We are in a time in which if you are thinking about entrepreneurship, it is important to have a good business plan, not necessarily because you are going to fulfill it, but to make you think about. So how to write a business plan is often the first question asked when starting a business.
If you follow these steps to write a professional custom business plan in one day, it is not guaranteed that you’ll succeed, but at least you will have done an important job to consider the economic viability and above all to know how much funding you will need initially.
8 essential steps: how to write a business plan for a successful business in 1 day
Step 1. Define your product or service in 1 phrase
Sometimes we have an idea but it’s hard to explain and that’s not good. How to write a business plan is all about how to present your business ideas for good. We must be able to explain our idea simply and briefly. When you start the business, everything will start to get complicated: the product or service itself will get complicated, you will start to have inputs from customers, partners and investors and if you have not defined your idea very well, it can be a big problem.
Define your idea, write it on paper and plasticize it. The initial idea is the pure idea, which you will want to go to when everything is complicated, and although everything will evolve, you will learn and surely the idea will change. Having access to that definition can help you a lot.
Step 2. Define your target audience with as much detailed as possible
Many times, we have an idea where your potential client is huge, too big, and that does not help you define your product/service, marketing and communication precisely. A very large range of target customers is an inconvenience and not an advantage. Amazon did not start selling everything, in fact they went public only selling books.
Step 3. Define your potential market
Once you know who your client is, it’s easier to define the size of your market. If you want to impress an investor, it is fine to define the size of the market worldwide, but if what you want to know is if your idea is viable, it is better to define the market that you want to be able to reach in the next two years, that is, if you are going to operate only in your city or only in your country, focus on that market. You can build very large companies working in small areas.
Step 4. Make a list of your competitors
When we think about competition, we often discard them all because they do not do exactly what we want to do. But that is a big mistake. Your competition is any company that can sell your product / service to the same customer as you. A hamburger seller is a competitor to a salad seller, because if we buy a salad, we no longer buy the hamburger. It is important to research a lot about your competitors, because it is a huge source of knowledge. First, we list them and put them in order of relevance. Then we investigate a little about them and we write down the most relevant information.
Step 5. Define the metrics with which you will measure your business
This is one of the most important points. How are you going to measure how well your business does? Sales are obviously an important metric, but in order to stimulate sales, we have to know the metrics with which we get each sale and thus be able to count each metric precisely to achieve the desired result.
Step 6. Define all the expense accounts that your business will have
Making the forecast of expenses of your business is a tedious but super important task. If we do not take each item into account in detail, it is very possible that we lose money, and the sum of small amounts can lead to a major deviation. We must also bear in mind that scaling a business has associated scale costs. For example, if we have a commercial team, we can calculate that the telephone line costs us €20 per month. But surely we will forget to calculate the cost of managing 25 telephone lines, since a certain volume will need a person to coordinate it, in addition to potential associated costs such as secondary lines in case of incidents in the main lines, etc.
Step 7. Write a business plan detailing the expenses
Once the table of expense accounts has been defined, you can begin to detail the monthly amounts of each expense. By having detailed accounts, we make sure not to leave details without foresight. In the case of expense accounts that are not very relevant to the activity, it is advisable to give them room for maneuver as well as exponential growth over time. There are fixed costs that increase over time and it is important to have them reflect in the business plan.
Step 8. Prepare it with the sales projections supported by the operational metrics
This is the exercise that will take most of your time writing the business plan, but it is where we are going to translate everything we have learned in the previous points. At the beginning of the process we had an idea, but surely we did not have information about the market, the competition, how we will do things, etc. But after carrying out the previous steps we have learned a lot about our idea, and we are prepared to write a business plan.
Making it longer does not make sense. Until we start with our business we will not have the capacity to make good projections based on historical data, so 1 day can be enough to analyze whether the business idea has a meaning or not and understand about how to write a business plan about it.
It is recommended that the business plan is well formulated with a central database where changing the metrics we change all the results and thus be able to play a little without having to spend a lot of time in each change.
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