Writing a Business Plan: Summing It Up

If you’ve been following along at home through the last eleven installments, you already know most of the major steps involved in writing a business plan. Once you start actually doing the legwork – gathering the information, developing a budget and a timeline, working out your mission and vision, and deciding where to base operations and what those operations should be, and so on – you may find yourself revisiting different aspects of the plan in light of your new information. It isn’t unusual for people to reach the point where they are actually generating text for the business plan before they realize that some aspect of the venture won’t work, or won’t work as well as something else they’ve encountered along the way. In fact, if you’ve made it all the way through this process without changing anything from your original concept, it was either an exceptionally good idea, or else you’re kidding yourself about something fairly major, and probably need a wake-up call…

The real problem at this point in the proceedings isn’t changing the direction of your business model, its being too fixed on your original concept to make such a change. If, during the course of this adventure, you’ve identified something that will generate a much higher profit margin, require a fraction of the start-up funding, or generate far greater real wealth than your original business concept would have, you’d have to be out of your mind not to change your plans to incorporate whatever that something is. Or, alternately, you’d have to be the sort of egotistical idiot who would rather make less money, pay higher interest, or end up with less than admit that your ideas are less than pure genius. Unfortunately, that description fits far too many of the entrepreneurs I have met in my travels…

Astute readers (assuming I have readers) will recall that at the beginning of this 12-part series I told you that the most important reason for writing a business plan isn’t about showing it to anyone else; the business plan is your plan for what you will actually be doing, and all of the things you intend to accomplish. Writing it clearly and convincingly enough that a potential investor would be able to make an investment decision about your project may help you to attract venture capital, but I have urged people who don’t even plan to look for funding to create such a document anyway. In fact, I have encouraged clients and students to create multiple drafts, work through every possible detail until they are sure that they’ve accounted for every possibility and selected the options they like the best – and now I’m advocating that you do the same…

Once you have done so, you will be ready to write that last piece of the actual business plan: the Executive Summary. This isn’t usually a point-by-point summary of the entire work, although it can be if you feel that’s the best approach. What you are looking for here is a short explanation of what the project is about; what you are trying to accomplish, where you will operate, who you will employ, when you plan to begin, and why (if that isn’t obvious) you are doing these things. There’s some debate about how much detail to get into, and I won’t settle that question here, but a rule of thumb I’ve seen used to good effect is the “5-minute” rule. Let’s suppose you ran into somebody who could fund your project (at a party, in a coffee house, at the supermarket, doesn’t matter), and you had five minutes to tell him or her about the venture before one or both of you had to rush off. What would you say?

There’s also no way for me to settle all of the debate about how to print the final product, what sort of binding to use, how many colors of printing to use, whether or not to use graphs, charts, drawings, photographs, clip art, or any other form of styles or accessories; I can’t even tell you for sure that the business plan will be a physical document and not simply a .pdf file that you send by email (or post on your website) as we move further into this 21^st Century. What I can tell you for certain is that you don’t want to be doing that final production step bare minutes before you go into a key meeting with your top prospect – and you don’t have to go about this alone. My final advice to you is: Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Get all of the input you can; gather all of the opinions you can find; get as many eyes on the final product as possible. And then, make your own decision. It is only the first of many…