Business Plans Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. Putting Your Plan Together

In This Chapter

• Assembling your business-planning team

• Addressing important audiences

• Writing, reviewing, and finalizing your plan

You've reached the point where you actually write your business plan. If you're arriving at this chapter sequentially (every author's dream!), the business-planning spadework is behind you. By now, you've defined your business purpose (Chapter 3), assessed your business environment (Chapter 4), charted your strategy (Chapter 5), detailed your company capabilities (Chapter 6), designed your marketing plan (Chapter 7), and untangled your finances (Chapter 8). The next step is to assemble the raw materials to formulate your plan.

If you're not reading in order (and you certainly don't have to), you'll still find plenty of useful information on the nuts and bolts of assembling a business-planning team and putting the document together. After you've browsed through this chapter, you can return to the earlier chapters with insights into what the final process of writing and reviewing the play will entail.

Here's a note for people who rank the idea of writing right up there with paying taxes or for people who find putting one word in front of another as excruciating as rolling boulders up a hill: The following pages keep the process easy. Plus, you can expect some good payoffs for your literary efforts:

• Making good ideas even better: Putting your plan into writing makes it easy to see which ideas don't hold water and which ones ...