Business Plans

Business plans have different uses. Some are for you, the business owner, to be used in your business planning. Others are for your bankers to support obtaining conventional financing. Still others may be directed toward other types of financing such as angel investors or venture capital firms.

Depending upon the audience, the content should concentrate on different things. Above all, the executive summary should clearly show what your audience really wants to know.

Intimidation Aversion

Sometimes just the mere thought of writing a business plan can be intimidating. After all, they’re filled with charts and graphs, they often use terms with which you’re not familiar, and sometimes they include some topics, that quite frankly, don’t seem to make sense. And let’s not forget how tedious the process can be. For some people, writing can be a daunting task.

Our philosophy for business plans is a little different from most. While we make sure most of the fundamental characteristics of a plan are included, we don’t use a standard boilerplate method. We like to tailor the plan to both the need and the business itself. But most of all, we like to make sure the client’s vision and passion are communicated in a way that instills confidence to the reader.

The Proceess

We begin with a one-on-one interview, collect all the information we can get from the client, then we build an outline. If the client needs pro-forma financial information, we will help them construct that into meaningful spreadsheets and charts. This includes all the supporting evidence we can find to show the revenue projections are accurate. Once the pro-forma financial information is created, we construct the remaining content to be presented with both realistic and attractive charts and images.

Once the plan is drafted, we build a one or two page executive summary. Our summaries are probably unlike any you’ve seen. They are not dried-up, mumbo-jumbo hype. They are in fact, exactly what the reader needs to see. Think of the executive summary as your 60 second elevator speech. This is typically put together in a conversational manner, with a sidebar block of information about who, what, and where. The remaining content of the executive summary is blocked into three or four headlined areas, with hard hitting information that the reader really wants to know at a glance. It tells them what’s in it for them, what it’s going to cost them, and the basic risks involved.

Remember, the executive summary is your one chance to grab your audience to gain their interest. You need to do that quickly and professionally without boring them to death. The rest of your plan shows them how to support your assumptions. If they like what they see in the executive summary and you can readily support the claims in the body of the plan, you have a good chance of getting their support.

Sample Executive Summary

Click on the link below for our sample executive summary. This is a summary of one of a plan where one of our principals developed a small vacation-home subdivision in North Carolina. This was a terrific investment making a healthy 25% annualized return on my investment over a 2 and half year time frame.

SAMPLE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY