial production, all the necessary equipment, missing capacities and methods of attracting them, the possibility of cooperation with other industries and companies, certification of production and its control system, methods of ensuring environmental protection, as well as general and direct costs.
• You will also need a detailed workforce plan. That is, you must indicate how many employees are already working, how many are needed, what is the "staff turnover", methods of building human resources, employee training and staffing. By the way, don't forget to read some interesting material on how to motivate employees. And yet, if you are asking for investment from government agencies, then the most weighty argument will be the number of jobs you have created, consider this.
• As a formality, it is imperative to register all the points related to the organizational and legal form of the enterprise.
• In the ninth paragraph, you need to characterize all the risks and, of course, insurance against them.
• Well, perhaps the most serious and difficult point is the financial and economic justification of the project. It needs to indicate investment costs, all costs of production and sales of products, sources of financing for the project, the schedule for developing production capacity, financial flows regarding payments and cash receipts, data for calculating the payback period, profitability, loan repayment schedule, calculating the need for working capital and of course the economic effect of the project.

Conclusion

It's clear that this structure of a business plan, although it answers the question of how to make a business plan, but still it is rather arbitrary, because for each individual project, depending on its conditions, the structure will be be corrected. If you want to take a loan from a bank, then for this I advise you to read articles about banks and small businesses, and consider the option of taking a consumer loan under the auspices of repairing an apartment, etc., for your project, if it is of course not so large-scale. ...

In conclusion, I would also like to note that there are a huge variety of types of business plans and they are subdivided depending on the focus of the project, its type and regional affiliation. In my practice, I often met such standards of business plans as the EBRD, TASIS (for socially oriented projects), KPLG (a standard in which special attention is paid to the study of risks and the financial part), as well as Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers # 284 of the Republic of Tatarstan (well, this is already regional level).