Definitive Business Plan, Second Edition, The

The next steps

For the planning process itself, you need to build a good understanding of your external environment, the extent to which you can control it, how it affects you, and where surprises might come from.

When you write about it in the plan, you need to prove that you understand your industry and market in which you operate, demonstrate where you have competitive advantages and show that you have identified a market niche for your products and services. Your readers may or may not know your market as well as you, but they almost certainly will understand the way that markets work. Moreover, you might think that there is room to replicate one of your competitor's approaches to the market. But you will find that capital providers are resistant ...