Business Plans

What

Your business plan is the stage between pitching your audience and securing a meeting and financing. It is not necessarily the first thing you should do when you begin a new venture, but it will become a necessity if you decide to pursue external funding. You'll find that most business plan readers will look at *you* first for the right experience, background, education, and track record and the nature of the unmet need or problem you are solving second in terms of market size, severity and urgency of the problem, willingness-to-pay, and current solutions. Don't get bogged down in jargon; it looks like you are trying to overcome for a shortcoming the reader will not stop trying to find. Don't file it away once you've written the first draft. Your product or service gets better every time you achieve a new milestone and/or validate another hypothesis about product/market fit; your business plan will also become more valuable as you update your assumptions and accomplishments over time. Do you want to be evaluated for admission into college based on your sixth-grade report card?

Instructions for Business Plans in My Courses

Instructions for Assembling a Business Plan Presentation

Your presentation (slide show and you and your team members talk) should include:

• Introduction of team, name of business, and summary of what the business does
• Description of the problem that the business is trying to solve
• Details about the offering; include information about the current stage of development
• Intellectual property status (e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.)
• Market analysis (market size, potential market size, ke customers, target market, competition)
• Competitive differentiation: what makes your business / idea unique?
• Sales and marketing plan: how will you get your market and close sales?
• Operating strategy: How will the offering be developed and delivered?
• Management team (bios, relevant experience)
• Financial highlights: cash flow, income statement, balance sheet (summary data needed for presentation)
• Offering of the company: investment needed, use of funds; how much money do you need to reach your next growth milestone?

You can use the Aldag templates I've posted below to help.

Here is the template for the Aldag Business Plan Competition

Here is the same template with talking points and examples for the Aldag Business Plan Competition

Instructions for Writing a Business Plan Document

Resources for Writing a Business Plan

Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide

Research on Business Planning

Researchers of entrepreneurship and small business have explored what investors look for in business plans and sought to definitively determine if entrepreneurs and small business owners benefit from having business plans. The results have been mixed. Some studies have merely compared whether entrepreneurs had a business plan or not (without giving full consideration of the quality or type of plan) and tried to assert "best practices" based on their findings.

I think the most important conclusion to draw from all the studies is that planning helps (gasp!). Sometime it helps to sample from as much of the literature as you can and determine the applicability of its prescriptions based on your own circumstances.