Do develop your business strategies and ideas progressively
as you write the plan. It will draw readers into the process and
make the ending more unexpected !
Don't summarize the projections - let
readers figure out the full-year totals, profits, cash flows
and so on for themselves.
Use PlanWare's Excel-based templates
for financial projections to address these
problems.
6.
If you include projected balance sheets, make sure that they don't balance.
- ditto -
7.
Don't produce any separate cash flow forecasts,
just rename the P&L or income projections.
- ditto -
8.
Do ensure that your financial projections indicate
40% profit margins in the third year. If raising external
capital, do explain that the projected return
to investors will exceed 100% per annum within three years.
Do base the plan's marketing section around a few
quotes from research reports that you found on the web.
- ditto -
11.
Don't consider customer behavior, needs or trends
unless you wish to present a series of supportive (unresearched)
theories that will support your plans.
- ditto -
12.
Do base your sales projections on the presumption
that you will gain, at least, a 1% share of the total market and don't bother
with any market segmentation.
Do pad out your sales plan with lots of buzz words
like customer-driven, first-to-market, market-led. Do underpin
it with a disproportionately small (or large) marketing budget but don't be
too explicit as to how, where and when it will be spent.
- ditto -
14.
Don't include any background to your
business idea/invention, progress to date or current status.
Do spend at least ten pages describing your
offering - do make this as detailed and technical as possible to
impress your readers. Don't mention any benefits
as these should be obvious !
Do include a 6-8 page CV for yourself but don't worry
about building a management team or sorting out operational issues
like production, delivery etc. Do make some heroic
assumptions about these matters and do pledge to address them at
a later date.
Do spend as little time as possible on the plan
but do make sure that it runs to at least sixty
pages even if this entails lots of padding and inclusion of superfluous
or irrelevant material.
* If you reverse each Do and Don't,
you'll have a useful checklist for preparing a sound
business plan. See also the
checklist on How to Write a Business Plan.
** See the online Business Plan Guide and/or
download Free-Plan with
its 100-page printable guide and 48-page template for Word.
Download Free-Plan, a freeBusiness
Plan Template for Word (48 pages) and a complementary Guide (supplied
as a 90+ topic Help file and as a 100+ page PDF file for printing).
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