E-book Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps - Sage

E-book

Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps

Follow our seven steps to creating a business plan that sets your business

up for future success

Contents

Meet our business owner

3

How to create a business plan

4

Step 1: Describing your business and its objectives

5

Step 2: Products and pricing

7

Step 3: Customers

8

Step 4: Competitors

9

Step 5: Your people

11

Step 6: How to make the business a success

12

Step 7: Profit and loss for the first three years

13

The small business toolkit

14

Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps

2

Meet our business owner

"People often approach investors once their operation is an ongoing concern, rather than beforehand"

Attracting investment When creating a business plan, you'll find plenty of examples and templates online which will help you to answer questions that are typically asked if you hope to attract interest in your business ? and therefore get investment.

Our business owner, Olivia, needs a business plan to launch her own plant-based chocolate retailer called Chocoholics Anonymous.

We'll aim to create an ideal business plan by examining what she writes and how she approaches the task.

Writing the first business plan Olivia has already tested the water by running a parttime business from her kitchen for some months, with help from a few friends. Sales have boomed.

Now, she'd like to expand into a storefront and full online operation.

If she's applying for a bank loan, she might be asking for most if not all of the funding. But if she's hoping for angel investment, she may need to match the anticipated input with her own.

This might be her own cash, but it can also be her collateral in the business, and it's for this reason that people often approach investors once their operation is an ongoing concern, rather than beforehand.

Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps

3

How to create a business plan

Olivia downloads our business plan template and sets aside an afternoon to make a start, realising it could take several days or perhaps even weeks to complete and perfect. She realises this is one of the most important things she will do ? more important, even, than the secret recipe for her fudge brigadeiros!

Identify your audience When answering the questions, she tries to remember who the business plan is for: investors, such as banks that she might be approaching for loans, or entrepreneurs.

For this reason, her plan contains as many data points as possible because it has to make a genuine case for her company's existence.

But it also has to be positive and inspiring, to show the promise her business offers.

Show them who you are This is one situation where she knows not to stop herself from including personality in the application. She knows investors are putting their money into her, as much as they are in the potential of the business.

In her business plan, she includes diagrams, charts, visuals and anything else that helps her share her vision.

And that makes the plan easier to consume ? after all, investors are busy people, so she's wise to make the job as easy as possible for them.

Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps

4

Step 1 Describing your business and its objectives

"Base your sales figure predictions on the reach of your competitors ? look at their annual reports and create a graph showing the sales increases you anticipate over the first, second and third years."

Don't be shy

When it comes to describing your business and its goals, there's no space for modesty. Olivia knows this, and she doesn't hold back: "Chocoholics Anonymous will be the most profitable plantbased chocolatier in the country and within three years will become the dominant plant-based chocolate brand."

Business summary

Summarise the history of your business and how the idea developed. What are your business's core values and what are you broadly looking to achieve? Outline your previous experience in this sector and in management.

Type your summary here

Highlight how you developed your business idea and what you want to achieve.

Create a business plan that will wow investors in 7 steps

5

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download