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New Year's resolution: Start the year with a great plan for your business

If you’re one of those people who have great intentions but lack follow through, writing a good business plan is the first major test of your commitment.

January 14, 2015 by Marla Topliff — President, Rosati's Pizza

Many of us start a new year with fresh goals and great plans, but lose steam before we even get started. If you’re one of those people who have great intentions but lack on follow through, writing a good business plan is the first major test of your commitment. Once it’s on paper, follow through is easy, but first you have to start. If you don’t know how, these tips can help.

A good plan is a written result of data collection and market research and describes every process and strategy, determining your financial needs at various stages of growth. A good plan will also identify potential obstacles and risks, market solutions and potential opportunities, as well as establish timelines for continuous and timely evaluations. It should convey an objective that understands your business.

If done properly, your business plan will be the playbook for managing your business. It’s your blueprint for both internal and external purposes. It can help to secure both debt and equity financing, create credibility to establish vendor relationships and major accounts, and provide the core model for expansion of the brand.

It’s your basic road map, your guide to operations that will help you to quickly and easily make decisions. Good plans have built in monitors to chart progress to keep you on track. They become the vehicle for comparison against actual results, and a tool to ensure that both employees and managers understand your objectives.

Start Writing Your Plan

Many people get stuck because they don’t like the writing process. They believe it’s too time consuming, or they know what they want to say, but just can’t seem to get started. Here are some tips to overcome that fear.

How Long Should It Be?

The length depends on the objective. A standard length for a one to three year plan would be ten to twenty written pages if you are applying for a $50k to $200k loan. That’s not counting the financial statements and appendix.

Start With Pre-planning

Do market research. Every good business plan should include well researched demographic information on the proposed market area. There are several good websites you can use to obtain this information such as the following:

www.census.gov

http://www.demoreports.com

Organization is Key

The information from your market research will be the basis for much of the writing. Once your research is complete, the next step is organizing ALL of your information to form an outline. Besides demographics be sure to include figures on liquid capital and amounts to be financed and charts on expected growth with detailed information on how you plan to get there. Always include your personal background; investors like to know who they are doing business with, so be sure to add references both business and personal.

Correlate the information

Sound logic and financial projections are the most important elements of a solid business plan. If the numbers don’t work, then no amount of beautiful prose and presentation will make it a good plan. If the numbers don’t correlate to the text, then the plan will lose credibility.

Write a little at a time

Start writing a few sentences to begin and only one section at a time. The plan doesn’t have to be completely written at one sitting. The most important part is to get your thoughts on paper as quickly as possible without worrying about grammar, punctuation or critiquing every sentence that has been written.

About Marla Topliff

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