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How to Write a Business Plan in 9 Steps (+ Template and Examples)

Every successful business has one thing in common, a good and well-executed business plan. A business plan is more than a document, it is a complete guide that outlines the goals your business wants to achieve, including its financial goals . It helps you analyze results, make strategic decisions, show your business operations and growth.

If you want to start a business or already have one and need to pitch it to investors for funding, writing a good business plan improves your chances of attracting financiers. As a startup, if you want to secure loans from financial institutions, part of the requirements involve submitting your business plan.

Writing a business plan does not have to be a complicated or time-consuming process. In this article, you will learn the step-by-step process for writing a successful business plan.

You will also learn what you need a business plan for, tips and strategies for writing a convincing business plan, business plan examples and templates that will save you tons of time, and the alternatives to the traditional business plan.

Let’s get started.

What Do You Need A Business Plan For?

Businesses create business plans for different purposes such as to secure funds, monitor business growth, measure your marketing strategies, and measure your business success.

1. Secure Funds

One of the primary reasons for writing a business plan is to secure funds, either from financial institutions/agencies or investors.

For you to effectively acquire funds, your business plan must contain the key elements of your business plan . For example, your business plan should include your growth plans, goals you want to achieve, and milestones you have recorded.

A business plan can also attract new business partners that are willing to contribute financially and intellectually. If you are writing a business plan to a bank, your project must show your traction , that is, the proof that you can pay back any loan borrowed.

Also, if you are writing to an investor, your plan must contain evidence that you can effectively utilize the funds you want them to invest in your business. Here, you are using your business plan to persuade a group or an individual that your business is a source of a good investment.

2. Monitor Business Growth

A business plan can help you track cash flows in your business. It steers your business to greater heights. A business plan capable of tracking business growth should contain:

• The business goals
• Methods to achieve the goals
• Time-frame for attaining those goals

A good business plan should guide you through every step in achieving your goals. It can also track the allocation of assets to every aspect of the business. You can tell when you are spending more than you should on a project.

You can compare a business plan to a written GPS. It helps you manage your business and hints at the right time to expand your business.

3. Measure Business Success

A business plan can help you measure your business success rate. Some small-scale businesses are thriving better than more prominent companies because of their track record of success.

Right from the onset of your business operation, set goals and work towards them. Write a plan to guide you through your procedures. Use your plan to measure how much you have achieved and how much is left to attain.

You can also weigh your success by monitoring the position of your brand relative to competitors. On the other hand, a business plan can also show you why you have not achieved a goal. It can tell if you have elapsed the time frame you set to attain a goal.

4. Document Your Marketing Strategies

You can use a business plan to document your marketing plans. Every business should have an effective marketing plan.

Competition mandates every business owner to go the extraordinary mile to remain relevant in the market. Your business plan should contain your marketing strategies that work. You can measure the success rate of your marketing plans.

In your business plan, your marketing strategy must answer the questions:

• How do you want to reach your target audience?
• How do you plan to retain your customers?
• What is/are your pricing plans?
• What is your budget for marketing?

How to Write a Business Plan Step-by-Step

1. create your executive summary.

The executive summary is a snapshot of your business or a high-level overview of your business purposes and plans . Although the executive summary is the first section in your business plan, most people write it last. The length of the executive summary is not more than two pages.

Generally, there are nine sections in a business plan, the executive summary should condense essential ideas from the other eight sections.

A good executive summary should do the following:

• A Snapshot of Growth Potential. Briefly inform the reader about your company and why it will be successful)
• Contain your Mission Statement which explains what the main objective or focus of your business is.
• Product Description and Differentiation. Brief description of your products or services and why it is different from other solutions in the market.
• The Team. Basic information about your company’s leadership team and employees
• Business Concept. A solid description of what your business does.
• Target Market. The customers you plan to sell to.
• Marketing Strategy. Your plans on reaching and selling to your customers
• Current Financial State. Brief information about what revenue your business currently generates.
• Projected Financial State. Brief information about what you foresee your business revenue to be in the future.

The executive summary is the make-or-break section of your business plan. If your summary cannot in less than two pages cannot clearly describe how your business will solve a particular problem of your target audience and make a profit, your business plan is set on a faulty foundation.

Avoid using the executive summary to hype your business, instead, focus on helping the reader understand the what and how of your plan.

View the executive summary as an opportunity to introduce your vision for your company. You know your executive summary is powerful when it can answer these key questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What sector or industry are you in?
• What are your products and services?
• What is the future of your industry?
• Is your company scaleable?
• Who are the owners and leaders of your company? What are their backgrounds and experience levels?
• What is the motivation for starting your company?
• What are the next steps?

Writing the executive summary last although it is the most important section of your business plan is an excellent idea. The reason why is because it is a high-level overview of your business plan. It is the section that determines whether potential investors and lenders will read further or not.

The executive summary can be a stand-alone document that covers everything in your business plan. It is not uncommon for investors to request only the executive summary when evaluating your business. If the information in the executive summary impresses them, they will ask for the complete business plan.

If you are writing your business plan for your planning purposes, you do not need to write the executive summary.

2. Add Your Company Overview

The company overview or description is the next section in your business plan after the executive summary. It describes what your business does.

Adding your company overview can be tricky especially when your business is still in the planning stages. Existing businesses can easily summarize their current operations but may encounter difficulties trying to explain what they plan to become.

Your company overview should contain the following:

• What products and services you will provide
• Geographical markets and locations your company have a presence
• What you need to run your business
• Who your target audience or customers are
• Who will service your customers
• Your company’s purpose, mission, and vision
• Information about your company’s founders
• Who the founders are
• Notable achievements of your company so far

When creating a company overview, you have to focus on three basics: identifying your industry, identifying your customer, and explaining the problem you solve.

If you are stuck when creating your company overview, try to answer some of these questions that pertain to you.

• Who are you targeting? (The answer is not everyone)
• What pain point does your product or service solve for your customers that they will be willing to spend money on resolving?
• How does your product or service overcome that pain point?
• Where is the location of your business?
• What products, equipment, and services do you need to run your business?
• How is your company’s product or service different from your competition in the eyes of your customers?
• How many employees do you need and what skills do you require them to have?

After answering some or all of these questions, you will get more than enough information you need to write your company overview or description section. When writing this section, describe what your company does for your customers.

The company description or overview section contains three elements: mission statement, history, and objectives.

• Mission Statement

The mission statement refers to the reason why your business or company is existing. It goes beyond what you do or sell, it is about the ‘why’. A good mission statement should be emotional and inspirational.

Your mission statement should follow the KISS rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid). For example, Shopify’s mission statement is “Make commerce better for everyone.”

When describing your company’s history, make it simple and avoid the temptation of tying it to a defensive narrative. Write it in the manner you would a profile. Your company’s history should include the following information:

• Founding Date
• Major Milestones
• Location(s)
• Flagship Products or Services
• Number of Employees
• Executive Leadership Roles

When you fill in this information, you use it to write one or two paragraphs about your company’s history.

Business Objectives

Your business objective must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.) Failure to clearly identify your business objectives does not inspire confidence and makes it hard for your team members to work towards a common purpose.

3. Perform Market and Competitive Analyses to Proof a Big Enough Business Opportunity

The third step in writing a business plan is the market and competitive analysis section. Every business, no matter the size, needs to perform comprehensive market and competitive analyses before it enters into a market.

Performing market and competitive analyses are critical for the success of your business. It helps you avoid entering the right market with the wrong product, or vice versa. Anyone reading your business plans, especially financiers and financial institutions will want to see proof that there is a big enough business opportunity you are targeting.

This section is where you describe the market and industry you want to operate in and show the big opportunities in the market that your business can leverage to make a profit. If you noticed any unique trends when doing your research, show them in this section.

Market analysis alone is not enough, you have to add competitive analysis to strengthen this section. There are already businesses in the industry or market, how do you plan to take a share of the market from them?

You have to clearly illustrate the competitive landscape in your business plan. Are there areas your competitors are doing well? Are there areas where they are not doing so well? Show it.

Make it clear in this section why you are moving into the industry and what weaknesses are present there that you plan to explain. How are your competitors going to react to your market entry? How do you plan to get customers? Do you plan on taking your competitors' competitors, tap into other sources for customers, or both?

Illustrate the competitive landscape as well. What are your competitors doing well and not so well?

Answering these questions and thoughts will aid your market and competitive analysis of the opportunities in your space. Depending on how sophisticated your industry is, or the expectations of your financiers, you may need to carry out a more comprehensive market and competitive analysis to prove that big business opportunity.

Instead of looking at the market and competitive analyses as one entity, separating them will make the research even more comprehensive.

Market Analysis

Market analysis, boarding speaking, refers to research a business carried out on its industry, market, and competitors. It helps businesses gain a good understanding of their target market and the outlook of their industry. Before starting a company, it is vital to carry out market research to find out if the market is viable.

The market analysis section is a key part of the business plan. It is the section where you identify who your best clients or customers are. You cannot omit this section, without it your business plan is incomplete.

A good market analysis will tell your readers how you fit into the existing market and what makes you stand out. This section requires in-depth research, it will probably be the most time-consuming part of the business plan to write.

• Market Research

To create a compelling market analysis that will win over investors and financial institutions, you have to carry out thorough market research . Your market research should be targeted at your primary target market for your products or services. Here is what you want to find out about your target market.

• Your target market’s needs or pain points
• The existing solutions for their pain points
• Geographic Location
• Demographics

The purpose of carrying out a marketing analysis is to get all the information you need to show that you have a solid and thorough understanding of your target audience.

Only after you have fully understood the people you plan to sell your products or services to, can you evaluate correctly if your target market will be interested in your products or services.

You can easily convince interested parties to invest in your business if you can show them you thoroughly understand the market and show them that there is a market for your products or services.

How to Quantify Your Target Market

One of the goals of your marketing research is to understand who your ideal customers are and their purchasing power. To quantify your target market, you have to determine the following:

• Your Potential Customers: They are the people you plan to target. For example, if you sell accounting software for small businesses , then anyone who runs an enterprise or large business is unlikely to be your customers. Also, individuals who do not have a business will most likely not be interested in your product.
• Total Households: If you are selling household products such as heating and air conditioning systems, determining the number of total households is more important than finding out the total population in the area you want to sell to. The logic is simple, people buy the product but it is the household that uses it.
• Median Income: You need to know the median income of your target market. If you target a market that cannot afford to buy your products and services, your business will not last long.
• Income by Demographics: If your potential customers belong to a certain age group or gender, determining income levels by demographics is necessary. For example, if you sell men's clothes, your target audience is men.

What Does a Good Market Analysis Entail?

Your business does not exist on its own, it can only flourish within an industry and alongside competitors. Market analysis takes into consideration your industry, target market, and competitors. Understanding these three entities will drastically improve your company’s chances of success.

You can view your market analysis as an examination of the market you want to break into and an education on the emerging trends and themes in that market. Good market analyses include the following:

• Industry Description. You find out about the history of your industry, the current and future market size, and who the largest players/companies are in your industry.
• Overview of Target Market. You research your target market and its characteristics. Who are you targeting? Note, it cannot be everyone, it has to be a specific group. You also have to find out all information possible about your customers that can help you understand how and why they make buying decisions.
• Size of Target Market: You need to know the size of your target market, how frequently they buy, and the expected quantity they buy so you do not risk overproducing and having lots of bad inventory. Researching the size of your target market will help you determine if it is big enough for sustained business or not.
• Growth Potential: Before picking a target market, you want to be sure there are lots of potential for future growth. You want to avoid going for an industry that is declining slowly or rapidly with almost zero growth potential.
• Market Share Potential: Does your business stand a good chance of taking a good share of the market?
• Market Pricing and Promotional Strategies: Your market analysis should give you an idea of the price point you can expect to charge for your products and services. Researching your target market will also give you ideas of pricing strategies you can implement to break into the market or to enjoy maximum profits.
• Potential Barriers to Entry: One of the biggest benefits of conducting market analysis is that it shows you every potential barrier to entry your business will likely encounter. It is a good idea to discuss potential barriers to entry such as changing technology. It informs readers of your business plan that you understand the market.
• Research on Competitors: You need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and how you can exploit them for the benefit of your business. Find patterns and trends among your competitors that make them successful, discover what works and what doesn’t, and see what you can do better.

The market analysis section is not just for talking about your target market, industry, and competitors. You also have to explain how your company can fill the hole you have identified in the market.

Here are some questions you can answer that can help you position your product or service in a positive light to your readers.

• Is your product or service of superior quality?
• What additional features do you offer that your competitors do not offer?
• Are you targeting a ‘new’ market?

Basically, your market analysis should include an analysis of what already exists in the market and an explanation of how your company fits into the market.

Competitive Analysis

In the competitive analysis section, y ou have to understand who your direct and indirect competitions are, and how successful they are in the marketplace. It is the section where you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, the advantage(s) they possess in the market and show the unique features or qualities that make you different from your competitors.

Many businesses do market analysis and competitive analysis together. However, to fully understand what the competitive analysis entails, it is essential to separate it from the market analysis.

Competitive analysis for your business can also include analysis on how to overcome barriers to entry in your target market.

The primary goal of conducting a competitive analysis is to distinguish your business from your competitors. A strong competitive analysis is essential if you want to convince potential funding sources to invest in your business. You have to show potential investors and lenders that your business has what it takes to compete in the marketplace successfully.

Competitive analysis will s how you what the strengths of your competition are and what they are doing to maintain that advantage.

When doing your competitive research, you first have to identify your competitor and then get all the information you can about them. The idea of spending time to identify your competitor and learn everything about them may seem daunting but it is well worth it.

Find answers to the following questions after you have identified who your competitors are.

• What are your successful competitors doing?
• Why is what they are doing working?
• Can your business do it better?
• What are the weaknesses of your successful competitors?
• What are they not doing well?
• Can your business turn its weaknesses into strengths?
• How good is your competitors’ customer service?
• Where do your competitors invest in advertising?
• What sales and pricing strategies are they using?
• What marketing strategies are they using?
• What kind of press coverage do they get?
• What are their customers saying about your competitors (both the positive and negative)?

If your competitors have a website, it is a good idea to visit their websites for more competitors’ research. Check their “About Us” page for more information.

If you are presenting your business plan to investors, you need to clearly distinguish yourself from your competitors. Investors can easily tell when you have not properly researched your competitors.

Take time to think about what unique qualities or features set you apart from your competitors. If you do not have any direct competition offering your product to the market, it does not mean you leave out the competitor analysis section blank. Instead research on other companies that are providing a similar product, or whose product is solving the problem your product solves.

The next step is to create a table listing the top competitors you want to include in your business plan. Ensure you list your business as the last and on the right. What you just created is known as the competitor analysis table.

Direct vs Indirect Competition

You cannot know if your product or service will be a fit for your target market if you have not understood your business and the competitive landscape.

There is no market you want to target where you will not encounter competition, even if your product is innovative. Including competitive analysis in your business plan is essential.

If you are entering an established market, you need to explain how you plan to differentiate your products from the available options in the market. Also, include a list of few companies that you view as your direct competitors The competition you face in an established market is your direct competition.

In situations where you are entering a market with no direct competition, it does not mean there is no competition there. Consider your indirect competition that offers substitutes for the products or services you offer.

For example, if you sell an innovative SaaS product, let us say a project management software , a company offering time management software is your indirect competition.

There is an easy way to find out who your indirect competitors are in the absence of no direct competitors. You simply have to research how your potential customers are solving the problems that your product or service seeks to solve. That is your direct competition.

Factors that Differentiate Your Business from the Competition

There are three main factors that any business can use to differentiate itself from its competition. They are cost leadership, product differentiation, and market segmentation.

1. Cost Leadership

A strategy you can impose to maximize your profits and gain an edge over your competitors. It involves offering lower prices than what the majority of your competitors are offering.

A common practice among businesses looking to enter into a market where there are dominant players is to use free trials or pricing to attract as many customers as possible to their offer.

2. Product Differentiation

Your product or service should have a unique selling proposition (USP) that your competitors do not have or do not stress in their marketing.

Part of the marketing strategy should involve making your products unique and different from your competitors. It does not have to be different from your competitors, it can be the addition to a feature or benefit that your competitors do not currently have.

3. Market Segmentation

As a new business seeking to break into an industry, you will gain more success from focusing on a specific niche or target market, and not the whole industry.

If your competitors are focused on a general need or target market, you can differentiate yourself from them by having a small and hyper-targeted audience. For example, if your competitors are selling men’s clothes in their online stores , you can sell hoodies for men.

4. Define Your Business and Management Structure

The next step in your business plan is your business and management structure. It is the section where you describe the legal structure of your business and the team running it.

Your business is only as good as the management team that runs it, while the management team can only strive when there is a proper business and management structure in place.

If your company is a sole proprietor or a limited liability company (LLC), a general or limited partnership, or a C or an S corporation, state it clearly in this section.

Use an organizational chart to show the management structure in your business. Clearly show who is in charge of what area in your company. It is where you show how each key manager or team leader’s unique experience can contribute immensely to the success of your company. You can also opt to add the resumes and CVs of the key players in your company.

The business and management structure section should show who the owner is, and other owners of the businesses (if the business has other owners). For businesses or companies with multiple owners, include the percent ownership of the various owners and clearly show the extent of each others’ involvement in the company.

Investors want to know who is behind the company and the team running it to determine if it has the right management to achieve its set goals.

Management Team

The management team section is where you show that you have the right team in place to successfully execute the business operations and ideas. Take time to create the management structure for your business. Think about all the important roles and responsibilities that you need managers for to grow your business.

Include brief bios of each key team member and ensure you highlight only the relevant information that is needed. If your team members have background industry experience or have held top positions for other companies and achieved success while filling that role, highlight it in this section.

A common mistake that many startups make is assigning C-level titles such as (CMO and CEO) to everyone on their team. It is unrealistic for a small business to have those titles. While it may look good on paper for the ego of your team members, it can prevent investors from investing in your business.

Instead of building an unrealistic management structure that does not fit your business reality, it is best to allow business titles to grow as the business grows. Starting everyone at the top leaves no room for future change or growth, which is bad for productivity.

Your management team does not have to be complete before you start writing your business plan. You can have a complete business plan even when there are managerial positions that are empty and need filling.

If you have management gaps in your team, simply show the gaps and indicate you are searching for the right candidates for the role(s). Investors do not expect you to have a full management team when you are just starting your business.

Key Questions to Answer When Structuring Your Management Team

• Who are the key leaders?
• What experiences, skills, and educational backgrounds do you expect your key leaders to have?
• Do your key leaders have industry experience?
• What positions will they fill and what duties will they perform in those positions?
• What level of authority do the key leaders have and what are their responsibilities?
• What is the salary for the various management positions that will attract the ideal candidates?

Additional Tips for Writing the Management Structure Section

1. Avoid Adding ‘Ghost’ Names to Your Management Team

There is always that temptation to include a ‘ghost’ name to your management team to attract and influence investors to invest in your business. Although the presence of these celebrity management team members may attract the attention of investors, it can cause your business to lose any credibility if you get found out.

Seasoned investors will investigate further the members of your management team before committing fully to your business If they find out that the celebrity name used does not play any actual role in your business, they will not invest and may write you off as dishonest.

2. Focus on Credentials But Pay Extra Attention to the Roles

Investors want to know the experience that your key team members have to determine if they can successfully reach the company’s growth and financial goals.

While it is an excellent boost for your key management team to have the right credentials, you also want to pay extra attention to the roles they will play in your company.

Organizational Chart

Adding an organizational chart in this section of your business plan is not necessary, you can do it in your business plan’s appendix.

If you are exploring funding options, it is not uncommon to get asked for your organizational chart. The function of an organizational chart goes beyond raising money, you can also use it as a useful planning tool for your business.

An organizational chart can help you identify how best to structure your management team for maximum productivity and point you towards key roles you need to fill in the future.

You can use the organizational chart to show your company’s internal management structure such as the roles and responsibilities of your management team, and relationships that exist between them.

5. Describe Your Product and Service Offering

In your business plan, you have to describe what you sell or the service you plan to offer. It is the next step after defining your business and management structure. The products and services section is where you sell the benefits of your business.

Here you have to explain how your product or service will benefit your customers and describe your product lifecycle. It is also the section where you write down your plans for intellectual property like patent filings and copyrighting.

The research and development that you are undertaking for your product or service need to be explained in detail in this section. However, do not get too technical, sell the general idea and its benefits.

If you have any diagrams or intricate designs of your product or service, do not include them in the products and services section. Instead, leave them for the addendum page. Also, if you are leaving out diagrams or designs for the addendum, ensure you add this phrase “For more detail, visit the addendum Page #.”

Your product and service section in your business plan should include the following:

• A detailed explanation that clearly shows how your product or service works.
• The pricing model for your product or service.
• Your business’ sales and distribution strategy.
• The ideal customers that want your product or service.
• The benefits of your products and services.
• Reason(s) why your product or service is a better alternative to what your competitors are currently offering in the market.
• Plans for filling the orders you receive
• If you have current or pending patents, copyrights, and trademarks for your product or service, you can also discuss them in this section.

What to Focus On When Describing the Benefits, Lifecycle, and Production Process of Your Products or Services

In the products and services section, you have to distill the benefits, lifecycle, and production process of your products and services.

When describing the benefits of your products or services, here are some key factors to focus on.

• Unique features
• Translating the unique features into benefits
• The emotional, psychological, and practical payoffs to attract customers
• Intellectual property rights or any patents

When describing the product life cycle of your products or services, here are some key factors to focus on.

• Upsells, cross-sells, and down-sells
• Time between purchases
• Plans for research and development.

When describing the production process for your products or services, you need to think about the following:

• The creation of new or existing products and services.
• The sources for the raw materials or components you need for production.
• Assembling the products
• Maintaining quality control
• Supply-chain logistics (receiving the raw materials and delivering the finished products)
• The day-to-day management of the production processes, bookkeeping, and inventory.

Tips for Writing the Products or Services Section of Your Business Plan

1. Avoid Technical Descriptions and Industry Buzzwords

The products and services section of your business plan should clearly describe the products and services that your company provides. However, it is not a section to include technical jargons that anyone outside your industry will not understand.

A good practice is to remove highly detailed or technical descriptions in favor of simple terms. Industry buzzwords are not necessary, if there are simpler terms you can use, then use them. If you plan to use your business plan to source funds, making the product or service section so technical will do you no favors.

2. Describe How Your Products or Services Differ from Your Competitors

When potential investors look at your business plan, they want to know how the products and services you are offering differ from that of your competition. Differentiating your products or services from your competition in a way that makes your solution more attractive is critical.

If you are going the innovative path and there is no market currently for your product or service, you need to describe in this section why the market needs your product or service.

For example, overnight delivery was a niche business that only a few companies were participating in. Federal Express (FedEx) had to show in its business plan that there was a large opportunity for that service and they justified why the market needed that service.

3. Long or Short Products or Services Section

Should your products or services section be short? Does the long products or services section attract more investors?

There are no straightforward answers to these questions. Whether your products or services section should be long or relatively short depends on the nature of your business.

If your business is product-focused, then automatically you need to use more space to describe the details of your products. However, if the product your business sells is a commodity item that relies on competitive pricing or other pricing strategies, you do not have to use up so much space to provide significant details about the product.

Likewise, if you are selling a commodity that is available in numerous outlets, then you do not have to spend time on writing a long products or services section.

The key to the success of your business is most likely the effectiveness of your marketing strategies compared to your competitors. Use more space to address that section.

If you are creating a new product or service that the market does not know about, your products or services section can be lengthy. The reason why is because you need to explain everything about the product or service such as the nature of the product, its use case, and values.

A short products or services section for an innovative product or service will not give the readers enough information to properly evaluate your business.

4. Describe Your Relationships with Vendors or Suppliers

Your business will rely on vendors or suppliers to supply raw materials or the components needed to make your products. In your products and services section, describe your relationships with your vendors and suppliers fully.

Avoid the mistake of relying on only one supplier or vendor. If that supplier or vendor fails to supply or goes out of business, you can easily face supply problems and struggle to meet your demands. Plan to set up multiple vendor or supplier relationships for better business stability.

5. Your Primary Goal Is to Convince Your Readers

The primary goal of your business plan is to convince your readers that your business is viable and to create a guide for your business to follow. It applies to the products and services section.

When drafting this section, think like the reader. See your reader as someone who has no idea about your products and services. You are using the products and services section to provide the needed information to help your reader understand your products and services. As a result, you have to be clear and to the point.

While you want to educate your readers about your products or services, you also do not want to bore them with lots of technical details. Show your products and services and not your fancy choice of words.

Your products and services section should provide the answer to the “what” question for your business. You and your management team may run the business, but it is your products and services that are the lifeblood of the business.

Key Questions to Answer When Writing your Products and Services Section

Answering these questions can help you write your products and services section quickly and in a way that will appeal to your readers.

• Are your products existing on the market or are they still in the development stage?
• What is your timeline for adding new products and services to the market?
• What are the positives that make your products and services different from your competitors?
• Do your products and services have any competitive advantage that your competitors’ products and services do not currently have?
• Do your products or services have any competitive disadvantages that you need to overcome to compete with your competitors? If your answer is yes, state how you plan to overcome them,
• How much does it cost to produce your products or services? How much do you plan to sell it for?
• What is the price for your products and services compared to your competitors? Is pricing an issue?
• What are your operating costs and will it be low enough for you to compete with your competitors and still take home a reasonable profit margin?
• What is your plan for acquiring your products? Are you involved in the production of your products or services?
• Are you the manufacturer and produce all the components you need to create your products? Do you assemble your products by using components supplied by other manufacturers? Do you purchase your products directly from suppliers or wholesalers?
• Do you have a steady supply of products that you need to start your business? (If your business is yet to kick-off)
• How do you plan to distribute your products or services to the market?

You can also hint at the marketing or promotion plans you have for your products or services such as how you plan to build awareness or retain customers. The next section is where you can go fully into details about your business’s marketing and sales plan.

6. Show and Explain Your Marketing and Sales Plan

Providing great products and services is wonderful, but it means nothing if you do not have a marketing and sales plan to inform your customers about them. Your marketing and sales plan is critical to the success of your business.

The sales and marketing section is where you show and offer a detailed explanation of your marketing and sales plan and how you plan to execute it. It covers your pricing plan, proposed advertising and promotion activities, activities and partnerships you need to make your business a success, and the benefits of your products and services.

There are several ways you can approach your marketing and sales strategy. Ideally, your marketing and sales strategy has to fit the unique needs of your business.

In this section, you describe how the plans your business has for attracting and retaining customers, and the exact process for making a sale happen. It is essential to thoroughly describe your complete marketing and sales plans because you are still going to reference this section when you are making financial projections for your business.

Outline Your Business’ Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

The sales and marketing section is where you outline your business’s unique selling proposition (USP). When you are developing your unique selling proposition, think about the strongest reasons why people should buy from you over your competition. That reason(s) is most likely a good fit to serve as your unique selling proposition (USP).

Target Market and Target Audience

Plans on how to get your products or services to your target market and how to get your target audience to buy them go into this section. You also highlight the strengths of your business here, particularly what sets them apart from your competition.

Before you start writing your marketing and sales plan, you need to have properly defined your target audience and fleshed out your buyer persona. If you do not first understand the individual you are marketing to, your marketing and sales plan will lack any substance and easily fall.

Creating a Smart Marketing and Sales Plan

Marketing your products and services is an investment that requires you to spend money. Like any other investment, you have to generate a good return on investment (ROI) to justify using that marketing and sales plan. Good marketing and sales plans bring in high sales and profits to your company.

Avoid spending money on unproductive marketing channels. Do your research and find out the best marketing and sales plan that works best for your company.

Your marketing and sales plan can be broken into different parts: your positioning statement, pricing, promotion, packaging, advertising, public relations, content marketing, social media, and strategic alliances.

Your Positioning Statement

Your positioning statement is the first part of your marketing and sales plan. It refers to the way you present your company to your customers.

Are you the premium solution, the low-price solution, or are you the intermediary between the two extremes in the market? What do you offer that your competitors do not that can give you leverage in the market?

Before you start writing your positioning statement, you need to spend some time evaluating the current market conditions. Here are some questions that can help you to evaluate the market

• What are the unique features or benefits that you offer that your competitors lack?
• What are your customers’ primary needs and wants?
• Why should a customer choose you over your competition? How do you plan to differentiate yourself from the competition?
• How does your company’s solution compare with other solutions in the market?

After answering these questions, then you can start writing your positioning statement. Your positioning statement does not have to be in-depth or too long.

All you need to explain with your positioning statement are two focus areas. The first is the position of your company within the competitive landscape. The other focus area is the core value proposition that sets your company apart from other alternatives that your ideal customer might consider.

Here is a simple template you can use to develop a positioning statement.

For [description of target market] who [need of target market], [product or service] [how it meets the need]. Unlike [top competition], it [most essential distinguishing feature].

For example, let’s create the positioning statement for fictional accounting software and QuickBooks alternative , TBooks.

“For small business owners who need accounting services, TBooks is an accounting software that helps small businesses handle their small business bookkeeping basics quickly and easily. Unlike Wave, TBooks gives small businesses access to live sessions with top accountants.”

You can edit this positioning statement sample and fill it with your business details.

After writing your positioning statement, the next step is the pricing of your offerings. The overall positioning strategy you set in your positioning statement will often determine how you price your products or services.

Pricing is a powerful tool that sends a strong message to your customers. Failure to get your pricing strategy right can make or mar your business. If you are targeting a low-income audience, setting a premium price can result in low sales.

You can use pricing to communicate your positioning to your customers. For example, if you are offering a product at a premium price, you are sending a message to your customers that the product belongs to the premium category.

Basic Rules to Follow When Pricing Your Offering

Setting a price for your offering involves more than just putting a price tag on it. Deciding on the right pricing for your offering requires following some basic rules. They include covering your costs, primary and secondary profit center pricing, and matching the market rate.

• Covering Your Costs: The price you set for your products or service should be more than it costs you to produce and deliver them. Every business has the same goal, to make a profit. Depending on the strategy you want to use, there are exceptions to this rule. However, the vast majority of businesses follow this rule.
• Primary and Secondary Profit Center Pricing: When a company sets its price above the cost of production, it is making that product its primary profit center. A company can also decide not to make its initial price its primary profit center by selling below or at even with its production cost. It rather depends on the support product or even maintenance that is associated with the initial purchase to make its profit. The initial price thus became its secondary profit center.
• Matching the Market Rate: A good rule to follow when pricing your products or services is to match your pricing with consumer demand and expectations. If you price your products or services beyond the price your customer perceives as the ideal price range, you may end up with no customers. Pricing your products too low below what your customer perceives as the ideal price range may lead to them undervaluing your offering.

Pricing Strategy

Your pricing strategy influences the price of your offering. There are several pricing strategies available for you to choose from when examining the right pricing strategy for your business. They include cost-plus pricing, market-based pricing, value pricing, and more.

• Cost-plus Pricing: This strategy is one of the simplest and oldest pricing strategies. Here you consider the cost of producing a unit of your product and then add a profit to it to arrive at your market price. It is an effective pricing strategy for manufacturers because it helps them cover their initial costs. Another name for the cost-plus pricing strategy is the markup pricing strategy.
• Market-based Pricing: This pricing strategy analyses the market including competitors’ pricing and then sets a price based on what the market is expecting. With this pricing strategy, you can either set your price at the low-end or high-end of the market.
• Value Pricing: This pricing strategy involves setting a price based on the value you are providing to your customer. When adopting a value-based pricing strategy, you have to set a price that your customers are willing to pay. Service-based businesses such as small business insurance providers , luxury goods sellers, and the fashion industry use this pricing strategy.

After carefully sorting out your positioning statement and pricing, the next item to look at is your promotional strategy. Your promotional strategy explains how you plan on communicating with your customers and prospects.

As a business, you must measure all your costs, including the cost of your promotions. You also want to measure how much sales your promotions bring for your business to determine its usefulness. Promotional strategies or programs that do not lead to profit need to be removed.

There are different types of promotional strategies you can adopt for your business, they include advertising, public relations, and content marketing.

Advertising

Your business plan should include your advertising plan which can be found in the marketing and sales plan section. You need to include an overview of your advertising plans such as the areas you plan to spend money on to advertise your business and offers.

Ensure that you make it clear in this section if your business will be advertising online or using the more traditional offline media, or the combination of both online and offline media. You can also include the advertising medium you want to use to raise awareness about your business and offers.

Some common online advertising mediums you can use include social media ads, landing pages, sales pages, SEO, Pay-Per-Click, emails, Google Ads, and others. Some common traditional and offline advertising mediums include word of mouth, radios, direct mail, televisions, flyers, billboards, posters, and others.

A key component of your advertising strategy is how you plan to measure the effectiveness and success of your advertising campaign. There is no point in sticking with an advertising plan or medium that does not produce results for your business in the long run.

Public Relations

A great way to reach your customers is to get the media to cover your business or product. Publicity, especially good ones, should be a part of your marketing and sales plan. In this section, show your plans for getting prominent reviews of your product from reputable publications and sources.

Your business needs that exposure to grow. If public relations is a crucial part of your promotional strategy, provide details about your public relations plan here.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a popular promotional strategy used by businesses to inform and attract their customers. It is about teaching and educating your prospects on various topics of interest in your niche, it does not just involve informing them about the benefits and features of the products and services you have,

Businesses publish content usually for free where they provide useful information, tips, and advice so that their target market can be made aware of the importance of their products and services. Content marketing strategies seek to nurture prospects into buyers over time by simply providing value.

Your company can create a blog where it will be publishing content for its target market. You will need to use the best website builder such as Wix and Squarespace and the best web hosting services such as Bluehost, Hostinger, and other Bluehost alternatives to create a functional blog or website.

If content marketing is a crucial part of your promotional strategy (as it should be), detail your plans under promotions.

Including high-quality images of the packaging of your product in your business plan is a lovely idea. You can add the images of the packaging of that product in the marketing and sales plan section. If you are not selling a product, then you do not need to include any worry about the physical packaging of your product.

When organizing the packaging section of your business plan, you can answer the following questions to make maximum use of this section.

• Is your choice of packaging consistent with your positioning strategy?
• What key value proposition does your packaging communicate? (It should reflect the key value proposition of your business)
• How does your packaging compare to that of your competitors?

Social Media

Your 21st-century business needs to have a good social media presence. Not having one is leaving out opportunities for growth and reaching out to your prospect.

You do not have to join the thousands of social media platforms out there. What you need to do is join the ones that your customers are active on and be active there.

Businesses use social media to provide information about their products such as promotions, discounts, the benefits of their products, and content on their blogs.

Social media is also a platform for engaging with your customers and getting feedback about your products or services. Make no mistake, more and more of your prospects are using social media channels to find more information about companies.

You need to consider the social media channels you want to prioritize your business (prioritize the ones your customers are active in) and your branding plans in this section.

Strategic Alliances

If your company plans to work closely with other companies as part of your sales and marketing plan, include it in this section. Prove details about those partnerships in your business plan if you have already established them.

Strategic alliances can be beneficial for all parties involved including your company. Working closely with another company in the form of a partnership can provide access to a different target market segment for your company.

The company you are partnering with may also gain access to your target market or simply offer a new product or service (that of your company) to its customers.

Mutually beneficial partnerships can cover the weaknesses of one company with the strength of another. You should consider strategic alliances with companies that sell complimentary products to yours. For example, if you provide printers, you can partner with a company that produces ink since the customers that buy printers from you will also need inks for printing.

Steps Involved in Creating a Marketing and Sales Plan

1. Focus on Your Target Market

Identify who your customers are, the market you want to target. Then determine the best ways to get your products or services to your potential customers.

2. Evaluate Your Competition

One of the goals of having a marketing plan is to distinguish yourself from your competition. You cannot stand out from them without first knowing them in and out.

You can know your competitors by gathering information about their products, pricing, service, and advertising campaigns.

These questions can help you know your competition.

• What makes your competition successful?
• What are their weaknesses?
• What are customers saying about your competition?

3. Consider Your Brand

Customers' perception of your brand has a strong impact on your sales. Your marketing and sales plan should seek to bolster the image of your brand. Before you start marketing your business, think about the message you want to pass across about your business and your products and services.

4. Focus on Benefits

The majority of your customers do not view your product in terms of features, what they want to know is the benefits and solutions your product offers. Think about the problems your product solves and the benefits it delivers, and use it to create the right sales and marketing message.

Your marketing plan should focus on what you want your customer to get instead of what you provide. Identify those benefits in your marketing and sales plan.

5. Focus on Differentiation

Your marketing and sales plan should look for a unique angle they can take that differentiates your business from the competition, even if the products offered are similar. Some good areas of differentiation you can use are your benefits, pricing, and features.

Key Questions to Answer When Writing Your Marketing and Sales Plan

• What is your company’s budget for sales and marketing campaigns?
• What key metrics will you use to determine if your marketing plans are successful?
• What are your alternatives if your initial marketing efforts do not succeed?
• Who are the sales representatives you need to promote your products or services?
• What are the marketing and sales channels you plan to use? How do you plan to get your products in front of your ideal customers?
• Where will you sell your products?

You may want to include samples of marketing materials you plan to use such as print ads, website descriptions, and social media ads. While it is not compulsory to include these samples, it can help you better communicate your marketing and sales plan and objectives.

The purpose of the marketing and sales section is to answer this question “How will you reach your customers?” If you cannot convincingly provide an answer to this question, you need to rework your marketing and sales section.

7. Clearly Show Your Funding Request

If you are writing your business plan to ask for funding from investors or financial institutions, the funding request section is where you will outline your funding requirements. The funding request section should answer the question ‘How much money will your business need in the near future (3 to 5 years)?’

A good funding request section will clearly outline and explain the amount of funding your business needs over the next five years. You need to know the amount of money your business needs to make an accurate funding request.

Also, when writing your funding request, provide details of how the funds will be used over the period. Specify if you want to use the funds to buy raw materials or machinery, pay salaries, pay for advertisements, and cover specific bills such as rent and electricity.

In addition to explaining what you want to use the funds requested for, you need to clearly state the projected return on investment (ROI) . Investors and creditors want to know if your business can generate profit for them if they put funds into it.

Ensure you do not inflate the figures and stay as realistic as possible. Investors and financial institutions you are seeking funds from will do their research before investing money in your business.

If you are not sure of an exact number to request from, you can use some range of numbers as rough estimates. Add a best-case scenario and a work-case scenario to your funding request. Also, include a description of your strategic future financial plans such as selling your business or paying off debts.

Funding Request: Debt or Equity?

When making your funding request, specify the type of funding you want. Do you want debt or equity? Draw out the terms that will be applicable for the funding, and the length of time the funding request will cover.

Case for Equity

If your new business has not yet started generating profits, you are most likely preparing to sell equity in your business to raise capital at the early stage. Equity here refers to ownership. In this case, you are selling a portion of your company to raise capital.

Although this method of raising capital for your business does not put your business in debt, keep in mind that an equity owner may expect to play a key role in company decisions even if he does not hold a major stake in the company.

Most equity sales for startups are usually private transactions . If you are making a funding request by offering equity in exchange for funding, let the investor know that they will be paid a dividend (a share of the company’s profit). Also, let the investor know the process for selling their equity in your business.

Case for Debt

You may decide not to offer equity in exchange for funds, instead, you make a funding request with the promise to pay back the money borrowed at the agreed time frame.

When making a funding request with an agreement to pay back, note that you will have to repay your creditors both the principal amount borrowed and the interest on it. Financial institutions offer this type of funding for businesses.

Large companies combine both equity and debt in their capital structure. When drafting your business plan, decide if you want to offer both or one over the other.

Before you sell equity in exchange for funding in your business, consider if you are willing to accept not being in total control of your business. Also, before you seek loans in your funding request section, ensure that the terms of repayment are favorable.

You should set a clear timeline in your funding request so that potential investors and creditors can know what you are expecting. Some investors and creditors may agree to your funding request and then delay payment for longer than 30 days, meanwhile, your business needs an immediate cash injection to operate efficiently.

Additional Tips for Writing the Funding Request Section of your Business Plan

The funding request section is not necessary for every business, it is only needed by businesses who plan to use their business plan to secure funding.

If you are adding the funding request section to your business plan, provide an itemized summary of how you plan to use the funds requested. Hiring a lawyer, accountant, or other professionals may be necessary for the proper development of this section.

You should also gather and use financial statements that add credibility and support to your funding requests. Ensure that the financial statements you use should include your projected financial data such as projected cash flows, forecast statements, and expenditure budgets.

If you are an existing business, include all historical financial statements such as cash flow statements, balance sheets and income statements .

Provide monthly and quarterly financial statements for a year. If your business has records that date back beyond the one-year mark, add the yearly statements of those years. These documents are for the appendix section of your business plan.

8. Detail Your Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projections

If you used the funding request section in your business plan, supplement it with a financial plan, metrics, and projections. This section paints a picture of the past performance of your business and then goes ahead to make an informed projection about its future.

The goal of this section is to convince readers that your business is going to be a financial success. It outlines your business plan to generate enough profit to repay the loan (with interest if applicable) and to generate a decent return on investment for investors.

If you have an existing business already in operation, use this section to demonstrate stability through finance. This section should include your cash flow statements, balance sheets, and income statements covering the last three to five years. If your business has some acceptable collateral that you can use to acquire loans, list it in the financial plan, metrics, and projection section.

Apart from current financial statements, this section should also contain a prospective financial outlook that spans the next five years. Include forecasted income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, and capital expenditure budget.

If your business is new and is not yet generating profit, use clear and realistic projections to show the potentials of your business.

When drafting this section, research industry norms and the performance of comparable businesses. Your financial projections should cover at least five years. State the logic behind your financial projections. Remember you can always make adjustments to this section as the variables change.

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section create a baseline which your business can either exceed or fail to reach. If your business fails to reach your projections in this section, you need to understand why it failed.

Investors and loan managers spend a lot of time going through the financial plan, metrics, and projection section compared to other parts of the business plan. Ensure you spend time creating credible financial analyses for your business in this section.

Many entrepreneurs find this section daunting to write. You do not need a business degree to create a solid financial forecast for your business. Business finances, especially for startups, are not as complicated as they seem. There are several online tools and templates that make writing this section so much easier.

Use Graphs and Charts

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section is a great place to use graphs and charts to tell the financial story of your business. Charts and images make it easier to communicate your finances.

Accuracy in this section is key, ensure you carefully analyze your past financial statements properly before making financial projects.

Address the Risk Factors and Show Realistic Financial Projections

Keep your financial plan, metrics, and projection realistic. It is okay to be optimistic in your financial projection, however, you have to justify it.

You should also address the various risk factors associated with your business in this section. Investors want to know the potential risks involved, show them. You should also show your plans for mitigating those risks.

What You Should In The Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projection Section of Your Business Plan

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section of your business plan should have monthly sales and revenue forecasts for the first year. It should also include annual projections that cover 3 to 5 years.

A three-year projection is a basic requirement to have in your business plan. However, some investors may request a five-year forecast.

Your business plan should include the following financial statements: sales forecast, personnel plan, income statement, income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, and an exit strategy.

1. Sales Forecast

Sales forecast refers to your projections about the number of sales your business is going to record over the next few years. It is typically broken into several rows, with each row assigned to a core product or service that your business is offering.

One common mistake people make in their business plan is to break down the sales forecast section into long details. A sales forecast should forecast the high-level details.

For example, if you are forecasting sales for a payroll software provider, you could break down your forecast into target market segments or subscription categories.

Your sales forecast section should also have a corresponding row for each sales row to cover the direct cost or Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). The objective of these rows is to show the expenses that your business incurs in making and delivering your product or service.

Note that your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) should only cover those direct costs incurred when making your products. Other indirect expenses such as insurance, salaries, payroll tax, and rent should not be included.

For example, the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for a restaurant is the cost of ingredients while for a consulting company it will be the cost of paper and other presentation materials.

2. Personnel Plan

The personnel plan section is where you provide details about the payment plan for your employees. For a small business, you can easily list every position in your company and how much you plan to pay in the personnel plan.

However, for larger businesses, you have to break the personnel plan into functional groups such as sales and marketing.

The personnel plan will also include the cost of an employee beyond salary, commonly referred to as the employee burden. These costs include insurance, payroll taxes , and other essential costs incurred monthly as a result of having employees on your payroll.

3. Income Statement

The income statement section shows if your business is making a profit or taking a loss. Another name for the income statement is the profit and loss (P&L). It takes data from your sales forecast and personnel plan and adds other ongoing expenses you incur while running your business.

Every business plan should have an income statement. It subtracts your business expenses from its earnings to show if your business is generating profit or incurring losses.

The income statement has the following items: sales, Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), gross margin, operating expenses, total operating expenses, operating income , total expenses, and net profit.

• Sales refer to the revenue your business generates from selling its products or services. Other names for sales are income or revenue.
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) refers to the total cost of selling your products. Other names for COGS are direct costs or cost of sales. Manufacturing businesses use the Costs of Goods Manufactured (COGM) .
• Gross Margin is the figure you get when you subtract your COGS from your sales. In your income statement, you can express it as a percentage of total sales (Gross margin / Sales = Gross Margin Percent).
• Operating Expenses refer to all the expenses you incur from running your business. It exempts the COGS because it stands alone as a core part of your income statement. You also have to exclude taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Your operating expenses include salaries, marketing expenses, research and development (R&D) expenses, and other expenses.
• Total Operating Expenses refers to the sum of all your operating expenses including those exemptions named above under operating expenses.
• Operating Income refers to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It is simply known as the acronym EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Calculating your operating income is simple, all you need to do is to subtract your COGS and total operating expenses from your sales.
• Total Expenses refer to the sum of your operating expenses and your business’ interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
• Net profit shows whether your business has made a profit or taken a loss during a given timeframe.

4. Cash Flow Statement

The cash flow statement tracks the money you have in the bank at any given point. It is often confused with the income statement or the profit and loss statement. They are both different types of financial statements. The income statement calculates your profits and losses while the cash flow statement shows you how much you have in the bank.

5. Balance Sheet

The balance sheet is a financial statement that provides an overview of the financial health of your business. It contains information about the assets and liabilities of your company, and owner’s or shareholders’ equity.

You can get the net worth of your company by subtracting your company’s liabilities from its assets.

6. Exit Strategy

The exit strategy refers to a probable plan for selling your business either to the public in an IPO or to another company. It is the last thing you include in the financial plan, metrics, and projection section.

You can choose to omit the exit strategy from your business plan if you plan to maintain full ownership of your business and do not plan on seeking angel investment or virtual capitalist (VC) funding.

Investors may want to know what your exit plan is. They invest in your business to get a good return on investment.

Your exit strategy does not have to include long and boring details. Ensure you identify some interested parties who may be interested in buying the company if it becomes a success.

Key Questions to Answer with Your Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projection

Your financial plan, metrics, and projection section helps investors, creditors, or your internal managers to understand what your expenses are, the amount of cash you need, and what it takes to make your company profitable. It also shows what you will be doing with any funding.

You do not need to show actual financial data if you do not have one. Adding forecasts and projections to your financial statements is added proof that your strategy is feasible and shows investors you have planned properly.

Here are some key questions to answer to help you develop this section.

• What is your sales forecast for the next year?
• When will your company achieve a positive cash flow?
• What are the core expenses you need to operate?
• How much money do you need upfront to operate or grow your company?
• How will you use the loans or investments?

9. Add an Appendix to Your Business Plan

Adding an appendix to your business plan is optional. It is a useful place to put any charts, tables, legal notes, definitions, permits, résumés, and other critical information that do not fit into other sections of your business plan.

The appendix section is where you would want to include details of a patent or patent-pending if you have one. You can always add illustrations or images of your products here. It is the last section of your business plan.

When writing your business plan, there are details you cut short or remove to prevent the entire section from becoming too lengthy. There are also details you want to include in the business plan but are not a good fit for any of the previous sections. You can add that additional information to the appendix section.

Businesses also use the appendix section to include supporting documents or other materials specially requested by investors or lenders.

You can include just about any information that supports the assumptions and statements you made in the business plan under the appendix. It is the one place in the business plan where unrelated data and information can coexist amicably.

If your appendix section is lengthy, try organizing it by adding a table of contents at the beginning of the appendix section. It is also advisable to group similar information to make it easier for the reader to access them.

A well-organized appendix section makes it easier to share your information clearly and concisely. Add footnotes throughout the rest of the business plan or make references in the plan to the documents in the appendix.

The appendix section is usually only necessary if you are seeking funding from investors or lenders, or hoping to attract partners.

People reading business plans do not want to spend time going through a heap of backup information, numbers, and charts. Keep these documents or information in the Appendix section in case the reader wants to dig deeper.

Common Items to Include in the Appendix Section of Your Business Plan

The appendix section includes documents that supplement or support the information or claims given in other sections of the business plans. Common items you can include in the appendix section include:

• Additional data about the process of manufacturing or creation
• Additional description of products or services such as product schematics
• Additional financial documents or projections
• Articles of incorporation and status
• Backup for market research or competitive analysis
• Bank statements
• Business registries
• Client testimonials (if your business is already running)
• Copies of insurances
• Credit histories (personal or/and business)
• Deeds and permits
• Equipment leases
• Examples of marketing and advertising collateral
• Industry associations and memberships
• Images of product
• Intellectual property
• Key customer contracts
• Legal documents and other contracts
• Letters of reference
• Links to references
• Market research data
• Organizational charts
• Photographs of potential facilities
• Professional licenses pertaining to your legal structure or type of business
• Purchase orders
• Resumes of the founder(s) and key managers
• State and federal identification numbers or codes
• Trademarks or patents’ registrations

Avoid using the appendix section as a place to dump any document or information you feel like adding. Only add documents or information that you support or increase the credibility of your business plan.

Tips and Strategies for Writing a Convincing Business Plan

To achieve a perfect business plan, you need to consider some key tips and strategies. These tips will raise the efficiency of your business plan above average.

1. Know Your Audience

When writing a business plan, you need to know your audience . Business owners write business plans for different reasons. Your business plan has to be specific. For example, you can write business plans to potential investors, banks, and even fellow board members of the company.

The audience you are writing to determines the structure of the business plan. As a business owner, you have to know your audience. Not everyone will be your audience. Knowing your audience will help you to narrow the scope of your business plan.

Consider what your audience wants to see in your projects, the likely questions they might ask, and what interests them.

• A business plan used to address a company's board members will center on its employment schemes, internal affairs, projects, stakeholders, etc.
• A business plan for financial institutions will talk about the size of your market and the chances for you to pay back any loans you demand.
• A business plan for investors will show proof that you can return the investment capital within a specific time. In addition, it discusses your financial projections, tractions, and market size.

2. Get Inspiration from People

Writing a business plan from scratch as an entrepreneur can be daunting. That is why you need the right inspiration to push you to write one. You can gain inspiration from the successful business plans of other businesses. Look at their business plans, the style they use, the structure of the project, etc.

To make your business plan easier to create, search companies related to your business to get an exact copy of what you need to create an effective business plan. You can also make references while citing examples in your business plans.

When drafting your business plan, get as much help from others as you possibly can. By getting inspiration from people, you can create something better than what they have.

3. Avoid Being Over Optimistic

Many business owners make use of strong adjectives to qualify their content. One of the big mistakes entrepreneurs make when preparing a business plan is promising too much.

The use of superlatives and over-optimistic claims can prepare the audience for more than you can offer. In the end, you disappoint the confidence they have in you.

In most cases, the best option is to be realistic with your claims and statistics. Most of the investors can sense a bit of incompetency from the overuse of superlatives. As a new entrepreneur, do not be tempted to over-promise to get the interests of investors.

The concept of entrepreneurship centers on risks, nothing is certain when you make future analyses. What separates the best is the ability to do careful research and work towards achieving that, not promising more than you can achieve.

To make an excellent first impression as an entrepreneur, replace superlatives with compelling data-driven content. In this way, you are more specific than someone promising a huge ROI from an investment.

4. Keep it Simple and Short

When writing business plans, ensure you keep them simple throughout. Irrespective of the purpose of the business plan, your goal is to convince the audience.

One way to achieve this goal is to make them understand your proposal. Therefore, it would be best if you avoid the use of complex grammar to express yourself. It would be a huge turn-off if the people you want to convince are not familiar with your use of words.

Another thing to note is the length of your business plan. It would be best if you made it as brief as possible.

You hardly see investors or agencies that read through an extremely long document. In that case, if your first few pages can’t convince them, then you have lost it. The more pages you write, the higher the chances of you derailing from the essential contents.

To ensure your business plan has a high conversion rate, you need to dispose of every unnecessary information. For example, if you have a strategy that you are not sure of, it would be best to leave it out of the plan.

5. Make an Outline and Follow Through

A perfect business plan must have touched every part needed to convince the audience. Business owners get easily tempted to concentrate more on their products than on other sections. Doing this can be detrimental to the efficiency of the business plan.

For example, imagine you talking about a product but omitting or providing very little information about the target audience. You will leave your clients confused.

To ensure that your business plan communicates your full business model to readers, you have to input all the necessary information in it. One of the best ways to achieve this is to design a structure and stick to it.

This structure is what guides you throughout the writing. To make your work easier, you can assign an estimated word count or page limit to every section to avoid making it too bulky for easy reading. As a guide, the necessary things your business plan must contain are:

• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Product or service description
• Target audience
• Market size
• Competition analysis
• Financial projections

Some specific businesses can include some other essential sections, but these are the key sections that must be in every business plan.

6. Ask a Professional to Proofread

When writing a business plan, you must tie all loose ends to get a perfect result. When you are done with writing, call a professional to go through the document for you. You are bound to make mistakes, and the way to correct them is to get external help.

You should get a professional in your field who can relate to every section of your business plan. It would be easier for the professional to notice the inner flaws in the document than an editor with no knowledge of your business.

In addition to getting a professional to proofread, get an editor to proofread and edit your document. The editor will help you identify grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and inappropriate writing styles.

Writing a business plan can be daunting, but you can surmount that obstacle and get the best out of it with these tips.

Business Plan Examples and Templates That’ll Save You Tons of Time

1. hubspot's one-page business plan.

The one-page business plan template by HubSpot is the perfect guide for businesses of any size, irrespective of their business strategy. Although the template is condensed into a page, your final business plan should not be a page long! The template is designed to ask helpful questions that can help you develop your business plan.

Hubspot’s one-page business plan template is divided into nine fields:

• Business opportunity
• Company description
• Industry analysis
• Target market
• Implementation timeline
• Marketing plan
• Financial summary
• Funding required

2. Bplan’s Free Business Plan Template

Bplans' free business plan template is investor-approved. It is a rich template used by prestigious educational institutions such as Babson College and Princeton University to teach entrepreneurs how to create a business plan.

The template has six sections: the executive summary, opportunity, execution, company, financial plan, and appendix. There is a step-by-step guide for writing every little detail in the business plan. Follow the instructions each step of the way and you will create a business plan that impresses investors or lenders easily.

3. HubSpot's Downloadable Business Plan Template

HubSpot’s downloadable business plan template is a more comprehensive option compared to the one-page business template by HubSpot. This free and downloadable business plan template is designed for entrepreneurs.

The template is a comprehensive guide and checklist for business owners just starting their businesses. It tells you everything you need to fill in each section of the business plan and how to do it.

There are nine sections in this business plan template: an executive summary, company and business description, product and services line, market analysis, marketing plan, sales plan, legal notes, financial considerations, and appendix.

4. Business Plan by My Own Business Institute

My Own Business Institute (MOBI) which is a part of Santa Clara University's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship offers a free business plan template. You can either copy the free business template from the link provided above or download it as a Word document.

The comprehensive template consists of a whopping 15 sections.

• The Business Profile
• The Vision and the People
• Home-Based Business and Freelance Business Opportunities
• Organization
• Licenses and Permits
• Business Insurance
• Communication Tools
• Acquisitions
• Location and Leasing
• Accounting and Cash Flow
• Opening and Marketing
• Managing Employees
• Expanding and Handling Problems

There are lots of helpful tips on how to fill each section in the free business plan template by MOBI.

5. Score's Business Plan Template for Startups

Score is an American nonprofit organization that helps entrepreneurs build successful companies. This business plan template for startups by Score is available for free download. The business plan template asks a whooping 150 generic questions that help entrepreneurs from different fields to set up the perfect business plan.

The business plan template for startups contains clear instructions and worksheets, all you have to do is answer the questions and fill the worksheets.

There are nine sections in the business plan template: executive summary, company description, products and services, marketing plan, operational plan, management and organization, startup expenses and capitalization, financial plan, and appendices.

The ‘refining the plan’ resource contains instructions that help you modify your business plan to suit your specific needs, industry, and target audience. After you have completed Score’s business plan template, you can work with a SCORE mentor for expert advice in business planning.

6. Minimalist Architecture Business Plan Template by Venngage

The minimalist architecture business plan template is a simple template by Venngage that you can customize to suit your business needs .

There are five sections in the template: an executive summary, statement of problem, approach and methodology, qualifications, and schedule and benchmark. The business plan template has instructions that guide users on what to fill in each section.

7. Small Business Administration Free Business Plan Template

The Small Business Administration (SBA) offers two free business plan templates, filled with practical real-life examples that you can model to create your business plan. Both free business plan templates are written by fictional business owners: Rebecca who owns a consulting firm, and Andrew who owns a toy company.

There are five sections in the two SBA’s free business plan templates.

• Executive Summary
• Company Description
• Service Line
• Marketing and Sales

8. The $100 Startup's One-Page Business Plan

The one-page business plan by the $100 startup is a simple business plan template for entrepreneurs who do not want to create a long and complicated plan . You can include more details in the appendices for funders who want more information beyond what you can put in the one-page business plan.

There are five sections in the one-page business plan such as overview, ka-ching, hustling, success, and obstacles or challenges or open questions. You can answer all the questions using one or two sentences.

9. PandaDoc’s Free Business Plan Template

The free business plan template by PandaDoc is a comprehensive 15-page document that describes the information you should include in every section.

There are 11 sections in PandaDoc’s free business plan template.

• Executive summary
• Business description
• Products and services
• Operations plan
• Management organization
• Financial plan
• Conclusion / Call to action
• Confidentiality statement

You have to sign up for its 14-day free trial to access the template. You will find different business plan templates on PandaDoc once you sign up (including templates for general businesses and specific businesses such as bakeries, startups, restaurants, salons, hotels, and coffee shops)

PandaDoc allows you to customize its business plan templates to fit the needs of your business. After editing the template, you can send it to interested parties and track opens and views through PandaDoc.

10. Invoiceberry Templates for Word, Open Office, Excel, or PPT

InvoiceBerry is a U.K based online invoicing and tracking platform that offers free business plan templates in .docx, .odt, .xlsx, and .pptx formats for freelancers and small businesses.

Before you can download the free business plan template, it will ask you to give it your email address. After you complete the little task, it will send the download link to your inbox for you to download. It also provides a business plan checklist in .xlsx file format that ensures you add the right information to the business plan.

Alternatives to the Traditional Business Plan

A business plan is very important in mapping out how one expects their business to grow over a set number of years, particularly when they need external investment in their business. However, many investors do not have the time to watch you present your business plan. It is a long and boring read.

Luckily, there are three alternatives to the traditional business plan (the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and Startup Pitch Deck). These alternatives are less laborious and easier and quicker to present to investors.

Business Model Canvas (BMC)

The business model canvas is a business tool used to present all the important components of setting up a business, such as customers, route to market, value proposition, and finance in a single sheet. It provides a very focused blueprint that defines your business initially which you can later expand on if needed.

The sheet is divided mainly into company, industry, and consumer models that are interconnected in how they find problems and proffer solutions.

Segments of the Business Model Canvas

The business model canvas was developed by founder Alexander Osterwalder to answer important business questions. It contains nine segments.

• Key Partners: Who will be occupying important executive positions in your business? What do they bring to the table? Will there be a third party involved with the company?
• Key Activities: What important activities will production entail? What activities will be carried out to ensure the smooth running of the company?
• The Product’s Value Propositions: What does your product do? How will it be different from other products?
• Customer Segments: What demography of consumers are you targeting? What are the habits of these consumers? Who are the MVPs of your target consumers?
• Customer Relationships: How will the team support and work with its customer base? How do you intend to build and maintain trust with the customer?
• Key Resources: What type of personnel and tools will be needed? What size of the budget will they need access to?
• Channels: How do you plan to create awareness of your products? How do you intend to transport your product to the customer?
• Cost Structure: What is the estimated cost of production? How much will distribution cost?
• Revenue Streams: For what value are customers willing to pay? How do they prefer to pay for the product? Are there any external revenues attached apart from the main source? How do the revenue streams contribute to the overall revenue?

Lean Canvas

The lean canvas is a problem-oriented alternative to the standard business model canvas. It was proposed by Ash Maurya, creator of Lean Stack as a development of the business model generation. It uses a more problem-focused approach and it majorly targets entrepreneurs and startup businesses.

Lean Canvas uses the same 9 blocks concept as the business model canvas, however, they have been modified slightly to suit the needs and purpose of a small startup. The key partners, key activities, customer relationships, and key resources are replaced by new segments which are:

• Problem: Simple and straightforward number of problems you have identified, ideally three.
• Solution: The solutions to each problem.
• Unfair Advantage: Something you possess that can't be easily bought or replicated.
• Key Metrics: Important numbers that will tell how your business is doing.

Startup Pitch Deck

While the business model canvas compresses into a factual sheet, startup pitch decks expand flamboyantly.

Pitch decks, through slides, convey your business plan, often through graphs and images used to emphasize estimations and observations in your presentation. Entrepreneurs often use pitch decks to fully convince their target audience of their plans before discussing funding arrangements.

Considering the likelihood of it being used in a small time frame, a good startup pitch deck should ideally contain 20 slides or less to have enough time to answer questions from the audience.

Unlike the standard and lean business model canvases, a pitch deck doesn't have a set template on how to present your business plan but there are still important components to it. These components often mirror those of the business model canvas except that they are in slide form and contain more details.

Using Airbnb (one of the most successful start-ups in recent history) for reference, the important components of a good slide are listed below.

• Cover/Introduction Slide: Here, you should include your company's name and mission statement. Your mission statement should be a very catchy tagline. Also, include personal information and contact details to provide an easy link for potential investors.
• Problem Slide: This slide requires you to create a connection with the audience or the investor that you are pitching. For example in their pitch, Airbnb summarized the most important problems it would solve in three brief points – pricing of hotels, disconnection from city culture, and connection problems for local bookings.
• Solution Slide: This slide includes your core value proposition. List simple and direct solutions to the problems you have mentioned
• Customer Analysis: Here you will provide information on the customers you will be offering your service to. The identity of your customers plays an important part in fundraising as well as the long-run viability of the business.
• Market Validation: Use competitive analysis to show numbers that prove the presence of a market for your product, industry behavior in the present and the long run, as well as the percentage of the market you aim to attract. It shows that you understand your competitors and customers and convinces investors of the opportunities presented in the market.
• Business Model: Your business model is the hook of your presentation. It may vary in complexity but it should generally include a pricing system informed by your market analysis. The goal of the slide is to confirm your business model is easy to implement.
• Marketing Strategy: This slide should summarize a few customer acquisition methods that you plan to use to grow the business.
• Competitive Advantage: What this slide will do is provide information on what will set you apart and make you a more attractive option to customers. It could be the possession of technology that is not widely known in the market.
• Team Slide: Here you will give a brief description of your team. Include your key management personnel here and their specific roles in the company. Include their educational background, job history, and skillsets. Also, talk about their accomplishments in their careers so far to build investors' confidence in members of your team.
• Traction Slide: This validates the company’s business model by showing growth through early sales and support. The slide aims to reduce any lingering fears in potential investors by showing realistic periodic milestones and profit margins. It can include current sales, growth, valuable customers, pre-orders, or data from surveys outlining current consumer interest.
• Funding Slide: This slide is popularly referred to as ‘the ask'. Here you will include important details like how much is needed to get your business off the ground and how the funding will be spent to help the company reach its goals.
• Appendix Slides: Your pitch deck appendix should always be included alongside a standard pitch presentation. It consists of additional slides you could not show in the pitch deck but you need to complement your presentation.

It is important to support your calculations with pictorial renditions. Infographics, such as pie charts or bar graphs, will be more effective in presenting the information than just listing numbers. For example, a six-month graph that shows rising profit margins will easily look more impressive than merely writing it.

Lastly, since a pitch deck is primarily used to secure meetings and you may be sharing your pitch with several investors, it is advisable to keep a separate public version that doesn't include financials. Only disclose the one with projections once you have secured a link with an investor.

Advantages of the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and Startup Pitch Deck over the Traditional Business Plan

• Time-Saving: Writing a detailed traditional business plan could take weeks or months. On the other hand, all three alternatives can be done in a few days or even one night of brainstorming if you have a comprehensive understanding of your business.
• Easier to Understand: Since the information presented is almost entirely factual, it puts focus on what is most important in running the business. They cut away the excess pages of fillers in a traditional business plan and allow investors to see what is driving the business and what is getting in the way.
• Easy to Update: Businesses typically present their business plans to many potential investors before they secure funding. What this means is that you may regularly have to amend your presentation to update statistics or adjust to audience-specific needs. For a traditional business plan, this could mean rewriting a whole section of your plan. For the three alternatives, updating is much easier because they are not voluminous.
• Guide for a More In-depth Business Plan: All three alternatives have the added benefit of being able to double as a sketch of your business plan if the need to create one arises in the future.

Business Plan FAQ

Business plans are important for any entrepreneur who is looking for a framework to run their company over some time or seeking external support. Although they are essential for new businesses, every company should ideally have a business plan to track their growth from time to time.  They can be used by startups seeking investments or loans to convey their business ideas or an employee to convince his boss of the feasibility of starting a new project. They can also be used by companies seeking to recruit high-profile employee targets into key positions or trying to secure partnerships with other firms.

Business plans often vary depending on your target audience, the scope, and the goals for the plan. Startup plans are the most common among the different types of business plans.  A start-up plan is used by a new business to present all the necessary information to help get the business up and running. They are usually used by entrepreneurs who are seeking funding from investors or bank loans. The established company alternative to a start-up plan is a feasibility plan. A feasibility plan is often used by an established company looking for new business opportunities. They are used to show the upsides of creating a new product for a consumer base. Because the audience is usually company people, it requires less company analysis. The third type of business plan is the lean business plan. A lean business plan is a brief, straight-to-the-point breakdown of your ideas and analysis for your business. It does not contain details of your proposal and can be written on one page. Finally, you have the what-if plan. As it implies, a what-if plan is a preparation for the worst-case scenario. You must always be prepared for the possibility of your original plan being rejected. A good what-if plan will serve as a good plan B to the original.

A good business plan has 10 key components. They include an executive plan, product analysis, desired customer base, company analysis, industry analysis, marketing strategy, sales strategy, financial projection, funding, and appendix. Executive Plan Your business should begin with your executive plan. An executive plan will provide early insight into what you are planning to achieve with your business. It should include your mission statement and highlight some of the important points which you will explain later. Product Analysis The next component of your business plan is your product analysis. A key part of this section is explaining the type of item or service you are going to offer as well as the market problems your product will solve. Desired Consumer Base Your product analysis should be supplemented with a detailed breakdown of your desired consumer base. Investors are always interested in knowing the economic power of your market as well as potential MVP customers. Company Analysis The next component of your business plan is your company analysis. Here, you explain how you want to run your business. It will include your operational strategy, an insight into the workforce needed to keep the company running, and important executive positions. It will also provide a calculation of expected operational costs.  Industry Analysis A good business plan should also contain well laid out industry analysis. It is important to convince potential investors you know the companies you will be competing with, as well as your plans to gain an edge on the competition. Marketing Strategy Your business plan should also include your marketing strategy. This is how you intend to spread awareness of your product. It should include a detailed explanation of the company brand as well as your advertising methods. Sales Strategy Your sales strategy comes after the market strategy. Here you give an overview of your company's pricing strategy and how you aim to maximize profits. You can also explain how your prices will adapt to market behaviors. Financial Projection The financial projection is the next component of your business plan. It explains your company's expected running cost and revenue earned during the tenure of the business plan. Financial projection gives a clear idea of how your company will develop in the future. Funding The next component of your business plan is funding. You have to detail how much external investment you need to get your business idea off the ground here. Appendix The last component of your plan is the appendix. This is where you put licenses, graphs, or key information that does not fit in any of the other components.

The business model canvas is a business management tool used to quickly define your business idea and model. It is often used when investors need you to pitch your business idea during a brief window.

A pitch deck is similar to a business model canvas except that it makes use of slides in its presentation. A pitch is not primarily used to secure funding, rather its main purpose is to entice potential investors by selling a very optimistic outlook on the business.

Business plan competitions help you evaluate the strength of your business plan. By participating in business plan competitions, you are improving your experience. The experience provides you with a degree of validation while practicing important skills. The main motivation for entering into the competitions is often to secure funding by finishing in podium positions. There is also the chance that you may catch the eye of a casual observer outside of the competition. These competitions also provide good networking opportunities. You could meet mentors who will take a keen interest in guiding you in your business journey. You also have the opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs whose ideas can complement yours.

Exlore Further

• 12 Key Elements of a Business Plan (Top Components Explained)
• 13 Sources of Business Finance For Companies & Sole Traders
• 5 Common Types of Business Structures (+ Pros & Cons)
• How to Buy a Business in 8 Steps (+ Due Diligence Checklist)

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Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

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What Is a Business Plan?

Understanding business plans, how to write a business plan, common elements of a business plan, how often should a business plan be updated, the bottom line, business plan: what it is, what's included, and how to write one.

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and behavioral finance. Adam received his master's in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

A business plan is a document that details a company's goals and how it intends to achieve them. Business plans can be of benefit to both startups and well-established companies. For startups, a business plan can be essential for winning over potential lenders and investors. Established businesses can find one useful for staying on track and not losing sight of their goals. This article explains what an effective business plan needs to include and how to write one.

Key Takeaways

• A business plan is a document describing a company's business activities and how it plans to achieve its goals.
• Startup companies use business plans to get off the ground and attract outside investors.
• For established companies, a business plan can help keep the executive team focused on and working toward the company's short- and long-term objectives.
• There is no single format that a business plan must follow, but there are certain key elements that most companies will want to include.

Investopedia / Ryan Oakley

Any new business should have a business plan in place prior to beginning operations. In fact, banks and venture capital firms often want to see a business plan before they'll consider making a loan or providing capital to new businesses.

Even if a business isn't looking to raise additional money, a business plan can help it focus on its goals. A 2017 Harvard Business Review article reported that, "Entrepreneurs who write formal plans are 16% more likely to achieve viability than the otherwise identical nonplanning entrepreneurs."

Ideally, a business plan should be reviewed and updated periodically to reflect any goals that have been achieved or that may have changed. An established business that has decided to move in a new direction might create an entirely new business plan for itself.

There are numerous benefits to creating (and sticking to) a well-conceived business plan. These include being able to think through ideas before investing too much money in them and highlighting any potential obstacles to success. A company might also share its business plan with trusted outsiders to get their objective feedback. In addition, a business plan can help keep a company's executive team on the same page about strategic action items and priorities.

Business plans, even among competitors in the same industry, are rarely identical. However, they often have some of the same basic elements, as we describe below.

While it's a good idea to provide as much detail as necessary, it's also important that a business plan be concise enough to hold a reader's attention to the end.

While there are any number of templates that you can use to write a business plan, it's best to try to avoid producing a generic-looking one. Let your plan reflect the unique personality of your business.

Many business plans use some combination of the sections below, with varying levels of detail, depending on the company.

The length of a business plan can vary greatly from business to business. Regardless, it's best to fit the basic information into a 15- to 25-page document. Other crucial elements that take up a lot of space—such as applications for patents—can be referenced in the main document and attached as appendices.

These are some of the most common elements in many business plans:

• Executive summary: This section introduces the company and includes its mission statement along with relevant information about the company's leadership, employees, operations, and locations.
• Products and services: Here, the company should describe the products and services it offers or plans to introduce. That might include details on pricing, product lifespan, and unique benefits to the consumer. Other factors that could go into this section include production and manufacturing processes, any relevant patents the company may have, as well as proprietary technology . Information about research and development (R&D) can also be included here.
• Market analysis: A company needs to have a good handle on the current state of its industry and the existing competition. This section should explain where the company fits in, what types of customers it plans to target, and how easy or difficult it may be to take market share from incumbents.
• Marketing strategy: This section can describe how the company plans to attract and keep customers, including any anticipated advertising and marketing campaigns. It should also describe the distribution channel or channels it will use to get its products or services to consumers.
• Financial plans and projections: Established businesses can include financial statements, balance sheets, and other relevant financial information. New businesses can provide financial targets and estimates for the first few years. Your plan might also include any funding requests you're making.

The best business plans aren't generic ones created from easily accessed templates. A company should aim to entice readers with a plan that demonstrates its uniqueness and potential for success.

2 Types of Business Plans

Business plans can take many forms, but they are sometimes divided into two basic categories: traditional and lean startup. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) , the traditional business plan is the more common of the two.

• Traditional business plans : These plans tend to be much longer than lean startup plans and contain considerably more detail. As a result they require more work on the part of the business, but they can also be more persuasive (and reassuring) to potential investors.
• Lean startup business plans : These use an abbreviated structure that highlights key elements. These business plans are short—as short as one page—and provide only the most basic detail. If a company wants to use this kind of plan, it should be prepared to provide more detail if an investor or a lender requests it.

Why Do Business Plans Fail?

A business plan is not a surefire recipe for success. The plan may have been unrealistic in its assumptions and projections to begin with. Markets and the overall economy might change in ways that couldn't have been foreseen. A competitor might introduce a revolutionary new product or service. All of this calls for building some flexibility into your plan, so you can pivot to a new course if needed.

How frequently a business plan needs to be revised will depend on the nature of the business. A well-established business might want to review its plan once a year and make changes if necessary. A new or fast-growing business in a fiercely competitive market might want to revise it more often, such as quarterly.

What Does a Lean Startup Business Plan Include?

The lean startup business plan is an option when a company prefers to give a quick explanation of its business. For example, a brand-new company may feel that it doesn't have a lot of information to provide yet.

Sections can include: a value proposition ; the company's major activities and advantages; resources such as staff, intellectual property, and capital; a list of partnerships; customer segments; and revenue sources.

A business plan can be useful to companies of all kinds. But as a company grows and the world around it changes, so too should its business plan. So don't think of your business plan as carved in granite but as a living document designed to evolve with your business.

Harvard Business Review. " Research: Writing a Business Plan Makes Your Startup More Likely to Succeed ."

U.S. Small Business Administration. " Write Your Business Plan ."

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Business Plan Management Structure: What You Need to Know

A business plan management structure can help your business identify its goals, growth plan, and structure for management. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

Business Organization

Every business, regardless of size, needs to have a solid plan in place for how it will be run. Without a business plan, it is nearly impossible to run the company smoothly or successfully. One aspect of the business plan should include the positions in the company and definitions for each position. Those definitions can identify roles and responsibilities, as well as the reporting structure for each role. As the needs of the business change and shift, the business structure likely will change as well. It's easier to make changes as you go when you have a plan in place.

When you're starting a business and need funding, you might not have any employees to fit the roles you have outlined in your plan. This list of roles could be more idealistic for how the company will operate when you have funding and more opportunities to hire employees. Smaller businesses tend to have less complicated needs than larger ones, so the process is usually more streamlined. However, all businesses need to show a clear understanding of workflow and demonstrate how it will be handled through every phase of growth and expansion.

The business plan should include:

• Administration
• Marketing and sales
• Production and distribution of product or service execution

Larger companies need a more detailed organizational plan with procedures that have been well thought out and documented. By creating this detailed plan, you can avoid internal confusion about who is responsible for what as well as avoid duplicated efforts that waste time. When your business runs and operates smoothly, it will be more cost-effective and efficient than a business that is disorganized. With a detailed and informative business plan, it becomes clear to potential investors and employees that you know what you're doing as a business owner. Larger companies may also need additional resources to operate, such as research and development or human resources.

Organizational Structure

You can use graphics to show your company's organizational structure. Simple flowcharts and diagrams offer visual representations of the management levels within your business, as well as the positions that fall beneath each level. With a graphic, it's easier to show the reporting structure and how various departments and divisions work together. This graphic will also help you show the other employee levels within the business.

The lower-level employees are responsible for the daily tasks of the business, so you'll need to identify and recognize the types of individuals you plan to hire, the number of people needed, and their qualifications. You might choose to include details about your hiring plan, such as where you will find employees and their estimated salaries. Don't forget to include your plan for hiring independent contractors, freelance workers, or consultants. Finally, the hiring plan should include any future positions that would be added if the business is able to expand.

Management Team Section of a Business Plan

Your company's management team is essential to business success. The management team is responsible for identifying and analyzing the objectives and goals of the company. After completing these tasks, experienced management professionals can implement and enforce strategies that will lead to success. In your business plan, this team should include the managers, owners, and board of directors (if applicable).

You can include information about the management team in several sections of your business plan, depending on the style. Regardless of where you place the details in the plan, make sure to include information about the company's legal structure and a list of owners. The owner's education, experience, and other related skills should be outlined. Discuss how much of the company each owner has, as well as the role of each owner in the business operations.

If your company has a board of directors, include the name of each member. Along with their names, you should also expand on their experience, background, and credentials, as well as include their contact information. Provide additional details on the contributions provided by each member to the company, along with information about how the members will contribute to the future growth and expansion of the business.

If you need help with a business plan management structure, you can post your legal need on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel accepts only the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.

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How to Write a Job Description for a Business Plan [Sample Template]

Are you in the process of writing the job description section of your business plan? Or you need a sample job description template? Then I advice you read on. Here, you drive home the point that not only do you know what you are doing or where you are going, but that you have the right mix of talent and experience to actually make it all happen.

You will need to highlight key members of your management team ( which may be only you for the time being ) as well as external service providers such as lawyers, accountants, and contract professionals. Also, include your advisors or board members ( if you have any ) as well as the positions you will be looking to hire in the near future.

While planning your business, one of the most important steps that you shouldn’t skip is writing a job description for every position that you are planning to hire an employee for. This may not be important if you have no plans to hire employees.

A job description is an important tool for hiring and managing your employees, as it helps them understand their roles and responsibilities even before they start working with you. It tells them what they need to do, how they need to do it, and what they will be held accountable for as soon as they assume their duties. It also reveal to investors who-is-who in your proposed or established business. In addition, a job description does the following:

4 Benefits of a Job Description in a Business Plan

• It helps you attract the right employees
• It gives a detailed description of an employee’s job or position
• It serves as a basis for outlining performance expectations, career advancement, job training, and job evaluation
• It provides a reference point for compensation decisions as well as unfair hiring practices

Writing a Job Description for a Business Plan – Sample Template

A job description should be clearly written, accurate, and very practical. It must effectively define your needs as well as what you expect from your employees. To write a good job description, you should start by analyzing the important facts about a job, such as:

The individual tasks involved

What are the tasks that the employee must complete on a periodic basis? Outline daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, and quarterly tasks required of the employee. To be practical enough, outline the duration and requirements of each task as well.

The methods for completing each task

If the tasks outlined can be handled using more than one method, outline which methods you can afford to provide your employee (but for optimal employee efficiency, make provisions for the best method available).

The purpose and responsibilities of the job

Outline how the role played by the chosen candidate would contribute to the business. Also, outline what the employee would be held accountable for.

The relationship of the job to other jobs

Outline how the chosen employee would work with other employees within the company.

Qualifications needed for the job

Outline the relevant qualifications that each candidate must have. Also state the number of years for which the candidate must have gained working experience in the same position.

The Outline of a Job Description

A job description typically includes the following:

• Job objective or overall purpose statement
• Brief of the general nature and level of the job
• Detailed description of the wide scope of the position
• List of duties or tasks to be performed that are critical to success
• Key functional and relational responsibilities (listed in order of significance)
• Description of the relationships and roles within the company, including the supervisory roles, subordinating roles, and other working relationships

In addition to the above listed, the following items may be added to the job description if deemed necessary:

• Job requirements, standards, and specifications
• Job location where the work will be performed
• Equipments available to be used for the job
• Salary range

5 Tips to Note When Writing a Job Description

• Always use verbs in the present tense.
• For the purpose of clarity and adding meaning, use explanatory sentences telling why, how, where, or how often whenever necessary.
• Delete any unnecessary articles such as “ a ”, “ an ”, “ the ” or other stop words to make the description easy to read and understand.
• Be unbiased in your use of pronouns. Use the “ he/she ” approach or construct your sentences in such a way that you won’t have to use pronouns.
• Avoid the use of adverbs or adjectives that are subject to additional explanation and interpretation; such as some, complex, several, occasional, frequently, etc. Rather than use them, use clear sentences that define your intent.

What to Avoid When Writing a Job Description

Don’t be rigid with your job description, as this may make you miss out on many diligent employees who can become great assets to your business. Jobs are subject to change for personal improvement, organizational development, and evolution of new technologies. A flexible job description encourages employees to grow within their position and contribute over time to the growth and development of your business.

In conclusion , a well-written job description can make all the difference between a successful business that grows over the years and one that remains on the same spot after several years. The right employees, if chosen for your business, can help propel your business to great heights within a short period. Only with a good job description can you hire such.

• Go to Chapter 8 Part E: Planning your Business Legal Structure

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More Like this

Who’s responsible for what structuring your strategic plan..

Creating a structured strategic plan is essential to the success of a planning process. But, creating responsibility at each level of the plan is absolutely pivotal to the success of a plan.

One of the most frequent questions we coach our clients through is, “how do I structure my plan and who should be responsible for what?” While the answer is usually unique to each organization, we’ve broken down the planning elements and organization structure to give you a handy visual to help guide you to structure your plan and create accountability for plan creation and execution throughout your organization.

Now that you have the overall view, let’s take a deeper dive into the elements.

CEO and Executive Team

The CEO and executive team play a big role in setting the foundation of a strategic plan by creating guiding organizational principles, articulating the strategic areas of focus, and creating the long-term goals that guide the organization to create aligned goals and actions to achieve its vision of success. The executive team is responsible for:

Mission, Vision, & Guiding Principles – These are the core foundational elements to your plan that tell your organization who you are, where you’re going, and how you’re going to operate. These principles encompass your organization’s ethos and help serve as the foundation to your long-term strategy to achieve your vision of success. These are updated every 5 years and reviewed by the executive team annually.

Strategic Priorities – These are the long-term areas of strategic focus that are designed to achieve your vision of long-term success. These create the different pillars of your plan and articulate the focus for each area. These are updated every 5 years and reviewed by the executive team annually.

Organization-Wide Goals and Performance Indicators – These are the long-term goals and performance indicators that begin to put action to paper to help achieve strategic priorities. These goals and actions have a lifespan of 3-5 years, but are reviewed and adapted annually.

Managers/Department Leaders

Managers and department leaders don’t have as much responsibility during the plan creation process, but drive your organization to create the annual department goals that support the organization’s goals and performance indicators. Managers and department leaders are responsible for:

Annual Goals – Department leaders and managers create and execute the annual department goals that align and support the organization-wide goals and performance indicators. These goals are established annually.

Get the Free Guide for Writing Better SMART Goals

Individual contributors.

Individual contributors are your soldiers on the ground tasked with helping drive your strategy from the ground up. They play an essential role in your day-to-day operations, but also in the creation and execution of your strategy. Individual contributors are responsible for:

Supporting Action Items with Milestones – Individual contributors create the supporting action plans with milestones that drive the day-to-day focus on strategy. Each of these action plan milestones tally up to achieve your annual goals. These action plans are completed annually.

Final Thoughts

As you work through building your strategic plan at every level of your organization, it’s important to remember that every player at the table is a key puzzle piece to your plan. Individual contributors play just as big a role as someone on the executive team – and the cascaded responsibility and execution of a plan is what makes strategy execution possible.

Thank you for the highly useful information.

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Writing the Organization and Management Section of Your Business Plan

What is the organization and management section in a business plan.

• What to Put in the Organization and Management Section

Organization

The management team, helpful tips to write this section, frequently asked questions (faqs).

vm / E+ / Getty Images

Every business plan needs an organization and management section. This document will help you convey your vision for how your business will be structured. Here's how to write a good one.

Key Takeaways

• This section of your business plan details your corporate structure.
• It should explain the hierarchy of management, including details about the owners, the board of directors, and any professional partners.
• The point of this section is to clarify who will be in charge of each aspect of your business, as well as how those individuals will help the business succeed.

The organization and management section of your business plan should summarize information about your business structure and team. It usually comes after the market analysis section in a business plan . It's especially important to include this section if you have a partnership or a multi-member limited liability company (LLC). However, if you're starting a home business or are  writing  a business plan for one that's already operating, and you're the only person involved, then you don't need to include this section.

What To Put in the Organization and Management Section

You can separate the two terms to better understand how to write this section of the business plan.

The "organization" in this section refers to how your business is structured and the people involved. "Management" refers to the responsibilities different managers have and what those individuals bring to the company.

In the opening of the section, you want to give a summary of your management team, including size, composition, and a bit about each member's experience.

For example, you might write something like "Our management team of five has more than 20 years of experience in the industry."

The organization section sets up the hierarchy of the people involved in your business. It's often set up in a chart form. If you have a partnership or multi-member LLC, this is where you indicate who is president or CEO, the CFO, director of marketing, and any other roles you have in your business. If you're a single-person home business, this becomes easy as you're the only one on the chart.

Technically, this part of the plan is about owner members, but if you plan to outsource work or hire a virtual assistant, you can include them here, as well. For example, you might have a freelance webmaster, marketing assistant, and copywriter. You might even have a virtual assistant whose job it is to work with your other freelancers. These people aren't owners but have significant duties in your business.

Some common types of business structures include sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, and corporations.

Sole Proprietorship

This type of business isn't a separate entity. Instead, business assets and liabilities are entwined with your personal finances. You're the sole person in charge, and you won't be allowed to sell stock or bring in new owners. If you don't register as any other kind of business, you'll automatically be considered a sole proprietorship.

Partnership

Partnerships can be either limited (LP) or limited liability (LLP). LPs have one general partner who takes on the bulk of the liability for the company, while all other partner owners have limited liability (and limited control over the business). LLPs are like an LP without a general partner; all partners have limited liability from debts as well as the actions of other partners.

Limited Liability Company

A limited liability company (LLC) combines elements of partnership and corporate structures. Your personal liability is limited, and profits are passed through to your personal returns.

Corporation

There are many variations of corporate structure that an organization might choose. These include C corps, which allow companies to issue stock shares, pay corporate taxes (rather than passing profits through to personal returns), and offer the highest level of personal protection from business activities. There are also nonprofit corporations, which are similar to C corps, but they don't seek profits and don't pay state or federal income taxes.

This section highlights what you and the others involved in the running of your business bring to the table. This not only includes owners and managers but also your board of directors (if you have one) and support professionals. Start by indicating your business structure, and then list the team members.

Owner/Manager/Members

Provide the following information on each owner/manager/member:

• Percentage of ownership (LLC, corporation, etc.)
• Extent of involvement (active or silent partner)
• Type of ownership (stock options, general partner, etc.)
• Position in the business (CEO, CFO, etc.)
• Duties and responsibilities
• Educational background
• Experience or skills that are relevant to the business and the duties
• Past employment
• Skills will benefit the business
• Awards and recognition
• Compensation (how paid)
• How each person's skills and experience will complement you and each other

Board of Directors

A board of directors is another part of your management team. If you don't have a board of directors, you don't need this information. This section provides much of the same information as in the ownership and management team sub-section. 

• Position (if there are positions)
• Involvement with the company

Even a one-person business could benefit from a small group of other business owners providing feedback, support, and accountability as an advisory board. 

Support Professionals

Especially if you're seeking funding, let potential investors know you're on the ball with a lawyer, accountant, and other professionals that are involved in your business. This is the place to list any freelancers or contractors you're using. Like the other sections, you'll want to include:

• Background information such as education or certificates
• Services provided to your business
• Relationship information (retainer, as-needed, regular, etc.)
• Skills and experience making them ideal for the work you need
• Anything else that makes them stand out as quality professionals (awards, etc.)

Writing a business plan seems like an overwhelming activity, especially if you're starting a small, one-person business. But writing a business plan can be fairly simple.

Like other parts of the business plan, this is a section you'll want to update if you have team member changes, or if you and your team members receive any additional training, awards, or other resume changes that benefit the business.

Because it highlights the skills and experience you and your team offer, it can be a great resource to refer to when seeking publicity and marketing opportunities. You can refer to it when creating your media kit or pitching for publicity.

Why are organization and management important to a business plan?

The point of this section is to clarify who's in charge of what. This document can clarify these roles for yourself, as well as investors and employees.

What should you cover in the organization and management section of a business plan?

The organization and management section should explain the chain of command , roles, and responsibilities. It should also explain a bit about what makes each person particularly well-suited to take charge of their area of the business.

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Small Business Administration. " Choose a Business Structure ."

How to Write the Management Team Section of a Business Plan + Examples

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Over the last 20+ years, we’ve written business plans for over 4,000 companies and hundreds of thousands of others have used the best business plan template and our other business planning materials.

From this vast experience, we’ve gained valuable insights on how to write a business plan effectively , specifically in the management section.

What is a Management Team Business Plan?

A management team business plan is a section in a comprehensive business plan that introduces and highlights the key members of the company’s management team. This part provides essential details about the individuals responsible for leading and running the business, including their backgrounds, skills, and experience.

It’s crucial for potential investors and stakeholders to evaluate the management team’s competence and qualifications, as a strong team can instill confidence in the company’s ability to succeed.

Why is the Management Team Section of a Business Plan Important?

Your management team plan has 3 goals:

• To prove to you that you have the right team to execute on the opportunity you have defined, and if not, to identify who you must hire to round out your current team
• To convince lenders and investors (e.g., angel investors, venture capitalists) to fund your company (if needed)
• To document how your Board (if applicable) can best help your team succeed

What to Include in Your Management Team Section

There are two key elements to include in your management team business plan as follows:

Management Team Members

For each key member of your team, document their name, title, and background.

Their backgrounds are most important in telling you and investors they are qualified to execute. Describe what positions each member has held in the past and what they accomplished in those positions. For example, if your VP of Sales was formerly the VP of Sales for another company in which they grew sales from zero to $10 million, that would be an important and compelling accomplishment to document.

Importantly, try to relate your team members’ past job experience with what you need them to accomplish at your company. For example, if a former high school principal was on your team, you could state that their vast experience working with both teenagers and their parents will help them succeed in their current position (particularly if the current position required them to work with both customer segments).

This is true for a management team for a small business, a medium-sized or large business.

Management Team Gaps

In this section, detail if your management team currently has any gaps or missing individuals. Not having a complete team at the time you develop your business plan. But, you must show your plan to complete your team.

As such, describe what positions are missing and who will fill the positions. For example, if you know you need to hire a VP of Marketing, state this. Further, state the job description of this person. For example, you might say that this hire will have 10 years of experience managing a marketing team, establishing new accounts, working with social media marketing, have startup experience, etc.

To give you a “checklist” of the employees you might want to include in your Management Team Members and/or Gaps sections, below are the most common management titles at a growing startup (note that many are specific to tech startups):

• Founder, CEO, and/or President
• Chief Operating Officer
• Chief Financial Officer
• VP of Sales
• VP of Marketing
• VP of Web Development and/or Engineering
• UX Designer/Manager
• Product Manager
• Digital Marketing Manager
• Business Development Manager
• Account Management/Customer Service Manager
• Sales Managers/Sales Staff
• Board Members

If you have a Board of Directors or Board of Advisors, you would include the bios of the members of your board in this section.

A Board of Directors is a paid group of individuals who help guide your company. Typically startups do not have such a board until they raise VC funding.

If your company is not at this stage, consider forming a Board of Advisors. Such a board is ideal particularly if your team is missing expertise and/or experience in certain areas. An advisory board includes 2 to 8 individuals who act as mentors to your business. Usually, you meet with them monthly or quarterly and they help answer questions and provide strategic guidance. You typically do not pay advisory board members with cash, but offering them options in your company is a best practice as it allows you to attract better board members and better motivate them.

Management Team Business Plan Example

Below are examples of how to include your management section in your business plan.

Key Team Members

Jim Smith, Founder & CEO

Jim has 15 years of experience in online software development, having co-founded two previous successful online businesses. His first company specialized in developing workflow automation software for government agencies and was sold to a public company in 2003. Jim’s second company developed a mobile app for parents to manage their children’s activities, which was sold to a large public company in 2014. Jim has a B.S. in computer science from MIT and an M.B.A from the University of Chicago

Bill Jones, COO

Bill has 20 years of sales and business development experience from working with several startups that he helped grow into large businesses. He has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T., where he also played Division I lacrosse for four years.

We currently have no gaps in our management team, but we plan to expand our team by hiring a Vice President of Marketing to be responsible for all digital marketing efforts.

Vance Williamson, Founder & CEO

Prior to founding GoDoIt, Vance was the CIO of a major corporation with more than 100 retail locations. He oversaw all IT initiatives including software development, sales technology, mobile apps for customers and employees, security systems, customer databases/CRM platforms, etc. He has a  B.S in computer science and an MBA in operations management from UCLA.

We currently have two gaps in our Management Team: 

A VP of Sales with 10 years of experience managing sales teams, overseeing sales processes, working with manufacturers, establishing new accounts, working with digital marketing/advertising agencies to build brand awareness, etc. 

In addition, we need to hire a VP of Marketing with experience creating online marketing campaigns that attract new customers to our site.

How to Finish Your Business Plan in 1 Day!

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Other Resources for Writing Your Business Plan

• How to Write an Executive Summary
• How to Expertly Write the Company Description in Your Business Plan
• How to Write the Market Analysis Section of a Business Plan
• The Customer Analysis Section of Your Business Plan
• Completing the Competitive Analysis Section of Your Business Plan
• Financial Assumptions and Your Business Plan
• How to Create Financial Projections for Your Business Plan
• Everything You Need to Know about the Business Plan Appendix
• Business Plan Conclusion: Summary & Recap

Other Helpful Business Plan Articles & Templates

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A guide to defining roles and responsibilities (with template)

When determining what makes a successful project, a lot of different aspects might come to mind — a clear vision, defined outcomes and expectations, known goals, etc. However, each of these has clarity as a common denominator. Everyone needs to be on the same page regarding what should happen, why, and how it will impact the product and/or the business.

Team members need to know what they need to do in any initiative, so the deliverables are clear. To achieve this, the easiest thing to do is to define roles at your inception meeting and then follow through on your agreements. What are the roles that need defining? Are all of them always needed? Keep reading to find out more!

What are roles and responsibilities?

Before we get started, it’s important to remember that the role in any given initiative isn’t the same as the position you’ve been hired for. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you might be a high-level manager assigned to deliver fresh coffee and pizza to the development team every morning. Quite the opposite!

This is an opportunity for anyone to step up and demonstrate talents that qualify this person for a different, even higher position! Every team and project will be different and will pose a unique set of challenges. Before we focus on building your optimal team, let’s first look at a typical set of roles that will appear in most of the IT projects in an agile environment.

Core agile roles

There are three core roles as defined by the  Scrum Guide  — developer, product owner/manager, and scrum master.

Developer (team member)

Developers create the product that your team delivers. Depending on the product, developers might include designers, writers, or programmers. They follow guidance and work towards a specific product goal.

Product owner/manager

The product owner is the person running the show at the high level. They’re responsible for what the project needs to accomplish and has the final say in all matters that involve facing the end user. A successful product owner focuses on maximizing the value that a product can deliver.

Scrum master

The scrum master watches over the team’s efficiency and ensures optimal use of the agile scrum framework. I often say that the ultimate goal of any scrum master is to find that the team no longer needs them and it’s time to move on to another group.

Supporting roles within developers

Now, let’s circle back to the developer/team member role and break it down to all the possible variations of it.

Project manager

If a product manager/owner is responsible for deciding what to do, then the project manager is tasked with making sure that the work goes according to plan. This role will also monitor, visualize, and report progress so that everyone can see whether the project is proceeding as planned.

Program manager

A program manager is an external project manager who helps the product owner/manager navigate the organization and identify what teams are needed to complete the initiative. Picture an old-time telephone operator who connects the cables to make calls happen. This person makes sure the right connections are kept and reports progress.

Code architect

While most projects will simply require you to sit down and code with a little bit of planning, in larger organizations such an approach can have disastrous results. An architect can step in and ensure that the coding is done in a responsible, unified, and standardized manner. They also try to reuse as many existing components as possible.

Over 200k developers and product managers use LogRocket to create better digital experiences

Data/business analyst

This role helps the team define how the tracking for the project should work. An analyst then crafts the right impact hypothesis and tracking dashboard in the tracking suite of choice. This person should have a deep understanding of how tracking works and how to best implement an experiment to be able to tell whether it was successful or not later down the line.

Designer/UI engineer/UX engineer

This role works on designing an attractive interface, but also optimal, intuitive flows to make sure users can easily navigate the software. They make sure users can easily move from one screen to another and find the solutions to their needs.

Quality assurance engineer (QA)/tester

Individuals with this assignment make sure the project is delivered to its specification, free of bugs. This might mean manual testing or overseeing automated testing tools and seeking additional ways of delivering the highest quality of the project.

Copywriter/translator

Good copy can make or break a product and a poor, half-baked translation can leave the user feeling not cared for. Sadly, this was one of the greatest challenges with Skype , especially the Polish copy. Because of this, it’s vital to ensure someone on the team will focus on choosing the perfect words for your user-facing aspects of the product.

Integration engineer

Integration usually refers to someone who integrates new code into the codebase and makes sure it all works. Integration engineering may also be a role, where one verifies whether the new project fits the whole product in terms of design and language, as well as that all the documentation, manual, and training videos are up to date.

Release engineer

Very often the process of releasing a new increment presents a challenge. Sometimes it’s about the technology, sometimes about the process (i.e. getting approvals from Play/App Store), and other times about crafting the right marketing copy and screenshots. Either automatically or manually, this needs to be done and done with care and might require a dedicated person.

Roles and responsibility template

You might be thinking to yourself, do I really need all these roles on a project? The short answer is no. The selection and availability of roles will differ substantially depending on the organization.

I have worked at small startups where I felt like I was handling these roles myself, but also at large organizations that had decided departments for each function. As the product manager, make sure that you identify the roles that you absolutely need and communicate the required headcount.

You can do this during a project kick-off meeting . It might be easier if you use this template I prepared for you.

How to select the right number of roles for any given project?

Try to determine the minimal number of people needed to deliver the initiative’s end goal. Of course, a frontend can be put together by the developers without a designer, but that’ll probably look and feel bad. On the other hand, if you are redesigning a registration form, perhaps you can reuse all the strings and translations from the previous iteration.

The more people you have, the more conflicts and more potential failures might arise. Also, more people requires more resources, which might be difficult to secure. In general, it’s useful to take a less is more approach with projects.

When exploring the world of IT product development, you’ll find out that all the needed roles and processes will likely already be there for you to use. The biggest thing you need to do is check to make sure that everyone you need is available and that expectations are clearly defined. As this article shows, a project requires a lot of different parts working together to deliver a finished product.

Good luck crafting your products with your teams!

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What They Do

What does a Business Planning Manager do?

A business planning manager is responsible for overseeing the business management process and ensuring that the staff meets productivity goals and targets. Business planning managers recruit and train new staff, handle budgets for projects, and identify opportunities that would increase more revenue resources and profits for the business. They also coordinate with clients for updates and adjust business plans as needed. A business planning manager must have excellent communication and leadership skills to manage teams and achieve long-term objectives.

• Responsibilities
• Skills And Traits
• Comparisions
• Types of Business Planning Manager

Business planning manager responsibilities

Business planning managers play a crucial role in ensuring that a company's products and services meet customer expectations in an ever-changing market. They manage processes that produce or support the firm's products, requiring the ability to analyze data to make informed decisions, drive continuous improvement, and solve problems through critical thinking. Dr. Kim Roberts , Professor of Operations Management, emphasizes this, stating, "Business professionals lead organizations by focused efforts that revolve around products/services, processes, and people."

Resume snippets for business planning managers often highlight responsibilities such as demand planning various product lines, managing customer service division policy deployment and ISO 9000 preparation and audits, and achieving 80% demand forecast accuracy through the implementation of dashboard metrics, KPIs, and competitive market analytics. These tasks demonstrate the ability to manage processes, analyze data, and make informed decisions that drive continuous improvement.

Here are examples of responsibilities from real business planning manager resumes:

• Lead central team summarizing and prioritizing all DOD opportunities, enabling more efficient and effective resource allocation across several program departments.
• Create and implement new product BOM's.
• Verify WIP movement transactions are complete and with the latest BOM changes.
• Provide management with managerial reporting, variances explanations, and KPIs for decision making.
• Perform discounted cash flow and ROI analysis to plan and approve capital equipment investments.
• Create and execute a global staffing scorecard to measure hiring process focusing on ROI to ensure essential staffing.
• Provide specialized CRM consulting, strategy development and systems integration services to help clients leverage technology to build effective customer relationships.
• Generate statistical forecast models using Manugistics and NEFOR (proprietary forecasting tool).
• Maintain and document forecasting and reporting procedures used in forecasting software (Manugistics).

Business planning manager skills and personality traits

We calculated that 19 % of Business Planning Managers are proficient in Business Planning , Competitive Analysis , and Direct Reports . They’re also known for soft skills such as Creativity , Interpersonal skills , and Organizational skills .

We break down the percentage of Business Planning Managers that have these skills listed on their resume here:

Create, communicate and coordinate quarterly adjustments to the annual plan as dictated by Corporate Business Planning and operational requirements.

Developed a market research and competitive analysis strategy that successfully differentiated the Ford product offering that increased sales and revenues.

Created, approved, and processed compensation transactions for senior executives and their direct reports.

Provided training to project management audience to promote efficient and standardized project management processes.

Develop metrics, performance measures and reports that support the business objectives and results.

Analyzed market trends, price cliffs, and competitor behavior to ensure pricing strategy drove profitable growth.

Most business planning managers use their skills in "business planning," "competitive analysis," and "direct reports" to do their jobs. You can find more detail on essential business planning manager responsibilities here:

Creativity. To carry out their duties, the most important skill for a business planning manager to have is creativity. Their role and responsibilities require that "advertising, promotions, and marketing managers must be able to generate new and imaginative ideas." Business planning managers often use creativity in their day-to-day job, as shown by this real resume: "managed 6 business planners in multiple countries coordinating all scheduling, delivery, and inventory activities for $250m+ product line. "

Interpersonal skills. Another essential skill to perform business planning manager duties is interpersonal skills. Business planning managers responsibilities require that "managers must deal with a range of people in different roles, both inside and outside the organization." Business planning managers also use interpersonal skills in their role according to a real resume snippet: "trained new employees in business practices, new business development, and interpersonal communication. "

Organizational skills. business planning managers are also known for organizational skills, which are critical to their duties. You can see how this skill relates to business planning manager responsibilities, because "advertising, promotions, and marketing managers must manage their time and budget efficiently while directing and motivating staff members." A business planning manager resume example shows how organizational skills is used in the workplace: "influence strong organizational effectiveness including effective project management, cross-functional leadership, corporate training and organizational development. "

Analytical skills. business planning manager responsibilities often require "analytical skills." The duties that rely on this skill are shown by the fact that "advertising, promotions, and marketing managers must be able to analyze industry trends to determine the most promising strategies for their organization." This resume example shows what business planning managers do with analytical skills on a typical day: "performed project and product profitability analysis for all product lines of the organization. "

Communication skills. A commonly-found skill in business planning manager job descriptions, "communication skills" is essential to what business planning managers do. Business planning manager responsibilities rely on this skill because "managers must be able to communicate effectively with a broad-based team made up of other managers or staff members during the advertising, promotions, and marketing process." You can also see how business planning manager duties rely on communication skills in this resume example: "directed business planning and internal communication activity for the $1.6b global transportation industry. "

Most common business planning manager skills

The three companies that hire the most business planning managers are:

• Ernst & Young 56 business planning managers jobs
• Oracle 48 business planning managers jobs
• Samsung Electronics Device Solutions (Semiconductor & Display) 15 business planning managers jobs

Choose from 10+ customizable business planning manager resume templates

Compare different business planning managers

Business planning manager vs. manager, strategy.

A strategy manager is an individual who reviews a company's objectives for growth and works with executives to formulate actionable plans to achieve these objectives. To make comprehensive recommendations, strategy managers must conduct data analysis of the organization as well as the overall industry. They must provide assessments of market trends and identify business threats and opportunities. Strategy managers should also work with department heads to develop individual team goals and break them down into actionable steps for the employees to complete.

There are some key differences in the responsibilities of each position. For example, business planning manager responsibilities require skills like "business planning," "continuous improvement," "supply chain planning," and "business performance." Meanwhile a typical manager, strategy has skills in areas such as "portfolio," "client facing," "digital marketing," and "strategic thinking." This difference in skills reveals the differences in what each career does.

Business planning manager vs. Product manager

A product manager is responsible for ensuring product development, providing the best marketing strategies, and effectively handling the sales and marketing team. Product managers' duties include monitoring the market trends and conditions, identifying business opportunities and plan initiatives, and collaborating the product launch process with the appropriate departments. A product manager is also responsible for generating ideas on improving product features, determining timetables and reasonable pricing, and analyzing product sales. A product manager must have excellent strategic and decision-making skills to contribute to its growth and profitability.

Each career also uses different skills, according to real business planning manager resumes. While business planning manager responsibilities can utilize skills like "business planning," "business objectives," "financial analysis," and "data analysis," product managers use skills like "product management," "qa," "product strategy," and "user stories."

Business planning manager vs. Market manager

A marketing manager is an executive who manages a brand or product's promotion positioning. Marketing managers analyze the trends in the industry and the demand for certain products and services. Typically, they attract more customers to purchase products and/or services and raise brand awareness through marketing campaigns. They research, identify, examine, and evaluate product demand. Also, they review advertising materials like print ads to boost the marketing strategy of the company and strengthen its campaign.

The required skills of the two careers differ considerably. For example, business planning managers are more likely to have skills like "business planning," "business objectives," "financial analysis," and "data analysis." But a market manager is more likely to have skills like "customer service," "strong analytical," "excellent interpersonal," and "human resources."

Business planning manager vs. Manager finance planning and analysis

A manager finance planning and analysis oversees the daily operations of a company's financial planning department. They typically have administrative duties such as setting goals and guidelines, establishing timelines and budgets, delegating tasks among teams and staff, and reviewing financial reports regularly. They also perform research and assessments, gather and analyze financial data from different departments, coordinate staff, and solve issues and concerns when any arise. Additionally, as a manager, they must lead and empower staff to reach goals while implementing company policies and regulations.

Even though a few skill sets overlap between business planning managers and managers finance planning and analysis, there are some differences that are important to note. For one, a business planning manager might have more use for skills like "business planning," "competitive analysis," "project management," and "business objectives." Meanwhile, some responsibilities of managers finance planning and analysis require skills like "customer service," "visualization," "financial operations," and "financial reports. "

Types of business planning manager

• Business Development Manager
• Business Manager

Product Manager

• Business Operations Manager
• Business Unit Manager
• Business Leader

Updated April 25, 2024

Editorial Staff

The Zippia Research Team has spent countless hours reviewing resumes, job postings, and government data to determine what goes into getting a job in each phase of life. Professional writers and data scientists comprise the Zippia Research Team.

What Similar Roles Do

• What a Brand Manager Does
• What a Business Development And Marketing Manager Does
• What a Business Development Manager Does
• What a Business Director Does
• What a Business Leader Does
• What a Business Manager Does
• What a Business Operations Manager Does
• What a Business Partner Does
• What a Business Unit Manager Does
• What a Manager Finance Planning And Analysis Does
• What a Manager, Strategy Does
• What a Market Manager Does
• What a Media Manager Does
• What a Planning Director Does
• What a Planning Manager Does

Business Planning Manager Related Careers

• Brand Manager
• Business Development And Marketing Manager
• Business Director
• Business Partner
• Manager Finance Planning And Analysis
• Manager, Strategy
• Market Manager
• Media Manager
• Planning Director
• Planning Manager

Business Planning Manager Related Jobs

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• Business Development Manager Resume
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• Business Unit Manager Resume
• Manager Finance Planning And Analysis Resume
• Manager, Strategy Resume
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• What Does A Business Planning Manager Do

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What Does a Business Planning Manager Do?

Find out what a Business Planning Manager does, how to get this job, salary information, and what it takes to succeed as a Business Planning Manager.

The Business Planning Manager plays a strategic role in steering the company’s direction through comprehensive market analysis, forecasting, and resource allocation. This position involves synthesizing complex data into actionable strategies that align with the company’s long-term goals and financial objectives. By closely monitoring industry trends and evaluating business performance, the Business Planning Manager ensures that the organization remains agile and responsive to changing market demands. Collaboration with various departments to develop and implement plans that enhance operational efficiency and profitability is also a significant aspect of the role. Through a balanced approach to risk management and opportunity identification, the Business Planning Manager supports the company in maintaining a competitive edge and achieving sustainable growth.

Business Planning Manager Job Duties

• Develop and implement comprehensive business plans to facilitate achievement by planning cost-effective operations and market development activities.
• Analyze and forecast financial, economic, and other data to provide accurate and timely information for strategic and operational decisions.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams to develop business strategies and objectives, ensuring alignment with corporate goals.
• Evaluate competitive market strategies through analysis of related product, market, or share trends.
• Identify and drive initiatives to improve operational efficiency, including process improvements, cost reduction, and systems enhancements.
• Facilitate communication and collaboration among departments to ensure that business planning and strategies are aligned with company-wide goals.
• Oversee the preparation of operational and risk reports for management analysis.
• Spearhead the development of new business opportunities, including expansion, mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.

Business Planning Manager Salary & Outlook

Factors affecting a Business Planning Manager’s salary include industry sector, company size, years of experience, and specific skills in strategic planning, financial modeling, and market analysis. Performance outcomes and the ability to influence business growth also significantly impact compensation.

• Median Annual Salary: $110,250 ($53/hour)
• Top 10% Annual Salary: $152,000 ($73.08/hour)

The employment of business planning managers is expected to grow faster than average over the next decade.

This growth is driven by the increasing complexity of global markets, the need for strategic planning in competitive environments, and the demand for innovation in product and service development. Business Planning Managers are pivotal in navigating these challenges, making their role more critical than ever.

Business Planning Manager Job Requirements

Education: A Business Planning Manager typically holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, Finance, or a related field. Coursework often includes strategic management, financial analysis, market research, and organizational behavior. Advanced degrees like an MBA can enhance prospects, focusing on leadership, advanced strategic planning, and international business. Specialized courses in data analysis, project management, and economics are also beneficial, equipping candidates with the necessary skills to excel in developing and implementing business strategies.

Experience: Business Planning Managers typically come from diverse experience backgrounds, with a significant portion having substantial experience in strategic planning, financial analysis, and project management. Many have progressed through roles that required increasing responsibility in business strategy and operations. On-the-job training is common, often through mentorship or rotational programs within a company, allowing for hands-on experience in different business units. Training programs focusing on leadership, data analysis, and market research are also valuable, equipping candidates with the skills to lead cross-functional teams and drive business growth. Successful candidates often demonstrate a blend of practical experience in business planning and strategic initiatives, coupled with formal training programs that enhance their analytical and leadership capabilities.

Certifications & Licenses: Certifications and licenses are not typically required for the role of Business Planning Manager.

Business Planning Manager Skills

Strategic Forecasting: Leveraging data-driven insights, a Business Planning Manager predicts market trends to develop strategies that align with organizational goals. This involves synthesizing diverse information sources to anticipate challenges and opportunities, keeping the company agile and competitive.

Market Analysis: Through the meticulous examination of trends, customer behaviors, and competitor activities, Business Planning Managers can forecast market demands and pinpoint opportunities or threats. This skill hinges on thorough data collection and interpretation to inform strategic decisions.

Financial Modeling: Business Planning Managers create detailed, predictive models of a company’s financial future to forecast revenue, assess risk, and efficiently allocate resources. This requires a solid grasp of accounting principles, spreadsheet software proficiency, and the ability to interpret market trends for data-driven strategic planning.

Risk Management: By identifying potential threats and developing strategies to mitigate them, Business Planning Managers protect the organization’s interests and ensure its long-term sustainability. Analyzing market trends, financial forecasts, and operational vulnerabilities is crucial for preemptively addressing challenges.

Stakeholder Engagement: Building and maintaining strong relationships with investors, partners, and internal teams is critical for aligning business strategies and meeting project milestones. This skill ensures smoother project execution and fosters an environment of trust and mutual respect.

Performance Optimization: Data-driven insights and lean methodologies are used to streamline operations, reduce waste, and boost business efficiency. Analyzing performance metrics, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing strategic interventions are key for sustained organizational improvement.

Business Planning Manager Work Environment

A Business Planning Manager typically operates within a structured office environment, where the workspace is designed to foster both concentration and collaboration. The setup usually includes personal computers, advanced planning software, and access to data analytics tools, essential for strategic decision-making and forecasting.

Work hours might extend beyond the traditional 9-to-5, especially during critical planning phases, though many organizations offer flexibility to accommodate work-life balance. The dress code tends to align with corporate standards, leaning towards business casual or formal, depending on the company’s culture and external meeting requirements.

The role demands frequent interaction with team members, stakeholders, and departments, necessitating strong communication channels and a cooperative atmosphere. Travel may be required for industry events or company-wide meetings, adding variety to the routine.

Professional development opportunities are often available, encouraging continuous learning and advancement in strategic planning methodologies and leadership skills. This role thrives in a setting that values analytical thinking, adaptability, and collaborative problem-solving.

Advancement Prospects

A Business Planning Manager can ascend to higher strategic roles within an organization, such as Director of Strategy or Chief Operations Officer (COO), by demonstrating exceptional analytical, leadership, and decision-making skills. Success in this career path hinges on the ability to drive business growth and efficiency through innovative planning and execution.

To achieve these advancements, a Business Planning Manager should focus on spearheading high-impact projects and initiatives that align with the company’s long-term goals. Gaining experience in cross-functional team leadership and developing a deep understanding of the industry’s competitive landscape are crucial.

Building a track record of successful business plans and strategies that have significantly contributed to the company’s profitability and market position will set a solid foundation for moving into top executive roles. Engaging in high-level decision-making processes and demonstrating a keen insight into market trends and business opportunities are essential steps toward career progression in this field.

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Program Roles & Responsibilities in a Business Continuity Management System

BUSINESS CONTINUITY ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Nearly every business continuity standard and regulation require clearly articulated roles and responsibilities. This includes ISO 22301, the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines, Disaster Recovery Institute, FFIEC requirements on business continuity, and NFPA 1600.

For example, ISO 22301’s requirements say the following about business continuity and IT disaster recovery program roles and responsibilities:

• “To achieve its business continuity objectives, the organization shall determine who will be responsible, what will be done, what resources will be required, when it will be completed, and how the results will be evaluated” (Clause 6.2)
• “The organization shall determine the necessary competence of person(s) doing work under its control that affects its performance; ensure that these persons are competent on the basis of appropriate education, training, and experience; where applicable, take actions to acquire the necessary competence, and evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken; and retain appropriate documented information as evidence of competence.” (Clause 7.2)

BENEFITS OF DEFINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY PROGRAM ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Beyond aligning to ISO 22301, and other industry-approved business continuity standards, there are four main benefits to defining roles and responsibilities, including:

• Ensuring the right individuals are in the right roles to maximize business continuity performance;
• Assisting organizational leaders with assigning the best individuals to each role;
• Ensuring that all  business continuity planning  participants understand what is expected of them;
• Helping to clearly identify any gaps in knowledge, skills, and abilities for individuals assigned to business continuity roles and responsibilities.

Often, when roles and responsibilities are not defined effectively, the wrong individuals (typically with the wrong skills, experiences, and credentials) are engaged in a specific task – usually resulting in poor performance or missed expectations.  For example, we see this when department-level managers assign a newer employee or an administrative assistant to develop a response and recovery plan for the department.  Many times, these individuals may not have the depth of knowledge about department operations or the authority to engage the right individuals to effectively plan for response and recovery.  Conversely, programs that attempt to have senior-level individuals complete a recovery plan for one of their several business units, typically struggle to capture the right level of detail. Both of these issues can result in an ineffective or incomplete plan.

DETERMINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY PROGRAM ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Although roles vary from organization to organization, some are common among business continuity programs.  The following tables highlight some of the common roles for managing the program.

  WHO SHOULD BE ON MY BUSINESS CONTINUITY STEERING COMMITTEE?

Steering Committee participation often varies based on the organization. Typical Steering Committee members include the COO, CFO, CIO, general counsel, and internal auditors. However, regardless of title, participants on the Steering Committee should be able to:

• Provide strategic input for the program
• Have a pulse on the business – he or she understands the organization’s strategic goals and can see when a change in the business can affect the program
• Assist in validating the scope, products/services, key findings, and strategies for his or her business area
• Ensure direct-reports and subordinates perform required business continuity activities
• Possess strong leadership and verbal communication skills
• Sees the value in having business continuity capabilities for their respective areas.

RESPONSE TEAM ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Business Continuity response team structures vary widely, but the following roles are common on most business continuity teams:

  STRENGTHENING THE PARTICIPATION LEVEL OF YOUR BUSINESS CONTINUITY PROGRAM

A simple process can help you define roles and responsibilities for your program.

DEFINE THE ROLE

Start by being clear about what you need from each role in the program. Make a list of all the roles in the program and then for each role, start a bulleted list of the role-specific requirements. This list should contain anything from time commitment to knowledge of the business to responsibilities for updating plans. But keep it focused on the most important things. We find most roles can be described in five to ten requirements.

Once the role is clearly defined, then it’s a question of finding the right person to fill it.

BRAINSTORM CANDIDATES

At Castellan, we talk about “GWC” when it comes time to clarify roles and responsibilities (we learned of this three-letter acronym from the book Traction by Gino Wickman, who described a business operating model called the Entrepreneurial Operating System). The person assigned to each role should be able to respond positively to the following questions:

• Do they Get it (understand the role and responsibilities)?
• Do they Want it (are they motivated to take on the responsibility)?
• Do they have the Capacity to perform it (ability and time to perform the responsibilities)?

Once the candidates are clearly defined, then it’s a question of deciding which candidate is the best fit.

SELECT THE BEST FIT

This is a gut feeling type of question – does the person understand what the role is about and how it all comes together to help the organization? Do they see why it’s important? For some people, it just doesn’t click.

Does the person honestly want to do the job? Or are they just going through the motions because they’ve been ‘assigned’ it. We often feel the need to ‘motivate’ or ‘energize’ people in their roles – and that’s one of the warning signs that the person just doesn’t want to participate or do the work. In those cases, you should stop banging your head against the wall and find someone who actually wants it.

Capacity encompasses the skills, resources and time needed to perform the role well. Use the role definition created above to ask yourself if a person has the mental capacity for the role, the skills and the time available to perform it. While Get it and Want it are mandatory, those who don’t fully have the Capacity for the role should still be considered if you believe they can develop the capacity with coaching or training in the next six months.

• When GWC is missing

If you’ve been assigned people that you believe don’t have GWC for the role – this section is for you! First – you must believe that you do not have to tolerate GWC issues in your program. Until you believe that, nothing will change. Even if it takes a year or more to fix – please know that you CAN have a program filled with people who Get it, Want it and have the Capacity to do the work! When that happens – EVERYTHING gets easier.

So how should a program manager address “GWC” problems? The first step is always to talk to the person one-on-one. During the conversation, you can ask them if they “get it, want it and have the capacity” for their role. 90% of the time, they know this is a problem and they’ll tell you all about it! 10% of the time, you’ll need to help them see your concerns. In either case, the first step is to talk to the person and get on the same page that the GWC is a problem. The second step is to ask them what we should do about it. Often, they can find or suggest someone who is a better GWC fit and you can move the program forward quickly. Sometimes though, you just can’t find the right GWC fit. In these cases, you must add it to an issue list as a long-term problem to be monitored and addressed. In some cases, particularly for people with limited capacity, you can put in place workarounds that still allow the program to accomplish its goals. However, if no solutions can be found, present the issue to the steering committee to get their help in problem-solving. Using clear roles and the GWC tool, over time, you can have a team comprised of the right people to help achieve the right level of resiliency. Additional considerations for determining business continuity team participation can be found in the chart below.

A QUICK RECAP

Documenting and communicating roles and responsibilities effectively has two key benefits for an organization:

• The organization will have “ the right people in the right seats “. This will help to ensure that the program continues to grow and develop by having competent individuals who are engaged in driving the program forward.
• Individuals filling each role will clearly understand their given responsibilities and expectations. This will help ensure that program actions are completed, the program is maintained, and, holistically, individuals are seeking to reduce gaps and improve organizational resilience.

Castellan has helped to develop business continuity and IT disaster recovery programs for organizations of all sizes in nearly every industry. Over the 15 years that Castellan has been developing world-class programs,  one of the six core elements  that we have identified as a key driver of program success is Participation.  

If you want to accelerate management’s support for business continuity – you need to check our free guide to building executive support: the  Executive Support Amplifier .  It provides the 5 easy steps to build support without having to ‘sell’ anyone!

If you’re ready to get hands-on help to quickly get results, please book a strategy session with a member of my team today to:

• Discuss your program goals
• Explore your current challenges
• Discuss how to achieve your goals

For more on integrated risk management, download our e-book, Conquering the New World of Risk with Intgrated Risk Management.

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Business Continuity and Crisis Management Consultants

Business Continuity Program Roles & Responsibilities

July 6, 2021 By //  by  Bryan Strawser

Have questions about your business continuity program? You’re not alone.

When we talk to businesses about their business continuity program and business continuity plans, we get asked everything from “What is one?” —at the most basic level, many businesses also don’t understand that a business continuity plan, or BCP, is fundamentally different from a disaster recovery plan; the former is focused on keeping your business running through a disruption and the latter on resuming and recovering technology applications and infrastructure after a major technology disruption occurs—to questions on a more granular level, like:

• What are the important roles in a business continuity program and plan?
• What do those roles and responsibilities mean?
• How do these roles interrelate?
• How do we ensure we place the right people in each role?

As risk management and business continuity planning experts, Bryghtpath helps companies cut through all this confusion and get clear about the path to business continuity planning success.

About Bryan Strawser

Bryan Strawser is Founder, Principal, and Chief Executive at Bryghtpath LLC, a strategic advisory firm he founded in 2014. He has more than twenty-five years of experience in the areas of, business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, enterprise risk, intelligence, and crisis communications.

At Bryghtpath, Bryan leads a team of experts that offer strategic counsel and support to the world’s leading brands, public sector agencies, and nonprofit organizations to strategically navigate uncertainty and disruption.

Learn more about Bryan at this link .

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[email protected]

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