Business Plan - planning for a brighter tomorrow

A clear and structured business plan can help you save time, money and convince others of the viability of your venture.

Business Plan

This is the key management document for ANY business, whether new or existing.

You will HAVE to prepare this document if you want to raise funds. But you SHOULD have anyway. as an essential guide, for your own benefit.It's good business practice.

As you begin to prepare the plan. keep in mind who it is for; the Bank, yourself, business partners or potential investers. Each may need more or less information. You need to provide enough to enable them to understand what the business does, who are the personnel, how it will attract customers, how it will be funded, what its objectives are etc. But, no-one likes to read much these days. We all want information that is kept to a minimum, easy to read, digest and understand. A bank manager will have a pile of applications and plans to read each day. He won't want pages of meaningless statistics (at first). He will want an impression, a feeling, that you know what you are doing. And, in the final analysis, the belief that he is going to get his money back, with a little profit and even less trouble. Give him all that but no more. Statistics and CYs can go in at the back as an appendix for anyone who simply MUST have the fine pnnt.

A colleague once said that a simple business plan should fit on one sheet of A4. Probably a bit ambitious, even for a simple business, but good. general advice.