Building A Business Plan

Creating a business plan is a wonderful way for a new business owner to better organize themselves and improve their chances for long term success. Business plans are crucial collections of strategies, statuses, research, and other valuable pieces of information. But how does someone even begin to write a business plan in the first place? This is one of the many questions asked about this wonderful tool for your business. If you're a new small business owner, then there's a chance that your current business plan consists of writing tasks out in your planner book and trying to find the balance between keeping your business afloat on a daily basis, while also trying to plan for the future.

As a new business owner, you may start to feel as though you're always constantly being pulled in several directions at once. This will obviously cause you to become more and more emotionally and mentally drained. Then one day you simply say that enough is enough, and decide that you're going to get yourself organized so you can stay on top of the current tasks and ahead of the upcoming hurdles that innately come with running a business. Congrats! But now you're back to square one in trying to understand what all is even supposed to go into a business plan. Obviously you want the end result to be better than what you're currently doing, but what you're currently doing is pretty much everything that came to mind in the first place.

So now you're faced with a new issue. How do you find a better way? Hopefully our SEO has been working its magic and matched you up properly with this blog. Because we're going to give you a full run-down of all of the basic components that make up a successful business plan right here, right now!

The first step is to acknowledge exactly why this business plan is being built in the first place. Most business plans serve one of two purposes. The first is that the plan will be presented to a lender or potential investor as part of your business investment pitch so you have a better chance of getting the extra funding that your business needs for some sort of undertaking. The second most common use is simply to help you better organize the needs of your business into an understandable document where each and every facet of your business is laid out nicely and tidy. This would allow you to better communicate with the other leaders in your company or business and ensure that they have all of the necessary direction at their disposal so they can fulfill their duties. This would be referred to simply as "in-house" use. There are a lot of areas in which the two main types of business documents would have similar content, but they vastly differ in how that content is presented.

If you're building a business plan as a means to secure funding from either a lender or potential investor, then your business plan will sway more towards supporting the evidence that there will be a return on their investment, and your business is very well organized. This would help to reassure them that their investments in this project will most likely see a significant or at the very least, a reliable return. Lenders or investors of any kind are always comparing the balance of risk vs reward in where they place their money. However, your business plan should not be the only selling point for your business if you want the best chances at success for this. You'll also want to consider developing a business investment pitch, or "investment opportunity offer" document. This is a separate document which is not to be confused with a business plan. If you're leaning more towards this route, then I recommend enrolling in our online course pitching your business to raise funding which will educate you on how to build an effective business pitch deck and provide best practices in actually presenting your pitch.

On the other hand, if you're building this business plan for more of an in-house use then you won't be nearly as concerned with "selling the idea" of your business. You're going to focus more on clarifying your vision for the future of your business and then methodically creating steps in which to achieve these goals. This version of the business plan is what I will mainly be focusing on for this article.

At Budd Consolidated the operating word for the concept of a business plan is the word “plan”. It is our belief that any plan that does not begin with an in-depth analysis of the current existing situation is doomed to fail. So the first item on the list for building your business plan is to take an in depth look at the current state of affairs for your business. This will help you to better navigate the distance between where you currently are, and where you want to be at the end of your plan. You need to be able to segment the different areas of your business piece by piece so that you can better organize each of these into individual categories, sections, or departments. Doing so will better help you to make slight adjustments to each individual component of your existing business model and then see the connection of how making a small change in one area has an effect on the neighboring portion of your business model.

So how do you accomplish this? Start with the ground up. At the very beginning of starting your business you had to choose how it was registered. So begin there. This falls into one of the primary pieces to any business plan called the “executive summary” or “corporate overview”. Think of all the standard information on what makes your business what it is. This can easily be addressed by listing the details out in a “what, who, how” format.

For example the “what” for your business would be the name of and registered type of business in which it was formed as. Such as an LLC, sole proprietorship, or c-corp. Next up would be the “who”. This would consist of your department heads or other staff that are decision makers. Next we move to the “how”. For this part, you want to state the primary service being provided by your business or its primary type of product which it sells. Once you’ve accomplished this short list of details, you’ve actually started to create what’s referred to as an “executive summary”, albeit a very shortened and simplified version.

Next up, you’re going to want to effectively and neatly sort out the existing business model that you have. This could be something as simple as a sole proprietor creating a detailed list of their financial accounts, suppliers for their products, and other relevant information regarding the mechanics or needs of their business. Once all of this information is neatly sorted and readily available to you, you can then begin to formulate a plan of how to move forward.

Which leads us to the next portion of creating your business plan is an in-depth market analysis. Having a clear understanding of the nature of the market in which your business resides, and the potential direction that market will take can help you better prepare how to present your business to the public. Market analysis will tie hand in hand with strategies for branding and marketing strategies for your business. You need to be able to understand the needs, wants, and competition that you have in your particular market. After that, you should be able to cultivate different strategies that make your branding more aligned with the audience or target market so that it’s more appealing.

In a nutshell, if you’ve put in the work to do proper analysis, then the final pieces of your business plan will be centered about the actual “planning” portion. Meaning, you’re going to create step-by-step plans of action to bring greater success to your business. These actionable steps will need to be held accountable by a time-based schedule. Meaning that each and every step will have a specified date for completion.

To wrap this article up, we’ll leave with the very obvious note that building a business plan is a time consuming and worthwhile endeavor for you to invest your time, money, and energy in. Creating an efficient business plan is a common practice for numerous small to medium sized businesses that are trying to get the extra edge they need in order to elevate their station in a competitive market. However, creating an effective and in-depth business plan doesn’t just take time and energy to bring to fruition. It also takes a particular level of professional experience. At Budd Consolidated, we are well versed in creating professional business plans that serve their purpose. Whether you’re at a stage in which you want to use your business plan as a tool to secure funding for your business, or if you’re just looking to better organize the direction of your business model in a way that your whole team can understand. Budd Consolidated offers two services which can benefit your business. The first would be our direct service of building your business plan. By booking your initial meeting with us, we will begin to understand the needs of your business and if you choose to work with us, we will create a detailed and effective plan to help you and your business achieve greater success. Alternatively, if you’re in the market for greater education on building a business plan, you can enroll in our online course on how to build a business plan and get in depth explanations to each component on how to build your business plan, with downloadable templates for you to use as well! Or you can simply click the button below to schedule your free discovery call!

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