Did you know that the competitors of Ford cars were carts with horses and trailers? And now determine yourself the relationship between a competition and a good business plan.

The sequence of writing a successful business plan

Before bringing the structure of writing a business plan, we would like to talk about three major principles of its writing.

1. Plan should be brief

Business plan should be brief and concise for two reasons:

1) For the attractiveness of its reading - due to investors’ limited amount of time.

2) It should be fairly flexible for possible additions and amendments.

2. It is important to know the potential investors

The plan should be written so that the investor could easily understand it. For example, if the business plan is connected with IT-sector and there are many specific terms in it, investor may be not familiar with these words, then the jargon of the plan should be maximally adapted to investor’s understanding.

3. Let the writing of the plan does not scare you

Most businessmen and entrepreneurs don’t have a business education. They gain knowledge in practice, and for this reason, instead of being afraid of writing a business plan; it’s more rational to focus on solving problems arising in the course of its writing.

And now let's talk about the sections of the business plan

1) Executive Summary

This is your general glance at business and your business plan, which must be maximum of 1-2 pages. This is your general glance at business and your business plan, which must be a maximum of 1-2 pages. The executive summary is actually just a brief summary of your business plan. This part should reflect the basic details of all parts of the business plan. The executive summary should begin with the sentence which should convey the essence of the whole business plan.

The compact but complete mood of the first sentence should be continued in the first paragraph and further in the text. The sentence should be technically well made and not have any grammatical errors.

The goal is to attract the potential investor from the first sentences, so that he may want to review the entire business plan.

2) Enterprise Description

This section provides information about the legal structure, location, and the history of a company. Usually, this section is the shortest part of the business plan. However, this part has its own special meaning - a clear statement of the goals of a business/enterprise. It would be wrong to give too much time on description of these goals. This can lead to very long sentences and confusing thoughts in a result of which the psychological setting of business goals may be lost.

Description of a company’s mission shall consist of one or two sentences, the mission must be clear and unambiguous, look realistic and attainable. Taking into account that each company makes a valuable substantive proposal, the mission of the company and the contribution of this company (to the market and consumers) must be identical.

For example, Toyota's mission is: "To improve the world around you with the most reliable means of transportation". The mission of Google is also interesting: “To organize all of the world's information, making it accessible and convenient for using”.

3) Goods and services

This section is considered to be the core of the entire business plan, as far as in this part are given the description of the product, directions of its possible use and consumer appeal. Moreover this section determines the lack of supply in the market, which can be filled with the proposed product or service. This allows you to emphasize the uniqueness of the product or service, highlight it from the competitors' products. If you are not able to describe the lack of supply and its solution in a brief accessible form, then your business plan will not reach an effective business concept.

After the researching the lack of proposals and its solutions is done, move to the question of competition. And here, it is necessary to understand that every business has competition. In the early 20th century the competitors of Ford cars were carts with horses and trailers. Though at first glance, it may seem that this kind of a new product was not supposed to have competition for that time.

After determining the competitors, it is necessary to compare their work with the proposed decision of your products or services. The main purpose of this comparison is to identify the benefits of your offer over competing offerings, maintain their differences.

If the business plan relates to the network business, the strategic advantage of profitable network locations should be identified as much as possible.

If your enterprise is closely related to technologies, it is important to give the description of these technologies and to identify the "secret" of the benefits of such technologies. Of course, it is not necessary to issue a trade secret, however, the description of the advantages of technologies will play only for the benefit of your business plan.

When it comes to intellectual property, and business consists entirely of it (for example, the invention of sports shoes, protecting the knees from injury), it’s in priority to explain the functionality of the product and the business advantage created by this product.

4) Target Market

After the detailed explanation of what products or services can offer, it's time to focus on the target market. Here all tasks will be concentrated around a single question: "Whom do you sell your product, and how many of these customers?".

Depending on the type of business, strong detalization may be avoided. However, in any case, be sure to know the approximate size of the consumer market and to reflect them in this section.

ATTENTION: Do not think that the "target market includes all the prospective buyers"; do not fall into this trap. An example is the creation of a shoe company. An alleged product or service, including the production of shoes, separates market into several segments, and the aim is to focus on these segments.