Business Planning

A good Business Plan will not, on its own, get you the funding you need.

A bad Business Plan could stop you get the funding you need!

Everyone writes Business Plans differently but essentially what it does is carry out two purposes:

• It gives you, the entrepreneur the opportunity to think about your business – your solution to a problem, the market(s) for that solution, how you get your solution out into those market-places, and operationally and financially how does this all fit together. It will be wrong – you will do different things based on your experience to date but at the start it gives you a route forward – when and how you deviate from that route is up to you.
• It gives the funder an idea of what you are trying to do in overall terms, and specifically how much you have thought about your product/service and the market issue it addresses, the market for that product and how you are going to market it, and overall how the business will operate, especially when you are not there. They know it will change but at least it will show them that you have thought out a route down which you are going to be travelling.

I do two things for my clients when it come to Business Plans :

• I will, if they want, create their Business Plan with them. This involves discussion about the key areas of the business – extracting all the relevant information, and then putting that in a format that ”hangs-together” as a viable logical plan and ties into the Financial Forecasts.
• The other service is to review a Business Plan that a client has created and critique it. Sometimes a client can work weeks on a plan and in some cases get too close to it and so miss the obvious questions – I can provide that service.