QuickBooks 2016 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Writing a Business Plan

In This Chapter

• Defining a 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 http://www.stephenlnelson.com/10_year_bizplan.xlsx. 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 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 detailed information about how to construct a strategic plan. Of course, ...