Tuesday, February 17, 2009

How To Write a Business Plan



1-Put yourself in the investor’s shoes. Ask yourself, “If I were going to invest X amount of dollars into a concept or idea, or even a product, what would I want to know?” Gather as much helpful and credible information as you can. Depending on your product, you may need to search long and hard for relevant information. Most importantly, do not lose heart if finding information, statistics, and graphs is more daunting than you initially anticipated. Your hard work will pay off when a potential investor becomes an actual investor!


2-Write up a draft for your business plan. At this stage, do not worry about capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. All you need to worry about is putting your ideas down on paper. Write down everything you think you need to compile an effective and efficient business plan.


3-Start to form your business plan. Begin creating section headings and putting the appropriate information under the appropriate headings. Once you have a general form, begin proofreading your plan. Correct all the mistakes that you can find.


4-Write an outline of your business plan, covering the following key concepts. Effectively separating your business' unique approach to each of these headings will organize your plan in a way investors find useful:

Description and Ownership. This is where you describe your product, mode of production, and establish who owns the company.


Assessment of the Business Environment. Address three points: Who needs you, who competes with you, and why you are able to sustain yourself. Your Economic Environment should detail the prevailing conditions of the labor force, local demand, availability of land, and growth trends in your target area. The Industrial Environment section should detail your competition, their modes of production, their relative power in the market, and a history of altruism. Finally, a Global Environment section should detail the overall global scale of your industry, and detail what is unique about your mode of production that will eventually lead your firm to prevail in the global market.

Management Plan. In this section you detail how your firm will be managed. This may not reflect the firm's ownership, so be sure to write this section with precision. Split this section in to two points, Labor management and Production management, reflecting your policies regarding people and machines.

Employment Plan. Here you describe your method of motivating employees to work for the betterment of the firm. Prove that your structure of compensation and advancement will cause a self-interested agent to take actions that benefit the firm, even when that agent lacks a sense of altruism.

Marketing Plan. Split this sections, production and marketing. In Production, outline the characteristics that set your product apart in cost and quality. In your marketing section, describe who will buy your product, how you will get it to them, and how you'll tell new consumers that you exist.

Financial Plan. This is a three dimensional budget that describes your minimum price to maximum price, the minimum to maximum number of units you will sell, and relative scale of production you could achieve with those prices to minimize costs over the long term.


Research: Wikihow

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