Definitive Business Plan, Second Edition, The

Those financials again

Remember how you looked out of the window and compared yourself with other companies in your industry (see Chapter 5 ). Recall how you valued capital projects and assessed your rate of return (see Chapter 11 ). Yes, you are correct. This is exactly how others – bosses, bankers and backers – will crawl over the financials in your business plan.

You know how you did the analysis so it should not be too hard to visualize how others will do it to you. They will:

• review your break even position to make sure that you have comfortable safety margins;

• look at the state of your profit and loss account and compare costs and revenues;

• analyze your balance sheet, checking for liquidity and valuable assets;

• examine your cash flow to ensure ...