subject: Writing A Business Plan Is A Major Challenge: Here Are A Few Helpful Hints [print this page] Don't put off getting started on that business plan because you feel overwhelmed. It is a major challenge but here are a few helpful hints.
"Made Fresh While You Wait" works better in dining than in planning. A trend today is to send an Executive Summary of a plan to potential investors before sending out the full document. Besides saving printing and postage costs, this allows the entrepreneur to determine if the investor is at all interested before revealing too much about the company. And you can sometimes get more timely responses from investors if you ask them to read 3 pages rather than 50. Entrepreneurs anxious to get financing, though, are just writing the summary, and then finishing the plan only when the investors express interest. How do you write a summary of something that doesn't yet exist? The Executive Summary is supposed to highlight the key aspects of your plan. It reads better if you actually have some aspects that can be summarized.
FYI: CYA (Whenever Possible)
In the opening few pages of the plan you need to have a disclaimer section that protects you from certain types of legal liability and as well as protects the confidentiality of your ideas. Your attorney needs to draft this page for you, but the general themes to include are: Disclosure of risk (you are not responsible for the achievement of results forecast in the plan); Confidentiality (protection against unauthorized copying and distribution of the document to third parties, and requirement that the information in the plan not be disclosed to third parties except by permission); Securities laws compliance (notification that the document is not intended to be a securities offering).
Plans Written By Committee Seldom Look Pretty
It is always a good idea to obtain input on the plan from the other key members of your management team--your marketing expert, your finance guru, the guy who brings the bagels in the morning--but it is not a good idea for each of these people to go off and work on their own independent drafts of the Plan, to somehow be assembled into one document later. What you will end up with is, well, a mess. A better method is to work off one draft, upon which each person is allowed to suggest comments or make edits. Some word processing software even lets you track each person's changes in different colors, so you can tell which person commented that your brilliant marketing strategies were "lame".
