your people know the purpose of their task and how their work fits into the larger picture. Some of the assignments are straightforward. Your financial person takes charge of the financial review. Your marketing head puts together the customer segmentation section. However, if certain pieces of the plan are more complex than others or require tight coordination among units, think about assigning a small group to work on them.
Put one person in charge. Keeping track of the whole process can be a job in itself, especially if you have a large team or a complicated plan. Name one person as the project director to manage the team and ensure that employees complete tasks on schedule. Make sure every person on the team understands that the person you choose has the ultimate authority.
Appoint a wordsmith. A business plan is a written document. If you’re lucky, you have someone on your team who enjoys writing — or at least has the talent to put words down on paper with clarity. Pick a lucky person to be in charge of writing key sections of your plan, such as the executive summary. They can also serve as senior plan editor, checking grammar and spelling and making sure that the writing style is clear and consistent throughout the plan.
Putting Your Plan on Paper or in Cyberspace
When you first set out to create a business plan, the task seems overwhelming. Right off the bat, you need to answer fundamental and sometimes difficult questions about your company and what you see for the future. You have to decide what targets to aim for as you look ahead and set specific business goals and objectives. To succeed, you have to take the time to know your
Industry
Customers
Competitors
Company resources
Company’s unique qualities
Company’s advantages
Basic financial condition
Financial forecast and a budget
You also have to prepare for changes you will make to this list down the road. That means thinking through other options and alternatives and being on the lookout for new ways to make your company prosper. Few business plans ever pan out according to the first cut, so the more you can build flexibility into it, the better.
To avoid becoming overwhelmed, and to keep the business-planning process in perspective, break up the plan into the basic sections that every good business plan needs to include. This should apply to both a written plan as well as a PowerPoint presentation. Take a moment to review the sections of a business plan.
Executive summary
Your executive summary touches on every important part of your business plan. It’s more than just a simple introduction; it’s the whole plan, only shorter. In many cases, the people who read your plan don’t need to go any further than the executive summary; if they do, however, the summary points them to the right place.
The executive summary isn’t much longer than a page or two, and you can wait until you complete the rest of the business plan before you compose it; that way, all you have to do is review the plan to identify the key ideas you want to cover.
The preceding little note might be helpful to recall if you deliver a summary of your business plan as a verbal plea to a VC (venture capitalist) or some comparable funding source. The senseis of Silicon Valley are known for requiring their acolytes to make the Big Ask as succinctly as possible, which has become known as “the elevator pitch.” (The idea being that these gurus’ time is so valuable that all you’ve got is the minute or so it takes to ride up the elevator with them to their palatial office digs.) But aside from the personal indignity involved, it’s actually not a bad idea. See whether you can boil down your concept to as simplified a version as possible — say, two or three sentences at most (but please, don’t take James Joyce as a model here). Chapter 4 gives you more on this topic.
Company overview
The company overview provides a place to make general observations about the nature of your business. In the overview, you highlight the most important aspects of your industry, your customers, and the products and services you offer or plan to develop. Although you should touch on your company’s business history and major activities in the overview (if you’re an ongoing enterprise), you can leave many of the details for the later sections.
To put together a general company overview, you need to draw on several key planning documents, including the following:
Values statement: The set of beliefs and principles that guide your company’s actions and activities
Vision statement: A phrase that announces where your company wants to go or paints a broad picture of what you want your company to become
Mission statement: A statement of your company’s purpose; establishes what it is and what it does as a business entity — and succinctly demonstrates its relationship to your vision
Goals and objectives: A list of all the major goals that you set for your company, along with the objectives that you have to meet to achieve those goals
To begin constructing these statements, turn to Chapters 3 and 4.
