Chapter 3. Writing a Business Plan
In This Chapter
Defining the business plan
Understanding strategic plans
Writing a white paper business plan
Writing a new venture plan
In Book VI, Chapter 2, I describe how to create a pro forma plan of business financial forecasts by using the bizplan.xls
workbook, which can be downloaded from www.stephenlnelson.com/bizplan.xls
. If you do create a forecast, you probably also want to create a companion business plan. For this reason, you also need to know about writing such a plan. I don't go into tedious detail about how to do this; I just provide you with some useful information about business plans — and I give you some tips about how to more easily write a workable business plan.
What the Term Business Plan Means
In truth, the term business plan actually refers to three separate things:
A strategic plan: A discussion or description of a firm's overall strategy
A new venture plan: The fund-raising document that entrepreneurs use to promote a new venture to investors
A white paper plan: The 50-page or even 100-page document that a business owner uses to describe in detail a new business opportunity, including its risks, its opportunities, and anything else that's germane
I talk a little bit about each of these plans — some more than others — in the following pages.
A Few Words about Strategic Plans
Unfortunately, I'm not really equipped to provide you with detailed information about how to construct a strategic plan. Of course, neither are most of the other ...
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