Business Plan Template: Your Consultant in a Box

For a small business entrepreneur on a tight budget, working with a business plan consultant may not be in the cards. In these situations, look for a business plan template which can guide you in the process of creating your plan and set you on the right track by focusing you on what funders are interested in seeing. If it is a high quality template, it will indeed serve as a “consultant in a box”, providing you with basic guidance on how to proceed. Structure and Format A business plan template will be a great source of information as to the proper structure for your plan and format to use. This is because the template won’t simply tell you what to do, but will show you as it provides an example of the full layout of the plan. This means you can move past worrying about the presentation look of the plan and focus on its content (your research and strategy). Financials The revenues and costs of your intended business may be relatively easy to estimate, but converting these numbers into full pro forma financial statements may be beyond your ability, at least within a reasonable time frame. A business plan template should include Excel worksheets for financials which only need you to customize certain numbers in order to generate full, consistent financial statements just as funders want to see them. As long as the financial assumptions you enter are reasonable, the entire financial section should be correct. You can then spend more time looking at these statements as an investor or lender would and project what kind of questions they will ask. Example Text A business plan template includes not only the general structure and format of a business plan, but may include example text for all of its sections. Having this example text can serve as a great guide to what type of information to include, what questions you must answer, and how to relate the many pieces of the plan to each other.