Business Plans: A Sample of Your Decision-Making

A business plan hopefully offers readers a complete understanding of the who, what, where, when, why and how of your business. However, it also offers them a look at you, personally. Assuming you plan to work as a key manager of the business, the plan shows readers a sample of your decision-making ability. Being Decisive In a Business Plan How, you may ask, can I be decisive in my business plan if there is so little information to go on about what my business must do? While it is true that any startup business must remain flexible to change its tactics as it learns more about the actual market situation it is in, business managers by their nature must be able to make decisions with incomplete information. Show that you can be decisive by presenting specific tactics you choose to pursue and why. This shows readers your confidence as well as your thinking process, allowing them to judge whether they would make the same decisions with the data you have at hand. The danger of not being confident in your choices in your plan is that you may appear indecisive to readers. For example, if you include a huge list of marketing tactics or possible staff you may hire, readers see evidence of a writer who was able to copy lists of options from another source, but not a manager who realizes that the company cannot try and do everything. Customer Targeting Choosing specific customer target markets to pursue is one way to show your decision-making ability. After gathering information on the size of each customer market segment, considering how highly they will value your product or service, and examining how easily you will be able to market to each segment, you should be able to prioritize which to approach first. Although you may approach a few at the same time, be careful to take note it the marketing and operations methods required of this begin to contradict one another. If there are contradictions like this, readers will be turned off from your plan. Making specific choices like this based on the best data you can find is expected when running a business as well as when planning a business.