What is a Business Plan and What You Should Include in Your Business Plan

If you want to organize your business and plan strategically to make profits, you need to write your business plan.

Things to Include in your business plan

Your business plan needs to include everything about your business, products, and services in black and white. Your business plan should give you a clear idea of your funding source, product development, marketing, generating sales, and earning profits.

You can include a lot of points in your business plan but I m giving you some information on six important things that you should include in your business plan.

Overview: This will be all about what your company or business does.

Message: If you want to become successful, you need a clear message.

Marketing: Writing a marketing plan means you are trying to find your target market. Also, include estimate size of your market and write about the market where most of your customers are concentrated.

Product: Write about what the product does and how the customers are going to benefit.

Production and delivery: Explain in detail how you are going to produce the product and how you are delivering it to your customers. If you plan to acquire products, explain how you are going to do this.

Goals: The goal of your business is what you will ultimately achieve by doing this business. You need to make short-term goals, as well as long-term goals.

While writing a business plan, you might find that you do not know a lot of things about how you will be running your business. It is perfectly fine because writing a business plan means also knowing about the things that you do not know already.

Six Steps to Writing a Business Plan

Writing a business plan means you are mainly writing about 6 important things.

Overview: You should begin with a writing overview. Include your business name, location, the business structure, and write what your company does. The overview should include your company’s mission.

Message: The message is what you are actually communicating to your customers. This section will include who exactly are your customers, how your products fit into their lives, and how you can solve their problems with your products.

Marketing: You should write about demographics and psychographics. Demography tells about your customers’ age, income, etc. whereas psychographics tells about their interests, desires.

Product: You might be trying to sell a lot of products (physical products, digital products, or services). However, you need to choose one primary product. This will help in business development and marketing. Identify your primary product; describe the results the product creates. Once you have written about your primary product, write about other products you are selling.

Productions and delivery: Your business plan needs to clearly mention whether you are manufacturing products or buying from suppliers

Goals: Your goal should be something like the number of sales, net profits, the impact of the products, etc.

Apart from these six important things, you can always include other points as well. However, you should never complicate things.

How to Pitch Your Idea

Starting a business also needs to pitch ideas, you might have to pitch ideas to your customers, clients, investors, shareholders, lenders, banks, etc.

Whether you are trying to sell products or trying to invite investors to your business, you will have to pitch your idea. You also have to pitch an idea if you are offering your services to other individuals or companies. Pitching of ideas is a common practice in the business world and community.

Before you learn how to pitch ideas, you should know what your pitch should include. Your pitch should have the following parts

Table of contents

About Us

Social Proof

Explanation of Services/products

Information on price

Benefits of working with your company

Case studies

Your working process

Thank you and contact information

Now that you know the basic elements of your pitch, I am going to share some tips that you can implement to pitch your idea.

First of all, you should tell in brief about what your sales pitch will be about. Then, explain about your company. You should back your company’s reputation with social proof. Once, you have established authenticity, talk in detail about your products including the pricing. After you have explained about your products, tell more about your company, talk about your previous clients and how you work on any project. You should conclude by sharing your contact information.

First published on Trendri, in author's name