Where can I find a successful startup business plan?

How do you avoid these pitfalls in your organization? That is where a business plan enters the picture. A business plan is a document that details the operations of your business. It cannot undo the failure, but it can provide a roadmap for success.

This article will walk you through creating a business plan from scratch, including why you need one, what to include, and some tips for creating a solid business plan.

Table of Contents:

• Why you need a business plan
• Key sections to include in your business plan
• Tips for a great business plan
• Create a successful business plan for a competitive advantage

Why you need a business plan

Since some financial institutions require businesses to submit a business plan when applying for a business loan, many business owners automatically associate a business plan with obtaining bank financing.

However, business plans can be used for a variety of other purposes. For example, they can assist you in the following ways:

Convince people to invest

Your business plan details your organization, business objectives, and product or service offerings. So, naturally, you can use it to introduce your business to potential investors and demonstrate the financial health of your enterprise.

Attract and keep skilled employees

You want to start with the best employees possible. Creating a business plan and sharing it with prospective recruits can assist you in accomplishing this.

Why? A strong business plan demonstrates to prospective employees that your values and goals align with their vision and abilities. This alignment benefits both parties, as it results in happier employees and attracts the best candidate for the job.

Evaluate your business idea

You are not required to write your business plan for others. However, writing your business plan is an excellent way to evaluate your ideas and organize your thoughts to plan your venture carefully.

Let us return to the reasons for startup failure. Numerous issues could have been avoided with better planning — pricing and cost issues, product mistiming, lack of market need, and ineffective capital management. A business plan can assist you in planning more effectively.

Find a business partner

Finally, developing a business plan provides a roadmap for you to present to prospective business partners and co-founders. This roadmap will assist you in identifying the right partner, as once you understand what your business requires to succeed, it will be easier to identify a partner who shares your vision.

Additionally, a well-crafted plan demonstrates your commitment to your venture. After all, would you instead work for a startup with a well-defined mission or one that claims to be “still figuring things out?”

Key sections to include in your business plan

Though every business plan will look slightly different, most programs include eight key sections:

• Executive summary
• Business goals
• Products and services
• Market opportunities
• Sales and marketing
• Management
• Logistics and operations
• Financial analysis

Let’s cover those sections in detail now:

Executive summary

An executive summary is an outline that summarizes your business plan. To make writing an executive summary easy, create it last by drawing from the rest of your project.

Your executive summary should ideally span half a page to a single page. You don’t need to add much detail to the executive summary, as its primary purpose is to pique the reader’s interest.

Here are some things to include:

• Your business’s “why.”
• A description of your offerings
• Your goal and 1 — 3 of the KPIs that measure your progress towards it
• A summary of the market your business operates in
• An overview of your business model
• Where you aim to be in 12 — 26 months
• An overview of your funding plans (including how much money you need to raise)

You can also open with your elevator pitch if you want to start strong. An elevator pitch (sometimes called an “elevator speech”) is a 30 — 60 second proposal used to grab someone’s attention.

Here’s an example of an elevator pitch from Hux:

Business goals

The “business goals” section (sometimes called the “overview and objectives”) section offers readers a more detailed introduction to your business.

This section should answer five key questions:

• “What is (brand) ‘s business idea?”
• “What does (brand) do and why?”
• “Who runs (brand)?”
• “Who is included in (brand) ‘s target market?”
• “What is (brand) ‘s goal?”

This section is very flexible, so it’s also a great place to outline any charitable visions, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives you want to put into place, and your mission statement.

Many of the parts of this section are subjective so we won’t cover them in much detail. So instead, let’s focus on two key things: your goals and target market.

Your business goals section should present readers with a clear goal and several objectives to help you get there. Goals are overarching, long-term targets, while objectives are short-term targets measured with KPIs. For example, “sell top-class speaker systems” is a goal, and “increase Instagram followers by 10% with smart hashtags” is an objective.

This business plan section should also outline your target market with buyer personas. A buyer persona describes your target market with generalized characteristics like age, gender, race, education level, interests, motivations, and challenges.

Here’s a buyer persona example to draw from:

Product and services

Your plan’s “products and services” section contains a detailed description of your offerings, precisely what you think it should. This includes:

• Product purpose
• Manufacturing or procurement plans (including a product roadmap)
• Legal considerations for product development
• Features
• Pricing strategy
• How it compares to other products

This section should also outline your offerings’ Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP is the “thing” that makes your offering superior to competing products or services.

AAMI is an excellent example if you are looking for inspiration. AAMI’s USP is “the doers of insurance,” and AAMI emphasizes that it’s an insurance company that will “do everything” in its power to “make your life easier.”

Market opportunities

The “market opportunities” section describes the external environment of the market your brand will operate. Of course, this doesn’t just include your industry and niche but covers your other businesses.

To build this section, you will need to conduct extensive market research on your proposed industry. Conducting a SWOT and PESTEL analysis can help with this.

A SWOT analysis looks at an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Specifically:

• Strengths cover advantages
• Weaknesses cover disadvantages
• Opportunities cover factors that a brand could use to grow and increase profit
• Threats cover factors that could interrupt the brand’s growth, integrity, and profitability

Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your brand, while opportunities and threats concern external factors.

A PESTEL analysis looks at the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal factors that influence a brand positively and negatively. Here’s what a PESTEL analysis includes:

Once you’ve conducted a SWOT and PESTEL analysis, finish your “market opportunities” section by addressing these questions:

• What does the market need?
• How will the market grow in one, two, and five years?
• How will (brand) ‘s offerings meet market needs?

Sales and marketing

The “sales and marketing” section explains how you’ll market your brand and offerings. There are three critical parts to this section:

1. Positioning strategy
2. Marketing strategy framework
3. Public relations strategy

First, you need to cover your positioning strategy. Your positioning strategy outlines your brand identity (or how you want people to remember your brand).

To understand what a positioning strategy looks like in practice, check out this ad from Honey:

It positions Honey as a friendly shopping assistant that helps users “save time and money.”

Develop a positioning statement to explain your positioning strategy. This statement includes what you do, your target market, what makes you unique, and what you do for customers. For example, you might like to use a template like: “(brand) helps (target market) to (what you do) because (brand) offers (what makes you special).”

Second, build your marketing framework. A marketing framework is a detailed roadmap that explains how you will reach your marketing goals. You’ll need to consider marketing channels like these when designing your framework:

• Social media advertisements
• Paid-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Offline marketing (including mail marketing, billboards, TV, and radio)

Third, design your Public Relations (PR) strategy. Your PR strategy outlines how you communicate with customers, stakeholders, and anyone impacted by your brand.

As part of developing your PR strategy, you’ll need to build a website, develop a brand voice, and create customer communication channels. These channels could include a customer service email, phone number, social media chatbot, or website chatbot.

Build a crisis management plan to put extra detail into the PR section.

Management

The “management” section describes how your organization will handle management, staffing, and employee relations. To introduce this section, describe your company’s hierarchy and outline the roles managers and employees will play in the organization.

Then, outline your company culture. Developing a strong company culture will help you create a more productive workplace, attract better employees, and build chemistry and connection between team members. As your company culture starts forming as soon as you launch, it’s crucial to include it in your business plan.

You might like to use some of these adjectives to describe your culture:

• Collaborative
• Connected
• Empathetic
• Flexible
• Fun
• Happy
• Inclusive
• Innovative
• Motivating
• Nurturing
• Progressive
• Relaxed
• Respectful
• Rewarding
• Transparent
• Welcoming

Finally, it would help if you outlined how you plan to manage your employees. This includes how you will approach workload management to ensure employees don’t get burned out. As we know that people’s moods impact their productivity, creative thinking, and decision-making abilities, managing people’s workloads is vital to keeping your employees happy and healthy.

Logistics and operations

The “logistics and operations” section covers the “how” of your brand. It includes a detailed description of:

• Your manufacturing process
• Product delivery and shipping plans
• Research and development plans
• Staffing needs and plans
• Vendor and supplier plans
• Inventory management
• Legal considerations (including any patents, trademarks, insurance, licenses, permits, and copyrights you need)

It would help if you also out any tools and software you will use in this section. That includes Human Resources (HR) and payroll systems, marketing, medicine tools, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Though selecting the right tools may seem tricky, there are many great options. For example, you can implement factoHR for the accurate management of your HR and payroll system, Mention for media monitoring, and Salesforce as a CRM tool.

Financial analysis

Finally, it would help to conclude your business plan with a detailed analysis of your business finances. There are five key documents to include:

1. A balance sheet that reports your assets, liabilities, earnings, and shareholder equity
2. An income statement (or “profit and loss statement”) that shows your projected revenue and expenses so readers can see if your company will become profitable
3. A cash flow statement shows how your business will spend its capital. This document includes all expenses — staff wages, inventory costs, and operational costs.
4. An operating budget, which shows projected revenue and expenses for a certain period (like a quarter)
5. A break-even analysis, which projects when your business will break even. When a company breaks even and becomes profitable, revenue becomes higher than expenses.

The scope of this section will depend on the reason you are creating a business plan services. For example, if you are seeking investors, a partner, or a loan, you may need to consult with a financial analyst or accountant to put these financial projections together. Otherwise, internal points will work.

The “financial analysis” section is arguably one of the most crucial parts of your business plan, so it’s worth spending more time on this section. But, first, make it presentable and engaging.

Tips for a great business plan

Now that you know what a business plan includes, you’re nearly ready to create your own. Here are two tips that can help you write a business plan effectively.

Create an additional one-page plan

A one-page plan is a concise, visual version of your business plan. This shortened plan is like a cheat sheet or image-based executive summary. So naturally, it’s a great document to give potential investors during a pitch or new employees during training.

To create a one-page plan, take each business plan section’s key points and summarize them into dot points. Then, add them into a business plan template like this:

Check for bad spelling and grammar

Imagine this: you attend an investor presentation, and when you open a copy of the new business plan you were given, there’s a spelling error in the marketing and sales plan. What kind of impression would this show you about the business? Would you still invest?

Poor spelling and grammar can turn investors away, making your plan look rushed and poorly thought out. To avoid this and keep your project looking professional, use a spelling and grammar checker like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or the Hemingway App.

Create a successful business plan for a competitive advantage

Creating a good business plan is more of an art than a science. However, you can’t go wrong if you include these sections in your project:

• Executive summary
• Business goals
• Products and services
• Market opportunities
• Sales and marketing
• Management
• Logistics and operations
• Financial analysis

Excellent plans focus on your finances, require extensive market analysis, and present your business in a positive (but not embellished) light. Above all else, they show the “thing” that makes your brand special.

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