Writing A Business Plan: 5 Keys To

Writing A Business Plan: 5 Keys To Your Success



Dave Lavinsky , CONTRIBUTOR
I help entrepreneurs become more successful.
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Over the past decade, I’ve helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners write their business plans, either through my business plan template, or our business plan consulting services.

However you expect to write your business plan, keep these five points top of mind:

1. Put Your Audience First

Most business plans are written for an audience. The most common audience is investors and lenders. Another audience might be your employees.

Make sure you write your plan with your key audience in mind. For example, if you are writing for venture capitalists (VCs), make sure you cater to their needs. For instance, VCs are very time constrained. So, make sure the first paragraph of your plan clearly states what you do and gets them interested. Likewise, VCs generally only fund companies who have the ability to scale to revenues of $100 million or more in five years. As such, your business plan must show how your company can attain such as feat.

2. Keep Your Business Plan Brief

Your business plan can never, nor should ever, answer every question your reader might have. Such a plan would be too lengthy, and no one would want to read it.

Rather, your business plan should cover the main points of your business, interest the reader, and show you have fully thought through the opportunity. One of the key goals of your business plan is to create enough interest for the investor to schedule a meeting with you. During that meeting they’ll ask you all the specific questions they have, some of which will not be covered in your plan (which is fine).

3. Sell, But Don’t Oversell

When used as a tool to gain investor and lender interest, your business plan is essentially a sales or marketing document. As such, it should get the investor excited, much like a brochure for a new automobile gets the right consumer to want to learn more and/or purchase it.

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Now, while your plan should excite the reader, be careful not to oversell and particularly not to load your business plan with superlatives. For example, saying we have the best technology, a world-class management team, incredible employees, etc., can often take away from the credibility of your plan. Unless of course, you can provide hard facts supporting each of these claims.