Making a business plan (or business plan ) consists of writing a solid presentation of the business creation project. This is the first realization of your project!
This useful and fruitful work will allow you to measure the maturity and level of completion of your project, to verify its realism and profitability, and above all to convince your contacts to follow you and support you: your relatives, your partners; let’s know the importance and purpose of preparing a business plan.
Main characteristics of the business plan
The file that you are going to put together must allow the reader to:
– quickly understand what it is, what needs the product or service offered meets,
– know who is behind it, their motivations, objectives, and assets for the complete it,
– assess its value and the seriousness of its preparation,
– take a position on the project.
This is why your file must be:
Neat: the first impression is the right one to generate favorable interest in the reader; your business plan must have an impeccable presentation.
Concise: there are no real rules in this area. A business plan has ten to thirty pages, excluding appendices. To unnecessarily burden the file, it is wise to bring together all the supporting documents in a second file.
When writing your business plan, think of the reader! Most of the time, this will be a very busy and busy person. The best service you can render him – is to make his work easier by giving him a sufficiently concise document. Indeed, a banker who must tackle the reading of a “paving stone” will begin, unconsciously or not, with an unfavorable prejudice. We must therefore go to the essential.
Complete: keep it short, but without forgetting anything that enables the project’s feasibility and viability to be judged. Therefore, all its aspects must be dealt with in your business plan (see “the composition of the file”).
Clair: I l should be written in a simple and easily understandable style; avoiding jargon put yourself in the place of a lay reader.
The text must have good readability (judicious choice of print characters and symbols, layout, etc.) with correct pagination and summary.
Well structured: I l must be scheduled logically in its decomposition into parts and subparts. The titles given to the chapters should help the reader to understand the whole subject.
Accurate : p o be credible, we must affirm that verifiable thing.
– Be careful to cite your sources of information: references to books or studies, press clippings, the identity of the expert whose comments you are reporting, etc.
– Include in the appendices file as many supporting documents as possible: copies of articles, records of conversations or telephone interviews, or better still: letter that you have requested and been able to obtain from the expert so that he confirms his statements, etc.
Seller: it is to stay incredible content, but the case should highlight the project’s essential data and particularly its strengths.
Thus the arguments developed, put in bold or underlined when they are stated, will be summarized in each chapter or part of the file concerning them to influence the reader and help him structure his perception of the project favorably.
And don’t hesitate to illustrate it with photos and videos of the team, your products, services, etc.
The executive summary
Your business plan must open with a synthetic and “sales” presentation of your project. This presentation, which should not exceed one or two pages, should make your interlocutor want to continue reading and take an interest in your project. For that, he must immediately understand what it is about. It is “the moment of discovery”. Weigh your words to arouse the reader’s interest and encourage them to continue reading beyond the executive summary!
You and your team
The project leader (that is to say you) or of the founding team must be done with the same care as the writing of a hiring CV, by emphasizing all that, in your experience past, is linked in a rewarding way to the project in question. This presentation must be “punchy”. In some projects, the personality of the creator of the team’s presentation is just as important as the project itself. And if you are more than one, insist on the complementarity of the team!
General presentation of the project
At this stage, v you can talk about your project’s genesis: how and why it occurred to you? What reasons are there to get you started? What are the goals you are pursuing? What are your assets for its success?
The economic part of the business plan
It has several parts.
– A presentation of the product (s) and services you are going to offer. Be careful to be understandable! Avoid jargon specific to your profession!
A presentation of the economic model (or business model ) that you will adopt describes how the company delivers and shares value to all stakeholders.
– The conclusions of your market study: explain which market you are in, detail the characteristics of potential customers, indicate who is your direct or indirect competitors, expose any risks related to your economic, legal and social environment. Professional…
– The strategy you have chosen to enter your market and develop your business: the market segmentation, the choice of the product/market pair, the positioning retained about the competition, as well as the marketing mix decisions you have taken (product, pricing, distribution, and communication policy).
– The costing of your estimated turnover by relying as much as possible on tangible elements.
Find out more about estimating forecast revenue
The drafting of this paragraph should be the occasion to visualize the company’s future market by breaking down the operating process and putting in parallel the equipment, the workforce, and the other means, in particular intangible, necessary.
The financial part of the business plan
It includes all the elements that translate the economic part into financial terms. Its composition will naturally depend on the sector of activity and the development potential of your project.
As an indication, to convince an investor, here are the financial elements that are frequently found in a business plan:
– The investment table: indicates the purchase price of the investments, their planned date of acquisition, the accounting depreciation period, and the annual depreciation allowance they entail for each of the first three financial years.
– The 12-month cash flow plan: this table makes it possible, over a relatively short period, to ensure that the new company will always be able, based on what one can reasonably foresee, to meet its financial commitments.
– The calculation of the break-even point: it is important to know the company’s turnover must imperatively achieve to cover all of its expenses and determine the moment when this threshold ( break-even point) will be reached. Beyond that, the company begins to make profits.
The three-year financing plan: this table is necessary to assess the company’s financial structure’s forecast evolution in the medium term. A good financial structure is one of the conditions for the sustainability of new companies.
– The table of credit annuities (if there is a medium or long-term loan): knowing the breakdown of loan repayments is necessary to feed the income statement (financial charges) and the 3-year financing plan ( repayment of borrowed capital).
– The initial financing plan indicates the capital to be raised to launch the project under good conditions. A thorough analysis and calculation must be carried out to correctly determine the working capital requirement to correctly identify all sustainable financing needs (to compare the necessary sustainable financial resources).
– The income statement for the first three years: allows us to judge the new company’s future profitability.
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