I. Business Planning Process:
When writing a business plan from the scratch, from a template or from the guide of an experienced business plan consultant, there are five required steps to create a new business plan. It is a detailed process here referred to as business planning process. These steps are:
i.i.Research: Business planning process starts with a detailed research into the industry, its customers, competitors, and costs of the business. This research comes in various forms like information from articles, collected data or direct interviews with prospective clients, experienced consultants or entrepreneurs. The result of the research should be meticulously organized and properly documented with its source.
i.ii. Strategize: The second step is to strategize based on the information gathered from the research. A good major source of strategizing is to watch the current practices in that business environment to have a foundation to build the necessary competitive distinctiveness. One needs to ponder over the strategy meticulously to consider the appropriate location, start up finances, equipment, operations, marketing and legal formalities.
i.iii. Calculate: From the decided strategy activities, comes the third step to calculate. It is essential to calculate and have a rough draft of the financial implications in terms of the expected expenditure and revenues to ascertain a possible profitability at the end of the day. There is the need to bring up all assumptions for startup expenses up to maturity at calculations for running early operations. Most startup businesses pack up before gestation stage due to financial assumptions.
i.iv. Draft: The fourth step of a business planning process is to begin to draft and flesh up the background work made in the decided strategy and the financial calculations for the actual business plan detailed content. One may require the services of a business plan writer or consultant, if there is any challenge in respect of this.
i.v. Revisitation and Proof-reading to finalize: The fifth step is to revisit the entire business plan details and reconsider any ambiguity or inappropriate wordings and ideas featuring in the plan. There may be the need to give it further fresh looks after setting it aside for some time. Soliciting for the assistance of an experienced proof-reader may be necessary to prevent grammatical, spelling and formatting errors to finalize the plan.
