What is the difficult part of a business plan? It's a great question but the answer depends on your personal strengths. If you're a proficient financial modeler, you're likely to find the market and industry analysis the most difficult. If you're a capable writer, a strong researcher, and have access to helpful tools, you'll probably find the meatiest sections of the business plan to be right up your alley, but you might stumble when it comes to forecasting the business' performance over a period of 3-5 years. Another big variable in the difficulty question revolves around the business itself – if you're launching a pharmaceutical company with 10 product lines, the Product Description could wind up being 20 pages of technical description, labels, chemical structures, and suggested use disclosures. If your business has a very simple market application but depends heavily on new marketing strategies, odds are your implementation section will be a long, detailed, data-driven assessment of marketing techniques while your market analysis could sit on a single page. It varies.
No matter what your strengths are or what part of the business plan development process you find the most difficult, remember the important topics to cover.
(1) You need to give a concise but complete overview of your product or service.
(2) You should analyze the market opportunity in full, which includes identifying your target market, talking about the state of the industry, exploring the market need, and profiling your chief competitors.
(3) You should outline your marketing strategies, no matter how basic.
(4) You need to profile your executive team and advisors, if applicable.
(5) You should show 3-5 years of financial projections.
(6) For investor plans, disclose a likely ownership scenario and give an exit strategy, even if you only intend them as points for negotiation.
If your skill set makes completing one part of the business plan easy but leaves another component undone, you can collaborate with an industry leader by retaining MasterPlans. We will not only review your entire document to see where we can add value, we can write entire sections from scratch using a decade of experience and the collective minds of some of the brightest modelers and analysts in the industry. Call toll-free 877-453-2011 to speak with a business plan consultant today.
