Business Plans in a Week

Write a Business Plan in Seven Simple Steps

Iain Maitland

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781473609396
• eBook ISBN: 9781444158793
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

The ability to write a successful business plan is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career.Written by Iain Maitland, a leading expert on appraisals as both a coach and a practitioner, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to write and receive support for a business plan.The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience.So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!

Now we start the proper work. We’ve got a clear idea of what we’ve got to put in our commercial and financial sections and our appendices – so let’s go and get it. Much of the information we need will be readily available ‘in-house’; it’s in our heads or we can get it from our work colleagues or books and records, past accounts, and so on. As we’ll see in a minute, asking yourself lots of questions is a good place to begin.

We may not have everything we need to know and include in-house. This is especially true when it comes to putting together the appendices – remember, the material in here needs to back up the facts in the commercial section and the figures in the financial section. As important, it needs to be from independent sources. We need to contact these independent sources – banks, customers, and so on. What they have to say is as important as what we have to say.

The chances are that we are going to generate a great deal of information that could go into this business plan. What we need to do is to be able to pull out the key facts and figures and to decide what we’ll discard. We also need to decide what’s going to be included in the appendices and what will be left out. We’ve lots to do today. Let’s crack on with…

• conducting internal research

• using external sources

• accumulating appropriate information.

Conducting internal research

Much of the information we need to put into our business plan can be obtained relatively easily, from in-house sources:

• our own knowledge

• our colleagues

• books and records.

Our own knowledge

More often than not, our understanding of the business will be greater than anyone else’s. We may have established the firm and perhaps now sell the goods, recruit the team, deal personally with customers, and so on. Who else knows as much as us? Probably nobody! We should therefore draw upon our own background knowledge and information before proceeding further.

One of the best ways of doing this is to ask ourselves lots of questions. Our answers will generate plenty of preparatory notes that we can use as the basis of our plan. Here are some questions to start us off:

• What is our business?

• What does it do?

• Where is it located?

• What are the premises like?

• What equipment, machinery and vehicles do we have?

• What do we sell?

• What are our products and services?

• What are our rivals’ goods and services?

• Who works for the firm?

• What are their backgrounds?

• What do they do?

• What are their strengths and weaknesses?

• Who are our customers?

• How much do we know about them?

• Who are our competitors?

• What do we know about them?

• What is the marketplace like?

• How much do we know about it?

• What are our personal goals?

• What are our business objectives?

• How have we been doing financially?

• What are our finances like now?

• W...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• About the Author
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday: Understanding business plans
• Monday: Making preparatory notes
• Tuesday: Composing the commercial section
• Wednesday: Compiling the financial section
• Thursday: Adding the appendices
• Friday: Submitting a business plan
• Saturday: Presenting a business plan
• 7 × 7
• Answers
• Copyright