what are the purposes of business plan review

Business Plan Review

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A business plan review is an in-depth examination of your business plan and its viability. It can be conducted by a single expert, a panel of experts, or you and your colleagues.

What Is a Business Plan?

A business plan is essential for any company wishing to start or expand its operations. It provides a framework for decision-making and helps to make sure that all sections of the organization are working together towards common goals. A good business plan can also help attract investors or obtain loans from banks or other lending institutions.

The main purpose of a business plan is to provide investors with information about the opportunities and challenges facing your company so they can make informed decisions about whether or not they want to invest in it. If they decide to invest, they'll know how much money they are likely to make and what risks might arise during their investment term (usually between five years and ten years).

Of course, not all startups need a full-blown business plan — but if you seek outside funding or investment, it's best to start developing yours as early as possible. And even if you don't seek outside funding, it's still smart to develop a comprehensive plan for your business to clearly define what success looks like and how you'll get there.

What Is a Business Plan Review?

A business plan review should be conducted before you begin your venture, at least once during its life cycle (preferably after you have experienced some success), and when it comes time for you to close up shop. The objective is to identify strengths and weaknesses in your plan so that you can take steps toward improving those areas.

The purpose of a business plan review is not to evaluate the likelihood of success for a given project or company but rather to determine whether the project has been adequately researched and whether the information presented is accurate and comprehensive enough for investors or other stakeholders to make an informed decision about investing in it.

Why Should You Have Your Business Plan Reviewed?

Your business plan is a living document. Over time, it will change as you grow and learn more about your business, market and competition.

But even when the plan isn't changing, it's important to review it regularly to ensure that you're still on track. Here are seven reasons why:

A good review will give you an unbiased look at your plan, highlighting areas where more information is required or gaps in your thinking. This can help ensure that your plan contains everything it needs to, which makes it easier to manage and gives investors confidence in your business.

A business plan is a blueprint for reaching your long-term goals. But a good review will help you see how well your current strategy aligns with those goals and whether there are any holes in the plan. If there are gaps, the reviewer can help you identify what needs to be changed and where resources must be allocated to achieve those goals.

Having someone look over your plan from an objective point of view can help you see potential problems before they become major issues. You might find that something is missing from your strategy or that too many steps are involved in achieving your goals. It could also reveal other important information that will help improve the overall quality of your plan.

Business plans don't just cover what's happened so far — they also forecast what's going to happen next year, six months from now and beyond. So if things change along the way, they may not be reflected in the plan written today. A review can help keep your focus on where you want to go in the future by reviewing your progress each month and adjusting accordingly if needed.

A good consultant will give you constructive feedback about areas where your business plan falls short. This is invaluable when it comes time to revise your plan to more accurately reflect the reality of what's happening in your company, whether due to external factors or internal mistakes. A comprehensive review will also show you where there are holes in your strategy and suggest how they can be filled to strengthen your company's position in its marketplace.

Looking at how your business has performed over time, you can identify areas of concern before they become serious problems.

For example, if sales are declining or profits are shrinking, these trends might be due to temporary factors that can be corrected with better marketing or product development. If sales continue to fall despite these efforts, however, there could be deeper-rooted problems that need addressing.

A good business plan will give you an idea of what your company can accomplish in the short term and over time.

A good business plan also helps potential investors understand what your business is about and why it has the potential for success. This means that if they invest in your company, they can be more confident that they're making a smart choice that will make them money.

• Business Strategy: Planning a company's strategic direction and goals. The business strategy consists of setting a business's vision and mission, identifying its strengths and weaknesses, and evaluating growth opportunities.
• Business Forecast: A business forecast predicts how well the company's revenue and expenses will fare for the next few years. It typically includes financial statements for the current year, estimates for the following year, and projections for two or three subsequent years.
• Bank-Ready Business Plan: A business plan that has been carefully prepared to meet all criteria set by banks when applying for a loan. The bank will want financial projections showing how your business can repay the loan and reasonable evidence that you have identified all costs associated with starting and operating your new business.

Hire the best lawyers for a business plan review through Contracts Counsel where you can find many qualified and vetted lawyers to help you go over your business plan.

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Creative, results driven business & technology executive with 24 years of experience (15+ as a business/corporate lawyer). A problem solver with a passion for business, technology, and law. I bring a thorough understanding of the intersection of the law and business needs to any endeavor, having founded multiple startups myself with successful exits. I provide professional business and legal consulting. Throughout my career I've represented a number large corporations (including some of the top Fortune 500 companies) but the vast majority of my clients these days are startups and small businesses. Having represented hundreds of successful crowdfunded startups, I'm one of the most well known attorneys for startups seeking CF funds. I hold a Juris Doctor degree with a focus on Business/Corporate Law, a Master of Business Administration degree in Entrepreneurship, A Master of Education degree and dual Bachelor of Science degrees. I look forward to working with any parties that have a need for my skill sets.

Anand is an entrepreneur and attorney with a wide-ranging background. In his legal capacity, Anand has represented parties in (i) commercial finance, (ii) corporate, and (iii) real estate matters throughout the country, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Arizona, and Georgia. He is well-versed in business formation and management, reviewing and negotiating contracts, advising clients on financing strategy, and various other arenas in which individuals and businesses commonly find themselves. As an entrepreneur, Anand is involved in the hospitality industry and commercial real estate. His approach to the legal practice is to treat clients fairly and provide the highest quality representation possible. Anand received his law degree from Rutgers University School of Law in 2013 and his Bachelor of Business Administration from Pace University, Lubin School of Business in 2007.

Skilled in the details of complex corporate transactions, I have 15 years experience working with entrepreneurs and businesses to plan and grow for the future. Clients trust me because of the practical guided advice I provide. No deal is too small or complex for me to handle.

I advise clients in the areas of business, trademarks, real estate, employment, and finance. My overarching goals are to unite creative people and companies to assist them in making sound legal and business decisions. I have been fortunate enough to build a fast-growing, 21st-century law firm with an amazing staff by my side. Our focus is not just on providing invaluable legal insight but creating a better all-around client experience. We provide unique subscription pricing and flat-fee options for our clients, providing billing transparency and enhanced value to all of our wonderful clients. Focus areas: contract drafting, negotiations, research, trademarks international law, entertainment, business development, entity choice; business: manager, team builder, leader, motivator. Speaking Engagements: National Business Institute (NBI) - "Business Contracts 101"

Hi, I am the founding member of Son of Brown Law Firm, based in Charlotte North Carolina. Our firm practices in the areas of Business Transactions, Cannabis/Hemp, Personal Injury and Immigration Law.

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5 Reasons Why You Should Do A Business Plan Review

Interested in doing a business plan review? Get Started on your business plan by downloading Small Business BC’s Business Plan Template and Cashflow Forecasting Tool.

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Every entrepreneur understands the value of a well-crafted business plan. It’s an invaluable roadmap for launching your business, and something you’ll use to impress banks and investors. The ideal business plan should be short and concise , but you can become so invested in the process that it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. This is why a business plan review can make a key difference to your start-up.

Business Plan Review

Plenty of services exist that will offer to write your business plan for you. However, nobody knows your business idea as well as you do. It’s important you write the business plan yourself so you can think critically about every aspect of the business. Once completed, a reviewer will ensure you’ve produced a quality document that stands up to scrutiny and meets the requirements of those who will be reading your plan. Having your plan reviewed is an incredibly important step in the business plan creation process, and here’s five reasons why.

A business plan review presents the perfect opportunity to discuss your strategies, plans, and goals with a professional who has ample experience in producing successful documents. You’ll hear objective feedback on your idea, have flagged any potential challenges you may face, and see if your plan is missing any essential information about your business idea that you may or may not have yet considered.

A Test for Your Pitch

The ability to pitch your business is a core skill for any aspiring entrepreneur. At its heart, a business plan represents an in-depth pitch. Knowing your business plan inside out will foster confidence among any investors you meet. Having it undergo a review amounts to a ‘stress test’ for your business plan.

Is Your Business Model Viable?

No matter how passionate you are, it will take real money to sustain your business. Can you show how your business will generate cash over the next six to 12 months? A business plan reviewer has been there and done that. They’ll be able to identify gaps in your numbers, ways you can adjust, or any small details you may have missed.

What to Tackle First

No matter how strong your plan is, it’s likely to present several issues when you take a second look. An experienced reviewer can clearly identify which of these issues you should tackle first, enabling you to organize your plan into a presentable state as quickly as possible.

Business Plan Review Provides Clarified Decisions

Entrepreneurship is said to be a lonely endeavour. You’re responsible for the success and failure of your enterprise, and it represents a lot of pressure on your shoulders. Getting your business plan reviewed lets you share and discuss your options and plans with an expert. They can provide the pluses and minuses of each of your choices, helping you to evaluate your decisions objectively. Once you’ve taken their recommendations on board, you can come to an informed decision.

Where to Get A Business Plan Review

No matter where you are in the business planning process, Small Business BC’s consulting and review service can help you. Work with our expert business plan advisors, Dylan Hrycyshen and Laura Aveledo , and get the professional advice you need to make your business idea a reality.

Get Started on your business plan by downloading Small Business BC’s Business Plan Template and Cashflow Forecasting Tool.

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Mid-Year Business Review: A Company’s Path to Success

Deciding whether or not to administer a mid-year business review can make or break the path of your company. Even if you’re busy, tired, or have other things to do, carving out a chunk of time to hold a review can significantly improve your chance of achieving financial goals.

A quality, comprehensive business review serves as a business status update and plan for the remainder of the year. The frequency of business reviews typically varies by company size as larger businesses tend to conduct them more frequently than smaller firms. While business advisors often, and perhaps accurately, recommend a quarterly business review, my observations among the most successful companies show only a mid-year review is necessary. The purpose of the mid-year business review is to monitor business performance, create solutions to make more money, and provide guidance for leadership via communication with, and for, your team.

Since management encompasses planning, organizing, leading, and controlling, a quality business plan review integrates each of those disciplines together. Let’s explore if a mid-year business review will benefit your company.

The purpose of a mid-year review

• Evaluate performance.
• Reallocate resources to better achieve goals.
• Make more money than you would have otherwise.
• Take stronger corrective actions than you would have without a mid-year review.
• Provide leadership for your team—too much silence taxes milestone goals.
• Offer focus for your team.

Reasons a mid-year review might be unnecessary

• Clearly meeting financial goals.
• Your team has knowledge of their duties and expectations of them for the rest of the year.
• Regular and sufficient monitoring of business performances.
• A full sales/marketing pipeline.
• Presence of all of the above.

There’s nothing quite like an abundance of cash in the checking account and a full sales and marketing pipeline to make a business owner comfortable and, consequently, ignore the need for business reviews. The goal of quality planning, however, is to prepare for the inevitable downturn while enjoying plentiful resources.

Types of business reviews and when to conduct them

While there are many different types of business reviews, these three fundamental types persist because they’re simple and effective. The following chart provides key elements for each fundamental business review, allowing you to determine which is right for your company:

Knowing how often to conduct the reviews stems from the successes your company has experienced.

• Never: Unfortunately, most small firms never conduct a review of their business, even if they need it.
• Annually: Conduct a review each year especially when successes remain high.
• Semi-annual: The best-in-class business planning processes occur in private industry when comprehensive reviews take place mid-year.
• Quarterly: Suggested as ideal in empirical business literature and by publicly traded companies due to quarterly SEC filing requirements, but often not practiced in smaller firms unless required by law.
• Monthly: Perform a monthly review when it seems that problems prevent goal attainment.
• Bi-Monthly: These reviews should be applied in the case of emergency situations.
• Weekly: The execution of a weekly review exists when facing bankruptcy, workouts, or the demands of obsessive-compulsive micro-managers.

Tips for a quality mid-year business review

Completing a mid-year business review makes updating your business plan easier. A review brings energy and action to the business planning process. To ensure a quality and comprehensive plan, employ the following tips:

• Planning and preparation by you must precede the meeting.
• Create and show your written agenda to your team.
• Allow sufficient time to complete the review.
• State the type of meeting, protocol, and expectations of the review.
• Discuss money matters last, or at least late, within the meeting(s).
• Meet your team where they are, as opposed to where you want them to be.
• Discuss first the successes and accomplishments to fertilize minds on necessary areas of improvement.
• Complete quality control check for communications with key players and organizations.

Taking time out of one’s busy schedule to hold a review is an essential part of business management. The first step is to write down an outline agenda highlighting what you want to accomplish with your team for the remainder of the current year. Try it. The exercises of integration, resource allocation, leadership, and communications strengthen the collective body of your company. Afterward, you will feel great knowing that you have created a more successful journey for you and your team.

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Quarterly and Annual Business Reviews: Why They Can Make or Break Your Success

The business review is one of the most underrated tools in a services company's arsenal. Quarterly business reviews highlight new ways to help clients achieve their goals, uncover risks and opportunities you're equipped to address and ensure customer leadership sees you as a critical piece of their growth strategies.

If you already do regular annual or quarterly business reviews with clients, you know how valuable they are. If not, you're about to learn what you're missing.

What Is a QBR?

A quarterly business review, or QBR, is when you sit down with customers on a quarterly basis to review how well you're contributing to their success. They ensure customer satisfaction and keep engagements on schedule, at or under budget and on track to meet agreed-on KPIs.

Here, we'll discuss the elements of both annual and quarterly business reviews, sometimes called "executive business reviews" or "health checks."

You can mix and match elements from each category, but in any case, these should be topics of regular conversation with your clients — because you don't want to be just a service provider. You want to be a partner in your customers' businesses such that they see you as intrinsic to their success. That increases client stickiness and opens the door to expanding the relationship.

Get a quick overview of quarterly business reviews and how to use them to solidify client relationships:

Is a QBR really needed?

Not all services businesses need to conduct frequent or in-depth business reviews. If you supply coffee to the breakroom, you can probably get away with a monthly email check-in. But if you provide a business-critical service, like technology, accounting, legal or marketing, you need to understand how your service plugs into the customer's business strategy.

Key Takeaways

• The real work is done at the annual review; QBRs are quick checks of KPIs and the relationship overall.
• Remember the old adage to keep goals S.M.A.R.T.
• Want to reduce churn? An agreed-on, documented set of goals is key.

What Are the Benefits of a QBR?

There are three main benefits of a quarterly business review.

They provide a measuring stick.

A well-defined performance-to-plan analysis gives customers a solid understanding of where they are on their journeys to new revenue opportunities , lowered risk or both — and how your services helped get them there. It also makes the customer equally invested in and accountable for certain shared metrics, such as profit margin. Yes, your service should aid them in achieving goals, but the real work is up to them. Business reviews allow you to track mutual KPIs so both you and the client have skin in the game. On that note ...

They track overall success metrics.

Business reviews should include KPIs with realistic timelines, budget allocations and responsible parties. A "scorecard" reflecting this ensures everyone is clear on expectations and that your services are steadily moving the client toward goals. For example, if you're a digital marketing agency tasked with recruiting new prospects, confirm there's a sales strategy to close the leads you bring in. That way, the blame for a lack of new customers isn't laid completely at your feet.

In that example, a relevant sales KPI is conversion rate, or the percentage of qualified leads that become paying customers. If the goal is, say, a 10% conversion rate and you're sending along plenty of prospects but your client's sales team isn't closing deals, then maybe you can help with sales coaching.

They solidify customer commitment and engagement.

A business review should highlight successes to date and map improvements that can lead to greater growth. This shows the customer that you understand how your individual contributions support its business strategy and that you're looking for new opportunities to engage, which can increase loyalty and minimize your own churn.

How Do You Prepare for a QBR?

The most important step in conducting a quarterly business review is preparation, which starts when the engagement begins. Service providers should gather a ton of critical information in the customer discovery process, but many skip that step.

Gather this data at the start of the relationship to make conducting annual or quarterly business reviews a smoother process.

Gather contacts and an org chart

Identify the people you'll interact with directly and the influencers who will play a part in executing and evaluating the strategy you propose. If you deal day-to-day with an operations manager who doesn't have a finger on the pulse of the company's overall strategy, ask for an introduction to the COO or whomever can define KPIs that tie directly to business objectives. In our previous digital marketing example, a conversation with the VP of sales will reveal how you can better assist in closing deals.

Set business plan objectives

Understand how your customer's goals align with your own capabilities and business objectives. If you're a managed service provider with an SLA for regular data backups, you should know exactly which types of data you're backing up, compliance regulations to which that backup should adhere, how quickly your customer needs to get back online after a cybersecurity incident to meet its own SLAs and more. Be very clear on how your services and success metrics align with customer needs.

Share success stories

Understand what success looks like for your customer. Where have they had wins? Where have previous service providers fallen short and lost credibility? What could they have done differently, and/or what did they do correctly that the customer expects you to repeat?

Learn about unresolved issues you're expected to handle or that your service will touch

Clearly it's important to identify outstanding issues that your team will pick up and run with, but successful firms go beyond that. If you provide digital marketing services to support sales, it's important to know whether the company has a CRM integration underway or if it's revamping its sales training, for example.

Set solid timelines for success

Make a template to assess early wins that looks something like this:

Customer pain point: How we will address it: How we will define success: Timeline for results:

In subsequent business reviews, assess whether the problem is resolved. Demonstrably removing pain points wins trust for upsells.

Know which KPIs will prove wins

Relatedly, and particularly in smaller shops, clients often want to hand over a general bucket of responsibilities without taking time to nail down exact metrics to track over the course of the engagement. Don't ever skip this step. It's vital to both business reviews and the relationship overall. You can't meet a client's needs if you don't know exactly what you're aiming for.

After you've collected the above information in your customer discovery, digest it and create a broad plan for how you'll steadily help the customer achieve the goals you've outlined. Then, turn those findings into an annual plan that you will track against on a quarterly basis. Don't make the plan super prescriptive — you and the customer will review and refine it together as you talk about business goals and conditions change.

Finally, sit down with your customer and conduct the actual QBR.

Annual business reviews vs. quarterly business reviews (QBRs)

The annual review, done at the beginning of the engagement and repeated yearly, can be an onerous process, and it will outline what success looks like. Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) should be much quicker and more to-the-point. Our main advice for both: Come prepared so you can make the most of every minute spent with the customer. Your contacts likely have many service providers demanding their time. Respect that, and you'll stand out.

What Is an Annual Business Review?

An annual business review is where you really get to know your customer's business. Note: The past 18 months showed that goals and tactics can change quickly in a weird and unpredictable business environment, so you may need to perform in-depth reviews more often if conditions change dramatically.

At least annually, sit down with your client for ideally two hours — and no less than one hour. Steps in an annual business review include:

Discuss business objectives.

We can't say this enough: Continually align the goals for your engagement with the customer's business strategy. As clients grow, you want to go along for the ride. If you don't know what "good" and "better" look like, then you don't know where to plug in. Don't be satisfied with what's working today. To capture a recurring customer for the long haul, look for areas in which you can contribute in the future.

Review past business goals.

Look at the previous year's goals, whether this is your first business review with this client or not. If it's your first rodeo, look at the top goals your client set with your predecessor so you know what you're getting into. And if you've done an annual business review with this client before, discuss whether the goals outlined last year have been achieved and why or why not.

Set Top 3 business goals for the coming year.

Focus this discussion on overall business strategy, not just the part your service will play. That breadth allows you to identify opportunities to provide additional services.

Identify opportunities for the coming year.

Which customer segments or sales channels is your customer targeting? Which new verticals or geographic markets are they expanding into? Which new products or services are they announcing? Internally, do they have future products on the drawing board? Challenges with suppliers? Which new systems are they implementing? Again, these insights help you employ your services to drive everyone forward.

Tease out barriers to success.

You never know where you'll uncover a need for additional services or ways to use your expertise to overcome a business challenge. Maybe clients are having trouble supporting new customers or scaling a service. Maybe it's staffing or supply chain visibility or margin pressure — issues that are pressing now and likely will be for the next year or so. Maybe the client's org structure is out of whack and needs fine-tuning. Getting a peek under the hood at what isn't working is just as important as understanding what is — maybe more so, because it presents problems you can potentially solve.

What Should the Content of a QBR Include?

As discussed, you need a mutual understanding of what "good" looks like so your offerings are aligned with the customer's needs. This piece shouldn't take long, because ideally, you came prepared with an understanding of how the partnership will work.

The content of a QBR should include an outline of three areas:

The customer's strategic goals and where they expect your help. In our digital marketing example, the customer's goal might be to get 300 new customers this year from a specific vertical that will help them expand into new markets.

Your own strategic goals and how they align with what's outlined in your SLA or service contract. Say your digital marketing agency is implementing a new marketing automation software or integrating multiple systems into a more comprehensive solution that will serve your clients better. How does that goal tie in to what your customer is expecting?

Joint strategic goals that you and the customer outline together. Perhaps the client's team has determined that to get those 300 new customers, it needs 2,000 marketing qualified leads. Now you know their overall strategic goals and how they expect you to contribute, before discussion in your quarterly business review.

What are SMART Goals?

Here's where you take the knowledge accumulated so far and lay out the areas in which planning, accountability and investments of money and time will drive the engagement.

Outline three to five strategic initiatives that will grow various parts of the business via your direct touch. Typically, these items require action in the short-term but may not show immediate ROI.

If your assignment is to drive new-customer acquisition with your digital marketing services, then you probably shouldn't expect to help the sales team deliver 100 new customers in the first couple of months. What's the goal for the year, and how can you work toward it?

Remember the old adage and keep goals S.M.A.R.T.: S pecific, M easureable, A ctionable, R elevant and T ime-bound.

Maybe your customer wants to double down on cross-selling to existing customers. You can glean KPIs specific to the client with questions like: How much revenue does the team expect from this initiative? How many customers are they targeting? By when do they expect to achieve this goal? Your shared metrics come from questions like: Which specific actions are marketers taking to move that initiative forward? Finally, where do you plug in? Only after outlining these with the customer can you define an SLA, commit to a certain benchmark and gain a solid understanding of how the engagement should proceed over the next year.

Concluding items

This is where you plot a plan of attack. Outline open items that will drive the business toward its goal — there are probably several of these, as the annual review is a kickoff for the coming year. Note any follow-up items that arise from the business review. Maybe you need to look into a new platform or research new technologies. Write those items down to hold everyone accountable.

Then, you and your customer need to literally sign off on the plan. Legally binding in court? Probably not. But the action alone solidifies a joint commitment to the objectives, KPIs and strategies outlined in the review. Plus, it makes it harder for customers to come back during a QBR with new goals you've never heard of and say you've known about them all along. If they try to throw a curveball, you have a mutually agreed-on strategy to point back to.

How Do You Conduct a QBR?

You do the heavy lifting in the annual business review. It isn't a light load, but it makes quarterly check-ins with the client quicker because you've already identified objectives, initiatives and KPIs. QBRs allow you to confirm that you and the customer are tracking toward those items. Unless your customer has a major strategic shift to fill you in on, the review's purpose is simply to keep you on track and help you identify wins, talk about KPIs, review open projects and get set for the next quarter.

Where can I find a QBR template?

We'll detail the elements of a QBR below. We've also distilled them into a handy template:

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Lay out the agenda.

Recap wins and misses..

Take a minute or two to talk about wins or success stories, as well as anywhere you or the client might have fallen down on the goals that you put your John Hancocks next to at the end of the annual review.

Discuss rearview-mirror metrics.

Glance at previous quarters to make sure you're tracking toward goals. If you've promised a certain number of MQLs for the year, calculate how many you've delivered, how many you have to go and your momentum. If you're an IT service provider, did you meet or exceed SLAs? How many tickets did you close? How long did it take, on average, to close them? CPAs will want to know whether quarterly taxes have been filed, the accuracy of forecasts and how fast their team responded to inquiries, for instance. Confirm you're tracking metrics that matter.

Review open projects.

Again, this shouldn't take long. Ideally, your project managers are having quick check-ins with customers at least monthly, making the QBR a time to wrap up results and progress with a tidy bow. Show how you're achieving mutually-agreed-on goals.

Then, review areas of improvement you and your team have identified while working through the engagement. After all, it isn't the client's job to identify other areas in which you can help them. Maybe they're done with their CRM integration; now you have a new marketing technology platform to suggest. Moving into a new vertical? Perhaps you have an idea for sales team training or events they should attend to learn more.

If you've identified or hope to identify opportunities for an upsell or cross-sell, bring in the account's sales rep — if the timing is right. The presence of sales can pressure a client into stubbornness.

Talk about unresolved issues.

Some items slowing progress may be on the client side, and some might be in your court. Regarding the latter: Has a hiccup on your end slowed progress? Clients are generally far more forgiving of delayed initiatives when those delays are addressed regularly vs. sprung upon them at the last minute.

Don't assume responsibility for issues on the customer's side that you can't fix. That trap is difficult to escape once you land in it. Are you waiting on the client to complete an integration? Is their HR team taking longer than anticipated to hire for a key role? Address any items that are outstanding, above budget or beyond deadline to avoid surprises. Identify ways you can help, but don't fall on your sword for issues that aren't in your control. Who within the organization is ultimately responsible for the client's initiatives? Who influences decisions that may be holding them up? Refer to the org chart if needed.

Unresolved issues may come up when discussing rearview-mirror metrics and open projects . If so, make a note and come back to them in this section. This advice applies to all sections of the QBR: If changes in business objectives come up in earlier sections of the review, make a note of it, and then touch on/clarify those changes in the appropriate section to ensure everyone is on the same page. There's no such thing as too many notes on your part.

Cover changes in business objectives.

Prepare for your client's business objectives to shift as the year progresses. It might frustrate you, but it will undoubtedly happen. Stay flexible, and talk about objectives on a regular basis so you can prepare for a shifted set of goals in the coming quarter.

Evaluate progress on last quarter's goals.

Map the objectives laid out in your annual business review to a KPI scorecard that holds everyone accountable to moving the engagement forward.

Should you collect customer feedback in QBR?

Essential to the QBR is a quick-and-dirty scorecard that lists objectives and how you’re meeting them. Keep the scorecard short and simple, using an “ABC;” “red, yellow, green;” or “percent complete” scoring system to indicate the initiative’s relation to the goal. The format should be easy to understand at-a-glance.

Again, your contacts have enough service providers to deal with. So don’t waste their time, and come with the scorecard mostly filled out with goals and metrics that you’ve continually tracked throughout the quarter.

See an example of a QBR scorecard in our QBR template .

Discuss pain points in the relationship.

Ask your client: Does your team respond to emails quickly? Are service issues resolved fast enough? Are there any complaints? Where can processes or communication be improved? Have you proven your value this quarter?

Touch on the future state.

Do this, but do it very quickly. You've already talked about changing business objectives and how you can help, so this is just a recap to cement yourself in the client's mind when they're creating a strategy for future endeavors. Do you see additional places you can plug into the customer's business in the future? This could look like expanding the number of departments you touch or appropriate additional services you might be able to provide. You're just planting the idea in the client's head, not making a sales pitch.

Sign the scorecard, and close it out.

At the close of the QBR, sign off on the completed scorecard to hold everyone accountable to the metrics, strategies and goals you're working toward. This level of accountability is invaluable in keeping the relationship even-keeled and on track. Review your call cadence with the client and ask if they have any questions.

How long should a QBR take?

A QBR should take 30 minutes at most. The above may seem like quite a bit to run through in half an hour, but a few elements make it possible: First, you've been updating this information and thinking through each of the points throughout the quarter. Second, you've been keeping track of KPIs in your scorecard and have come prepared to breeze through that piece — if your client is strapped for time, the scorecard is where you should focus your efforts. Third, the more you do QBRs, the better you'll get at them and the faster they'll go.

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The Bottom Line

As a services company, keeping customers satisfied is pivotal in reducing churn. And it's difficult to know whether you're meeting expectations if you don't regularly check in with customers. Without the business review process, you're floating in space without any sense of True North, just guessing about the right actions to take.

You might think that you know your stuff, but there are always accounts that will say they're dissatisfied one day out of the blue, and you'll wonder where you went wrong. Avoid that by checking in with your clients regularly and using customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep an eye on satisfaction. Plus, doing so ensures you're aligned with customers' overall business objectives so that you can continue to provide value and more deeply enmesh yourself into said strategies. Who doesn't love being needed?

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How to Write a Business Plan: Step-by-Step Guide + Examples

Noah Parsons

24 min. read

Updated March 18, 2024

Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be complicated. 

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to write a business plan that’s detailed enough to impress bankers and potential investors, while giving you the tools to start, run, and grow a successful business.

• The basics of business planning

If you’re reading this guide, then you already know why you need a business plan . 

You understand that planning helps you: 

• Raise money
• Grow strategically
• Keep your business on the right track 

As you start to write your plan, it’s useful to zoom out and remember what a business plan is .

At its core, a business plan is an overview of the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy: how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

Most business plans also include financial forecasts for the future. These set sales goals, budget for expenses, and predict profits and cash flow. 

A good business plan is much more than just a document that you write once and forget about. It’s also a guide that helps you outline and achieve your goals. 

After completing your plan, you can use it as a management tool to track your progress toward your goals. Updating and adjusting your forecasts and budgets as you go is one of the most important steps you can take to run a healthier, smarter business. 

We’ll dive into how to use your plan later in this article.

There are many different types of plans , but we’ll go over the most common type here, which includes everything you need for an investor-ready plan. However, if you’re just starting out and are looking for something simpler—I recommend starting with a one-page business plan . It’s faster and easier to create. 

It’s also the perfect place to start if you’re just figuring out your idea, or need a simple strategic plan to use inside your business.

Dig deeper : How to write a one-page business plan

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• What to include in your business plan

Executive summary

The executive summary is an overview of your business and your plans. It comes first in your plan and is ideally just one to two pages. Most people write it last because it’s a summary of the complete business plan.

Ideally, the executive summary can act as a stand-alone document that covers the highlights of your detailed plan. 

In fact, it’s common for investors to ask only for the executive summary when evaluating your business. If they like what they see in the executive summary, they’ll often follow up with a request for a complete plan, a pitch presentation , or more in-depth financial forecasts .

Your executive summary should include:

• A summary of the problem you are solving
• A description of your product or service
• An overview of your target market
• A brief description of your team
• A summary of your financials
• Your funding requirements (if you are raising money)

Dig Deeper: How to write an effective executive summary

Products and services description

This is where you describe exactly what you’re selling, and how it solves a problem for your target market. The best way to organize this part of your plan is to start by describing the problem that exists for your customers. After that, you can describe how you plan to solve that problem with your product or service. 

This is usually called a problem and solution statement .

To truly showcase the value of your products and services, you need to craft a compelling narrative around your offerings. How will your product or service transform your customers’ lives or jobs? A strong narrative will draw in your readers.

This is also the part of the business plan to discuss any competitive advantages you may have, like specific intellectual property or patents that protect your product. If you have any initial sales, contracts, or other evidence that your product or service is likely to sell, include that information as well. It will show that your idea has traction , which can help convince readers that your plan has a high chance of success.

Market analysis

Your target market is a description of the type of people that you plan to sell to. You might even have multiple target markets, depending on your business. 

A market analysis is the part of your plan where you bring together all of the information you know about your target market. Basically, it’s a thorough description of who your customers are and why they need what you’re selling. You’ll also include information about the growth of your market and your industry .

Try to be as specific as possible when you describe your market. 

Include information such as age, income level, and location—these are what’s called “demographics.” If you can, also describe your market’s interests and habits as they relate to your business—these are “psychographics.” 

Related: Target market examples

Essentially, you want to include any knowledge you have about your customers that is relevant to how your product or service is right for them. With a solid target market, it will be easier to create a sales and marketing plan that will reach your customers. That’s because you know who they are, what they like to do, and the best ways to reach them.

Next, provide any additional information you have about your market. 

What is the size of your market ? Is the market growing or shrinking? Ideally, you’ll want to demonstrate that your market is growing over time, and also explain how your business is positioned to take advantage of any expected changes in your industry.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write a market analysis

Competitive analysis

Part of defining your business opportunity is determining what your competitive advantage is. To do this effectively, you need to know as much about your competitors as your target customers. 

Every business has some form of competition. If you don’t think you have competitors, then explore what alternatives there are in the market for your product or service. 

For example: In the early years of cars, their main competition was horses. For social media, the early competition was reading books, watching TV, and talking on the phone.

A good competitive analysis fully lays out the competitive landscape and then explains how your business is different. Maybe your products are better made, or cheaper, or your customer service is superior. Maybe your competitive advantage is your location – a wide variety of factors can ultimately give you an advantage.

Dig Deeper: How to write a competitive analysis for your business plan

Marketing and sales plan

The marketing and sales plan covers how you will position your product or service in the market, the marketing channels and messaging you will use, and your sales tactics. 

The best place to start with a marketing plan is with a positioning statement . 

This explains how your business fits into the overall market, and how you will explain the advantages of your product or service to customers. You’ll use the information from your competitive analysis to help you with your positioning. 

For example: You might position your company as the premium, most expensive but the highest quality option in the market. Or your positioning might focus on being locally owned and that shoppers support the local economy by buying your products.

Once you understand your positioning, you’ll bring this together with the information about your target market to create your marketing strategy . 

This is how you plan to communicate your message to potential customers. Depending on who your customers are and how they purchase products like yours, you might use many different strategies, from social media advertising to creating a podcast. Your marketing plan is all about how your customers discover who you are and why they should consider your products and services. 

While your marketing plan is about reaching your customers—your sales plan will describe the actual sales process once a customer has decided that they’re interested in what you have to offer. 

If your business requires salespeople and a long sales process, describe that in this section. If your customers can “self-serve” and just make purchases quickly on your website, describe that process. 

A good sales plan picks up where your marketing plan leaves off. The marketing plan brings customers in the door and the sales plan is how you close the deal.

Together, these specific plans paint a picture of how you will connect with your target audience, and how you will turn them into paying customers.

Dig deeper: What to include in your sales and marketing plan

Business operations

The operations section describes the necessary requirements for your business to run smoothly. It’s where you talk about how your business works and what day-to-day operations look like. 

Depending on how your business is structured, your operations plan may include elements of the business like:

• Supply chain management
• Manufacturing processes
• Equipment and technology
• Distribution

Some businesses distribute their products and reach their customers through large retailers like Amazon.com, Walmart, Target, and grocery store chains. 

These businesses should review how this part of their business works. The plan should discuss the logistics and costs of getting products onto store shelves and any potential hurdles the business may have to overcome.

If your business is much simpler than this, that’s OK. This section of your business plan can be either extremely short or more detailed, depending on the type of business you are building.

For businesses selling services, such as physical therapy or online software, you can use this section to describe the technology you’ll leverage, what goes into your service, and who you will partner with to deliver your services.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write the operations chapter of your plan

Key milestones and metrics

Although it’s not required to complete your business plan, mapping out key business milestones and the metrics can be incredibly useful for measuring your success.

Good milestones clearly lay out the parameters of the task and set expectations for their execution. You’ll want to include:

• A description of each task
• The proposed due date
• Who is responsible for each task

If you have a budget, you can include projected costs to hit each milestone. You don’t need extensive project planning in this section—just list key milestones you want to hit and when you plan to hit them. This is your overall business roadmap. 

Possible milestones might be:

• Website launch date
• Store or office opening date
• First significant sales
• Break even date
• Business licenses and approvals

You should also discuss the key numbers you will track to determine your success. Some common metrics worth tracking include:

• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition costs
• Profit per customer
• Repeat purchases

It’s perfectly fine to start with just a few metrics and grow the number you are tracking over time. You also may find that some metrics simply aren’t relevant to your business and can narrow down what you’re tracking.

Dig Deeper: How to use milestones in your business plan

Organization and management team

Investors don’t just look for great ideas—they want to find great teams. Use this chapter to describe your current team and who you need to hire . You should also provide a quick overview of your location and history if you’re already up and running.

Briefly highlight the relevant experiences of each key team member in the company. It’s important to make the case for why yours is the right team to turn an idea into a reality. 

Do they have the right industry experience and background? Have members of the team had entrepreneurial successes before? 

If you still need to hire key team members, that’s OK. Just note those gaps in this section.

Your company overview should also include a summary of your company’s current business structure . The most common business structures include:

• Sole proprietor
• Partnership

Be sure to provide an overview of how the business is owned as well. Does each business partner own an equal portion of the business? How is ownership divided? 

Potential lenders and investors will want to know the structure of the business before they will consider a loan or investment.

Dig Deeper: How to write about your company structure and team

Financial plan

Last, but certainly not least, is your financial plan chapter. 

Entrepreneurs often find this section the most daunting. But, business financials for most startups are less complicated than you think, and a business degree is certainly not required to build a solid financial forecast. 

A typical financial forecast in a business plan includes the following:

• Sales forecast : An estimate of the sales expected over a given period. You’ll break down your forecast into the key revenue streams that you expect to have.
• Expense budget : Your planned spending such as personnel costs , marketing expenses, and taxes.
• Profit & Loss : Brings together your sales and expenses and helps you calculate planned profits.
• Cash Flow : Shows how cash moves into and out of your business. It can predict how much cash you’ll have on hand at any given point in the future.
• Balance Sheet : A list of the assets, liabilities, and equity in your company. In short, it provides an overview of the financial health of your business. 

A strong business plan will include a description of assumptions about the future, and potential risks that could impact the financial plan. Including those will be especially important if you’re writing a business plan to pursue a loan or other investment.

Dig Deeper: How to create financial forecasts and budgets

This is the place for additional data, charts, or other information that supports your plan.

Including an appendix can significantly enhance the credibility of your plan by showing readers that you’ve thoroughly considered the details of your business idea, and are backing your ideas up with solid data.

Just remember that the information in the appendix is meant to be supplementary. Your business plan should stand on its own, even if the reader skips this section.

Dig Deeper : What to include in your business plan appendix

Optional: Business plan cover page

Adding a business plan cover page can make your plan, and by extension your business, seem more professional in the eyes of potential investors, lenders, and partners. It serves as the introduction to your document and provides necessary contact information for stakeholders to reference.

Your cover page should be simple and include:

• Company logo
• Business name
• Value proposition (optional)
• Business plan title
• Completion and/or update date
• Address and contact information
• Confidentiality statement

Just remember, the cover page is optional. If you decide to include it, keep it very simple and only spend a short amount of time putting it together.

Dig Deeper: How to create a business plan cover page

How to use AI to help write your business plan

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can speed up the business plan writing process and help you think through concepts like market segmentation and competition. These tools are especially useful for taking ideas that you provide and converting them into polished text for your business plan.

The best way to use AI for your business plan is to leverage it as a collaborator , not a replacement for human creative thinking and ingenuity. 

AI can come up with lots of ideas and act as a brainstorming partner. It’s up to you to filter through those ideas and figure out which ones are realistic enough to resonate with your customers. 

There are pros and cons of using AI to help with your business plan . So, spend some time understanding how it can be most helpful before just outsourcing the job to AI.

Learn more: 10 AI prompts you need to write a business plan

• Writing tips and strategies

To help streamline the business plan writing process, here are a few tips and key questions to answer to make sure you get the most out of your plan and avoid common mistakes .  

Determine why you are writing a business plan

Knowing why you are writing a business plan will determine your approach to your planning project. 

For example: If you are writing a business plan for yourself, or just to use inside your own business , you can probably skip the section about your team and organizational structure. 

If you’re raising money, you’ll want to spend more time explaining why you’re looking to raise the funds and exactly how you will use them.

Regardless of how you intend to use your business plan , think about why you are writing and what you’re trying to get out of the process before you begin.

Keep things concise

Probably the most important tip is to keep your business plan short and simple. There are no prizes for long business plans . The longer your plan is, the less likely people are to read it. 

So focus on trimming things down to the essentials your readers need to know. Skip the extended, wordy descriptions and instead focus on creating a plan that is easy to read —using bullets and short sentences whenever possible.

Have someone review your business plan

Writing a business plan in a vacuum is never a good idea. Sometimes it’s helpful to zoom out and check if your plan makes sense to someone else. You also want to make sure that it’s easy to read and understand.

Don’t wait until your plan is “done” to get a second look. Start sharing your plan early, and find out from readers what questions your plan leaves unanswered. This early review cycle will help you spot shortcomings in your plan and address them quickly, rather than finding out about them right before you present your plan to a lender or investor.

If you need a more detailed review, you may want to explore hiring a professional plan writer to thoroughly examine it.

Use a free business plan template and business plan examples to get started

Knowing what information you need to cover in a business plan sometimes isn’t quite enough. If you’re struggling to get started or need additional guidance, it may be worth using a business plan template. 

If you’re looking for a free downloadable business plan template to get you started, download the template used by more than 1 million businesses. 

Or, if you just want to see what a completed business plan looks like, check out our library of over 550 free business plan examples . 

We even have a growing list of industry business planning guides with tips for what to focus on depending on your business type.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re writing your business plan. Some entrepreneurs get sucked into the writing and research process, and don’t focus enough on actually getting their business started. 

Here are a few common mistakes and how to avoid them:

Not talking to your customers : This is one of the most common mistakes. It’s easy to assume that your product or service is something that people want. Before you invest too much in your business and too much in the planning process, make sure you talk to your prospective customers and have a good understanding of their needs.

• Overly optimistic sales and profit forecasts: By nature, entrepreneurs are optimistic about the future. But it’s good to temper that optimism a little when you’re planning, and make sure your forecasts are grounded in reality. 
• Spending too much time planning: Yes, planning is crucial. But you also need to get out and talk to customers, build prototypes of your product and figure out if there’s a market for your idea. Make sure to balance planning with building.
• Not revising the plan: Planning is useful, but nothing ever goes exactly as planned. As you learn more about what’s working and what’s not—revise your plan, your budgets, and your revenue forecast. Doing so will provide a more realistic picture of where your business is going, and what your financial needs will be moving forward.
• Not using the plan to manage your business: A good business plan is a management tool. Don’t just write it and put it on the shelf to collect dust – use it to track your progress and help you reach your goals.
• Presenting your business plan

The planning process forces you to think through every aspect of your business and answer questions that you may not have thought of. That’s the real benefit of writing a business plan – the knowledge you gain about your business that you may not have been able to discover otherwise.

With all of this knowledge, you’re well prepared to convert your business plan into a pitch presentation to present your ideas. 

A pitch presentation is a summary of your plan, just hitting the highlights and key points. It’s the best way to present your business plan to investors and team members.

Dig Deeper: Learn what key slides should be included in your pitch deck

Use your business plan to manage your business

One of the biggest benefits of planning is that it gives you a tool to manage your business better. With a revenue forecast, expense budget, and projected cash flow, you know your targets and where you are headed.

And yet, nothing ever goes exactly as planned – it’s the nature of business.

That’s where using your plan as a management tool comes in. The key to leveraging it for your business is to review it periodically and compare your forecasts and projections to your actual results.

Start by setting up a regular time to review the plan – a monthly review is a good starting point. During this review, answer questions like:

• Did you meet your sales goals?
• Is spending following your budget?
• Has anything gone differently than what you expected?

Now that you see whether you’re meeting your goals or are off track, you can make adjustments and set new targets. 

Maybe you’re exceeding your sales goals and should set new, more aggressive goals. In that case, maybe you should also explore more spending or hiring more employees. 

Or maybe expenses are rising faster than you projected. If that’s the case, you would need to look at where you can cut costs.

A plan, and a method for comparing your plan to your actual results , is the tool you need to steer your business toward success.

Learn More: How to run a regular plan review

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How to write a business plan FAQ

What is a business plan?

A document that describes your business , the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy, how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

What are the benefits of a business plan?

A business plan helps you understand where you want to go with your business and what it will take to get there. It reduces your overall risk, helps you uncover your business’s potential, attracts investors, and identifies areas for growth.

Having a business plan ultimately makes you more confident as a business owner and more likely to succeed for a longer period of time.

What are the 7 steps of a business plan?

The seven steps to writing a business plan include:

• Write a brief executive summary
• Describe your products and services.
• Conduct market research and compile data into a cohesive market analysis.
• Describe your marketing and sales strategy.
• Outline your organizational structure and management team.
• Develop financial projections for sales, revenue, and cash flow.
• Add any additional documents to your appendix.

What are the 5 most common business plan mistakes?

There are plenty of mistakes that can be made when writing a business plan. However, these are the 5 most common that you should do your best to avoid:

• 1. Not taking the planning process seriously.
• Having unrealistic financial projections or incomplete financial information.
• Inconsistent information or simple mistakes.
• Failing to establish a sound business model.
• Not having a defined purpose for your business plan.

What questions should be answered in a business plan?

Writing a business plan is all about asking yourself questions about your business and being able to answer them through the planning process. You’ll likely be asking dozens and dozens of questions for each section of your plan.

However, these are the key questions you should ask and answer with your business plan:

• How will your business make money?
• Is there a need for your product or service?
• Who are your customers?
• How are you different from the competition?
• How will you reach your customers?
• How will you measure success?

How long should a business plan be?

The length of your business plan fully depends on what you intend to do with it. From the SBA and traditional lender point of view, a business plan needs to be whatever length necessary to fully explain your business. This means that you prove the viability of your business, show that you understand the market, and have a detailed strategy in place.

If you intend to use your business plan for internal management purposes, you don’t necessarily need a full 25-50 page business plan. Instead, you can start with a one-page plan to get all of the necessary information in place.

What are the different types of business plans?

While all business plans cover similar categories, the style and function fully depend on how you intend to use your plan. Here are a few common business plan types worth considering.

Traditional business plan: The tried-and-true traditional business plan is a formal document meant to be used when applying for funding or pitching to investors. This type of business plan follows the outline above and can be anywhere from 10-50 pages depending on the amount of detail included, the complexity of your business, and what you include in your appendix.

Business model canvas: The business model canvas is a one-page template designed to demystify the business planning process. It removes the need for a traditional, copy-heavy business plan, in favor of a single-page outline that can help you and outside parties better explore your business idea.

One-page business plan: This format is a simplified version of the traditional plan that focuses on the core aspects of your business. You’ll typically stick with bullet points and single sentences. It’s most useful for those exploring ideas, needing to validate their business model, or who need an internal plan to help them run and manage their business.

Lean Plan: The Lean Plan is less of a specific document type and more of a methodology. It takes the simplicity and styling of the one-page business plan and turns it into a process for you to continuously plan, test, review, refine, and take action based on performance. It’s faster, keeps your plan concise, and ensures that your plan is always up-to-date.

What’s the difference between a business plan and a strategic plan?

A business plan covers the “who” and “what” of your business. It explains what your business is doing right now and how it functions. The strategic plan explores long-term goals and explains “how” the business will get there. It encourages you to look more intently toward the future and how you will achieve your vision.

However, when approached correctly, your business plan can actually function as a strategic plan as well. If kept lean, you can define your business, outline strategic steps, and track ongoing operations all with a single plan.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

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• Common planning mistakes
• Manage with your business plan
• Templates and examples

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If you have written a business plan for your business, how often do you look at it?

A business plan’s first purpose is to act as a road map for your business .

It acts as a framework through which you can express your thoughts on what should be achieved in your business and how you intend to achieve it. However, as your business grows and changes significantly, it is important to adjust your plan accordingly. It should be used as a checklist for all your objectives and goals, both short term and long term, and regularly reviewed as a way of noting your progress—particularly with regards to what strategies are working and which are not.

The review is a good practice for the beginning of each financial year in order to get your priorities straight and your head in the right mindset, and especially to reiterate your mission, vision and your goals for the year ahead.

You can look at what has changed within your business. Perhaps your business model changed, or you have new products and services (or have removed some). Maybe your costing models need to be altered, or you have an entirely new target market and need an updated customer profile. You might be looking to implement an offbeat marketing campaign or a different set of strategies. There could be a new competitor in your segment of the marketplace, or it could be as simple as a decline in figures. Basically, after any major changes, you need to dig up your business plan and reassess so your business can move forward and continue to grow.   This article is based on an extract from the MentorNet mentoring program session on Business Planning, which was presented by Wendy Fogarty. For more information about the HerBusiness’s mentoring services, see the Mentoring section of this website. For details of the next Business Plans Made Easy, visit the Upcoming Events section of this website.   This article was co-authored by Elizabeth Rowe. Elizabeth graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature) at the ANU and a Masters of Media Practice at the University of Sydney. She is currently completing an internship with the HerBusiness.

About the Author

HerBusiness (formerly Australian Businesswomen’s Network) is a membership community that provides education, training, resources, mentoring and support for women business owners.

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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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What is a business plan? Definition, Purpose, and Types

In the world of business, a well-thought-out plan is often the key to success. This plan, known as a business plan, is a comprehensive document that outlines a company’s goals, strategies , and financial projections. Whether you’re starting a new business or looking to expand an existing one, a business plan is an essential tool.

As a business plan writer and consultant , I’ve crafted over 15,000 plans for a diverse range of businesses. In this article, I’ll be sharing my wealth of experience about what a business plan is, its purpose, and the step-by-step process of creating one. By the end, you’ll have a thorough understanding of how to develop a robust business plan that can drive your business to success.

What is a business plan?

Purposes of a business plan, executive summary, business description or overview, product and price, competitive analysis, target market, marketing plan, financial plan, funding requirements, lean startup business plans, traditional business plans, how often should a business plan be reviewed and revised, what are the key elements of a lean startup business plan.

• What are some of the reasons why business plans don't succeed?

A business plan is a roadmap for your business. It outlines your goals, strategies, and how you plan to achieve them. It’s a living document that you can update as your business grows and changes.

Looking for someone to write a business plan?

Find professional business plan writers for your business success.

These are the following purpose of business plan:

• Attract investors and lenders: If you’re seeking funding for your business , a business plan is a must-have. Investors and lenders want to see that you have a clear plan for how you’ll use their money to grow your business and generate revenue.
• Get organized and stay on track: Writing a business plan forces you to think through all aspects of your business, from your target market to your marketing strategy. This can help you identify any potential challenges and opportunities early on, so you can develop a plan to address them.
• Make better decisions: A business plan can help you make better decisions about your business by providing you with a framework to evaluate different options. For example, if you’re considering launching a new product, your business plan can help you assess the potential market demand, costs, and profitability.

What are the essential components of a business plan?

The executive summary is the most important part of your business plan, even though it’s the last one you’ll write. It’s the first section that potential investors or lenders will read, and it may be the only one they read. The executive summary sets the stage for the rest of the document by introducing your company’s mission or vision statement, value proposition, and long-term goals.

The business description section of your business plan should introduce your business to the reader in a compelling and concise way. It should include your business name, years in operation, key offerings, positioning statement, and core values (if applicable). You may also want to include a short history of your company.

In this section, the company should describe its products or services , including pricing, product lifespan, and unique benefits to the consumer. Other relevant information could include production and manufacturing processes, patents, and proprietary technology.

Every industry has competitors, even if your business is the first of its kind or has the majority of the market share. In the competitive analysis section of your business plan, you’ll objectively assess the industry landscape to understand your business’s competitive position. A SWOT analysis is a structured way to organize this section.

Your target market section explains the core customers of your business and why they are your ideal customers. It should include demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic information about your target market.

Marketing plan describes how the company will attract and retain customers, including any planned advertising and marketing campaigns . It also describes how the company will distribute its products or services to consumers.

After outlining your goals, validating your business opportunity, and assessing the industry landscape, the team section of your business plan identifies who will be responsible for achieving your goals. Even if you don’t have your full team in place yet, investors will be impressed by your clear understanding of the roles that need to be filled.

In the financial plan section,established businesses should provide financial statements , balance sheets , and other financial data. New businesses should provide financial targets and estimates for the first few years, and may also request funding.

Since one goal of a business plan is to secure funding from investors , you should include the amount of funding you need, why you need it, and how long you need it for.

• Tip: Use bullet points and numbered lists to make your plan easy to read and scannable.

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Types of business plan.

Business plans can come in many different formats, but they are often divided into two main types: traditional and lean startup. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) says that the traditional business plan is the more common of the two.

Lean startup business plans are short (as short as one page) and focus on the most important elements. They are easy to create, but companies may need to provide more information if requested by investors or lenders.

Traditional business plans are longer and more detailed than lean startup business plans, which makes them more time-consuming to create but more persuasive to potential investors. Lean startup business plans are shorter and less detailed, but companies should be prepared to provide more information if requested.

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A business plan should be reviewed and revised at least annually, or more often if the business is experiencing significant changes. This is because the business landscape is constantly changing, and your business plan needs to reflect those changes in order to remain relevant and effective.

Here are some specific situations in which you should review and revise your business plan:

• You have launched a new product or service line.
• You have entered a new market.
• You have experienced significant changes in your customer base or competitive landscape.
• You have made changes to your management team or organizational structure.
• You have raised new funding.

A lean startup business plan is a short and simple way for a company to explain its business, especially if it is new and does not have a lot of information yet. It can include sections on the company’s value proposition, major activities and advantages, resources, partnerships, customer segments, and revenue sources.

What are some of the reasons why business plans don't succeed?

• Unrealistic assumptions: Business plans are often based on assumptions about the market, the competition, and the company’s own capabilities. If these assumptions are unrealistic, the plan is doomed to fail.
• Lack of focus: A good business plan should be focused on a specific goal and how the company will achieve it. If the plan is too broad or tries to do too much, it is unlikely to be successful.
• Poor execution: Even the best business plan is useless if it is not executed properly. This means having the right team in place, the necessary resources, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
• Unforeseen challenges:  Every business faces challenges that could not be predicted or planned for. These challenges can be anything from a natural disaster to a new competitor to a change in government regulations.

What are the benefits of having a business plan?

• It helps you to clarify your business goals and strategies.
• It can help you to attract investors and lenders.
• It can serve as a roadmap for your business as it grows and changes.
• It can help you to make better business decisions.

How to write a business plan?

There are many different ways to write a business plan, but most follow the same basic structure. Here is a step-by-step guide:

• Executive summary.
• Company description.
• Management and organization description.
• Financial projections.

How to write a business plan step by step?

Start with an executive summary, then describe your business, analyze the market, outline your products or services, detail your marketing and sales strategies, introduce your team, and provide financial projections.

Why do I need a business plan for my startup?

A business plan helps define your startup’s direction, attract investors, secure funding, and make informed decisions crucial for success.

What are the key components of a business plan?

Key components include an executive summary, business description, market analysis, products or services, marketing and sales strategy, management and team, financial projections, and funding requirements.

Can a business plan help secure funding for my business?

Yes, a well-crafted business plan demonstrates your business’s viability, the use of investment, and potential returns, making it a valuable tool for attracting investors and lenders.

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How to Conduct a Monthly Business Plan Review Meeting

Posted june 21, 2021 by noah parsons.

Most people think that meetings are a waste of time. They’re right.

The fact is, too many meetings are run poorly, have no real objective, and waste employees’ time — which kills productivity.

I absolutely encourage you to be ruthless in your pursuit of fewer and more efficient meetings. There’s tons of advice out there on how to run better meetings and cut down on useless touch bases that waste time and make your organization move slower.

For example, here at Palo Alto Software , we’ve found one meeting that is simply indispensable. It only takes an hour each month, keeps the management team up to speed on everything that’s going on in the company, and helps us plan and manage in a quick and effective way .

This meeting is our monthly plan review meeting. 

What is a plan review meeting?

A monthly review meeting is a time for you and your team to review current progress against your ideal performance. This one-to-two-hour meeting should be spent dissecting parts of your strategy, reviewing financials, and making adjustments based on overall performance. It has been a fixture of our management strategy for years and is simply one of the most effective ways for us to continue to grow the company and adjust our course as necessary.

For us, business planning isn’t just a one-time or annual event. Instead, it’s an ongoing process where we are constantly reviewing and adjusting course as necessary while ensuring that we’re staying on track toward our larger goals .

Why is it important to conduct a monthly plan review?

Every business of any size can benefit from a calculated time to stop, review and revise. When done correctly, this meeting can help you focus on what’s vital for your company, identify what data you need to accurately measure it and how to best present and review these results. Additionally, your monthly plan review process can help your business in the following ways.

Commits your business to learn and act

It can become very easy to let operations and processes become stagnant and standard. Without a regular performance review, any potential problems may remain to fester well beyond when they are first identified. You don’t want to waste company time and resources on things that are ineffective, but it’s difficult to change course without first processing it.

By setting aside this monthly time, it provides the opportunity to commit to learning and adjusting anything and everything. This isn’t based on off-hand information but on solid information and data that helps you identify and evaluate what’s most important for your business. 

Engages individuals across your entire business

Depending on how you present this meeting, it has the potential to pull in greater insight from across your business. Whether you’re sharing information company-wide or sticking with select leaders from each department, it immediately expands the scope of expertise. 

The more that every leader and employee knows what’s going on with everyone else, the better you can align and produce effective goals . It also provides the opportunity to identify potential solutions or issues from outside your core team’s responsibilities. Maybe your product team sees a potential gap in your marketing messaging. Or someone in HR sees a potential work/life balance misalignment in the sales team. None of this would come to life without a core review meeting like this.

Influences better business conversations

Engaging more people across your business and providing more detailed information typically leads to more fruitful conversations outside the core meeting. Yes, the meeting itself is vital for actively reviewing and adjusting your strategy at the moment. However, this information being top of mind means that potential issues or innovations will be dealt with outside of the planning meeting. This is due to your employees having a clear direction to reference in the day-to-day. They know the strategy and data are up-to-date and that it serves as a north star for their own projects and initiatives.

How to run an effective monthly plan review meeting

We treat planning not as a document, but as a management tool that helps guide decisions and strategy. It’s this mindset that helps our team run these monthly meetings successfully. We have a strategy in place, steps to walk through and key objectives we expect to find.

Here’s a quick overview of how we structure our monthly plan review meetings and what’s worked well for us over the years. 

1. Review your financial statements

We always start with the numbers first . How did we do last month compared to our forecast ? How did we do compared to the same month last year? What does our year-to-date performance look like?

What financial statements to review

Ideally, you’ll have the opportunity to review all relevant monthly financial statements. At a minimum, you should review your Profit and Loss Statement , Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement . These will provide a high-level overview of your financial position and help identify any obvious anomalies. If possible, it’s valuable to look at these all together through a business dashboard , that way you can immediately start making connections.

With that top-level exploration in mind, you can then start looking into your budget, financial forecast scenarios, and any specific elements that may seem relevant. This may include things like your expense categories, accounts receivable/payable payment schedules, etc. 

Look beyond top-line performance

We always spend time drilling into the numbers, beyond the top-line revenue and expenses to better understand what the drivers were behind our performance. Did all product lines perform well? Or did some underperform? Did we spend as planned or were there some areas that we overspent in?

Most importantly, we review our cash position and cash flow . Did we collect money as planned? What does our cash flow forecast look like for the next few months?

There are benefits to looking at financials together

While financial reports can be reviewed outside of a meeting, reviewing them together as a team encourages questions and discussion around our revenue and spending. It also helps you uncover specific issues or opportunities that you may miss on your own. And of course, gives everyone a voice to determine the next steps for the company as well as their specific teams.

Of course, we use LivePlan to review our numbers because it’s much easier than drilling through exported reports from QuickBooks . But if you’re not ready to make that jump, you can always start out with a simple cash flow template in Excel.

2. Reevaluate your milestones

Once we review our financial performance, we review our “ major milestones ”—the big tasks we had hoped to get done in the past month and our plans for the next month.

We discuss how various teams might be working with each other on different projects and talk about the specific milestones that we have planned. Are these still the tactics that we want to work on that will help achieve our goals? Do we need to shift priorities? Is there new learning and information that would have us change our schedule?

By reviewing major initiatives on a monthly basis, we can stay agile and make changes as needed. That’s also why we review them after parsing through our financials, to determine if our current milestones should still be a priority. As we learn more about our customers and our market , we might shift strategies and develop new milestones .

3. Review your long-term goals and strategy

Next, we review our long-term strategic goals. While this doesn’t change too often in our situation as an established company, new startups might shift their strategy frequently as they search for a business model that works.

For those early-stage startups, this step of the meeting may be the most important step and often takes the longest. For more established companies, this part of the meeting might typically only take a few minutes. This is where having a brief and functional business plan can really help speed up the process.

Instead of delving deep into a 40-page business plan document to review our strategy, we review our our one-page business plan (in LivePlan, it’s called the Pitch ). It covers our company identity, the core problem we solve for our customers, our solution, competition , and sales and marketing strategy . It’s all on one page so it’s easy to read, review, and change quickly .

4. Provide time to discuss any company issues

Finally, anyone on the team can bring forward any issues that they want to discuss. This could include new opportunities to consider, prioritization of product features, potential partnerships, or internal HR issues.

Everything is fair game and we try to come up with resolutions and next steps for any issue that’s brought up.

We’ve found that this type of open-ended discussion really helps generate new ideas and brings different perspectives from managers of different teams.

5. Set meeting guidelines

I believe that all companies would benefit from a monthly review of their business. These types of meetings keep everyone on the same page, help share information about progress, and turn planning into a tool that helps teams make informed decisions. 

But in order to run these monthly meetings successfully, you’ll need to do some preliminary work to keep you and your team on track. Here are three tips to successfully establish your monthly business plan review.

Put the meeting on the calendar

It’s important to make it a formal event that’s on the schedule. It can’t be optional and it has to be at a regular time so that everyone always knows when the meeting is.

For us, we started out with the meeting on the 3rd Thursday of every month. As our bookkeeping and accounting processes have become more efficient, we’ve been able to move our meeting to the 2nd Friday of the month.

Follow a repeatable agenda

While different topics will come up for discussion, it’s important that your plan review meeting has a repeatable agenda. Not only does it provide structure, but it gives your team specific action items to review beforehand.

That means making sure that you have your numbers ready for review and that your team has updates on their goals. Try to set time limits for each section if you can, and overestimate the length of the meeting with the full intention of finishing earlier than planned. This part will be a continuous work in progress and you and your team will gradually improve your efficiency with each subsequent meeting.

Be prepared to change the plan

These plan review meetings aren’t just about staying the course and blindly following the plan. Instead, they are about adjusting the plan. Perhaps you’ll discover that you should be investing more in marketing, or that you’re going to be able to expand and hire faster than you originally planned.

The plan review meeting is about making adjustments to your goals and strategies based on what you’ve discovered in the past month.

Use your monthly plan review to redefine how you do meetings

Keep in mind that running your meetings more successfully won’t just happen overnight. It takes time to develop a structure that works best for you and your team. As I outlined in this article, the best place to start your meeting restructure is with your monthly plan review meeting.

It’s a necessary review that can be consistently repeated, refined, and adjusted, which makes it the perfect testing ground for a new system. 

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written in 2018 and updated for 2021.

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The Essential Guide to Writing a Business Plan Here's the no-nonsense guide on how to write a business plan that will help you map success for your startup.

By Carolyn Sun

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." If you're starting a business, you should have a business plan regardless of whether you're bootstrapping it or looking for outside funding.

The best sorts of business plans tell a clear story of what the company plans to do and how it will do it. Given the high failure rate of startups in their first year, a business plan is also an ideal opportunity to safely test out the feasibility of a business and spot flaws, set aside unrealistic projections and identify and analyze the competition.

A business plan doesn't need to be complicated, but for it to serve its purpose and set you up for success, it must be clear to whomever is reading your plan that you have a realistic handle on the why and how your business will be a success.

To get you moving in the right direction, here's a guide on how to write a business plan.

Overall tips

There's a lot of advice in the infosphere about how to write a business plan, but there's no single correct way. Your approach depends on your industry, who is reading your plan and what the plan is intended for. Are you trying to get funding? Sara Sutton Fell, founder of FlexJobs , a job site for flexible telecommuting jobs, says her business plan was an initiator for more in-depth conversation with potential investors. "A plan does help to see if investors and entrepreneurs are on the same page with general expectations for the business," she says.

A business plan serves many purposes, but there is universal consensus on the following when it comes to your business plan:

Have several versions tailored for specific audiences: "One of the mistakes that inexperienced business owners make is not understanding who they're writing the plan for," says David Ciccarelli, a small business owner who got consultation from his local Small Business Association (SBA) when he was starting his company Voices.com , which connects employers with voiceover talent.

Your plan is a living document: Tim Berry, the founder of a business planning software company Palo Alto Software , took his company from zero to $5 million in sales in its first three years. To do so requires frequent review and close tracking, says Berry, who met with his management team every month to review the plan versus what actually happened -- and then to revise. "There is no virtue to sticking to a plan if it's not useful and responsive to what actually happens," he cautions.

Be realistic about financial estimates and projections: "When you present a plan to bankers and financiers, or even to your employees, people will get way more excited about what's real rather than some huge thing that's never going to happen," says Ciccarelli. So present an achievable sales forecasts based on bottom-upwards information (i.e. how many units per month get sold in how many stores) and stop over projecting profits.

Writing your business plan is about the process and having a blueprint: Your business plan "reflects your ideas, intuitions, instincts and insights about your business and its future," according to Write Your Business Plan (Entrepreneur, 2015). The plan serves as a safe way to test these out before you commit to a course of action. And once you get your business going, the plan also serves as a reference point. "I still print the document," says Ciccarelli. "You're capturing it in time. If you're changing it all the time, you kind of don't remember where you were last year."

Back up any claims: Follow up your projections and assertions with statistics, facts or quotes from a knowledgeable source to lend your plan credibility.

Presentation counts: Reading any long, text-heavy document is hard on the eyes, so format with this in mind. Consider formatting your text pages into two-columns and break up long passages with charts or graphs. Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman are standard industry fonts.

Writing your business plan isn't busy work or a luxury; it's a vital part of the process of starting a business and arms you with information you need to know. So, let's get into what information goes into your business plan.

Related: Bu siness Plans: A Step-by-Step Guide

What goes into a business plan?

A typical business plan is 15 to 25 pages. Its length depends on a variety of factors, such as whether your business is introducing a new product or belongs to a new industry (which requires explanation to the reader), or if you're pitching to bankers, who generally expect to see a traditional written business plan and financials.

"Most equity investors prefer either an executive summary or pitch deck for first contact, but will often request a more detailed plan later in the due diligence process. Potential customers don't need all the details of your internal operation. Your management team needs access to everything," says Akira Hirai, managing director of business plan consulting service Cayenne Consulting .

Most business plans include these seven sections:

1. Executive summary : The executive summary follows the title page and explains the fundamentals of your business. It should provide a short and clear synopsis of your business plan that describes your business concept, financial features and requirements (i.e. cash flow and sales projections plus capital needed), your company's current business position (i.e. its legal form of operation, when the company was formed, principals and key personnel) and any major achievements in the company that are relevant to its success, including patents, prototypes or results from test marketing.

2. Business description : This section typically begins with a brief description of your industry and its outlook. Get into the various markets within the industry, including any new products that will benefit or hurt your business. For those seeking funding, reinforce your data with reliable sources and footnote when possible. Also provide a description of your business operation's structure (i.e. wholesale, retail or service-oriented), who you will sell to, how you will distribute your products/services, the products/services itself (what gives you the competitive edge), your business's legal structure, your principals and what they bring to the organization.

Here are some worksheets from Write Your Business Plan that will help determine your unique selling proposition and analyze your industry.

Click to Enlarge+

3. Market strategies: Here is where you define your target market and how you plan to reach them. Market analysis requires research and familiarity with the market so that the target market can be defined and the company can be positioned (i.e. are you a premium product or a price-competitive product?) in order to garner its market share. Analyze your market in terms of size, structure, growth prospects, trends and sales/growth potential. This section also talks about distribution plans and promotion strategy and tactics that will allow you to fulfill your plans.

Here is a worksheet from Write Your Business Plan that will guide you toward identifying your target market.

4. Competitive analysis: The purpose of the competitive analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, strategies that will provide you with a distinct advantage, the barriers that can be developed in order to prevent competition from entering your market, and any weaknesses that can be exploited within the product development cycle. Show why your business will be a success over others.

5. Design and development plan: You will only need this section if you have a product in development, such as an app. The purpose of this section is to provide investors with a description of the product's design, chart its development within the context of production and marketing and show a development budget that will enable the company to reach its goals.

6. Operations and management plan: This section describes how the business functions on a daily basis, its location, equipment, people, processes and surrounding environment. If you have a product that needs to be manufactured, explain the how and where; also, describe your work facility, the personnel, the legal environment (such as licensing, permits, special regulations, etc.), key suppliers and inventory. This section will also highlight the logistics of the organization such as the various responsibilities of the management team and the tasks assigned to each division within the company.

7. Financial factors: Financial data is always at the back of a business plan -- yet it's extremely important. The financial data can include your personal financial statement, startup expenses and capital, your projected cash flow statement and 12-month profit-and-loss statement. PaloAlto's Berry stresses that if you're going after investors, you'll need to show a cash flow statement and a break-even analysis -- or the breakdown to see where your business breaks even.

The best way to prepare for running a business is to have all the components of the plan ready. So if you are are showing a prospective lender your business plan on 10 PowerPoint slides and get asked about something that isn't in the presentation, you can speak knowledgeably and follow up with a more fleshed out plan -- and quickly.

Some business owners hire business plan writing services. Cayenne Consulting's Hirai says that his clients generally fall into one of two categories: those intimidated by the process and those who could write the plan themselves but would prefer to spend their time on other priorities.

If you find yourself intimidated or stuck, you can always write the parts of plan yourself that you understand and hire a consultant or researcher to help with parts that you find confusing.

Or if you're a startup watching every dollar, then tap the free services of the federal Small Business Association (SBA). Every state has a district office . Through the SBA, you can get business plan assistance through its various resource partners, which includes Women's Business Centers , Small Business Development Centers and Service Corps of Retired Executives .

Allow this business plan template for Business Plan for a Startup Business to guide you:

Different types of business plans

Generally, business plans can be divided into four categories :

Working plan: This plan is what you will use to operate your business and is not meant to be admired. This version of your plan is an internal document and will be long on detail, short on presentation. Here, you can omit descriptions that you need not explain to yourself or your team.

Mini plan: The reader may request a mini plan, or a condensed version of your business plan (1-10 pages), which includes most of the same components as in a longer traditional plan -- minus the details and explanation. This includes the business concept, financing needs, marketing plan, financial statements (especially cash flow), income project and balance sheet. This shorter plan is not meant to be a substitute for a full-length plan, but serves as an option to present to potential partners or investors.

Presentation plan: Whether you're using a pitch deck or a written business plan, the information in your presentation plan will be, more or less, the same as in your working plan but worded differently and styled for the eyes of an outsider. The reader of your presentation plan will be someone who is unfamiliar with your business, such as investor or venture capitalist, so lose any jargon or shorthand from your working plan, which only makes sense to you. Also, keep in mind that investors will want to see due diligence on your competition threats and risks as well as financial projections. In addition, looks count, so use the color printer, a nice cover and bindings and the fancy paper stock. Or else, if you're presenting your business plan as a PowerPoint presentation, you can use this business plan presentation template .

What-if plan: This is a contingency plan -- in case your worst case scenario happens, such as market share loss, heavy price competition or defection of a key member of your team. You want to think about what to do in the face of an of these, and if you're trying to get outside funds, having a contingency plan shows that you've considered what to do if things don't go according to plan. You don't necessarily need this, but if you are getting outside funding, then it can strengthen your credibility showing that you have thought about these what-if possibilities. Even if you're not going to get outside funding, shouldn't you be thinking of the what ifs?

If four plans seem like a mountain of work, don't panic. Select two to start off -- a working plan and a mini plan, which will be an abbreviated version of your working plan.

Take several months to write your business plan. Consider it a journey, not a sprint.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Business Plan

Carolyn Sun is a freelance writer for Entrepreneur.com. Find out more on Twitter  and  Facebook . 

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A business plan is used to help manage an organisation by stating ambitions, how they will be achieved, and exactly when. The plan will also help summarise what the business is about, why it exists, and where it will get to.

Your business plan will serve as a key point of reference for investors, partners, employees and management to gauge progress against objectives.

Provide a road map

A detailed plan will help you as the owner and founder to manage your business effectively. Writing down and illustrating both your ideas and tactics will establish a path and course of action, akin to a road map. This will give you something concrete by which to monitor and assess the progress you make.

It may seem like an odd suggestion but you should look to work with your accountant on this task even at an early stage. Why? Well, a quality professional advisor will have helped many early stage businesses. Given how close a good accountant is to the operations and strategic direction of a company, they’ll be able to draw upon their experience of what’s worked and what hasn’t with other clients. 

This means they’ll be well placed to help you test your assumptions. Remember you want your business concept to be as well thought through as possible. Having a fresh set of eyes reviewing your ideas from a different perspective could make all the difference as to the viability of your business model . An accountant will know what success looks like along with what’s required and when to achieve it.

In charting a potential course of action you may find your business is faced with multiple different potential paths. It would therefore be wise to plot the most likely scenarios and strategies for these different circumstances. If, for example, your business is heavily reliant upon exporting then you may need to consider potential global and political events. How would that impact on currencies in your chosen markets in the near future?

What does a 10% currency appreciation or depreciation mean for sales, revenues, profits and cashflow? Working through this with your accountant will ensure you can ascertain the impact of such events from a financial perspective. You’ll then be able to craft solutions accordingly to deal with such events.

Developing a clear plan and strategy will focus your mind. What resources will you need and when to achieve each of your goals? This provides you with clarity as to how much needs to be invested at each stage of the business lifecycle . You'll then know when you're going to need cash injections based on likely cashflow.

Understand what to focus on

As an entrepreneur, where should your efforts and concentrations be centred on? It’s a common issue. The early days of starting out can be very chaotic. There’s so much to set up, think about, implement and develop. It’s an emotional roller coaster of mass excitement and sharp shots of anxiety. Amid all this and with an ever mounting in-tray of to do’s, you can fast lose track of what’s important.

When writing a business plan you’re defining exactly what your organisation is today and then intends to become tomorrow. This coherence concerning the purpose of your business and direction in which you’re heading is invaluable. Doing this means you’ll understand what needs to be implemented to move forward.

As an example, your plan should describe your ideal customer and include their needs and wants. Then you’d expand on this as to how your products or services address their requirements. How are you going to market to these potential customers? How will you get your name out there? What approach will you adopt to make sales and generate revenue?

These are vital matters to address early on. Growth primarily comes through new customers and achieving repeat custom. This then determines your progress towards profitability. By mapping this all out on paper you’re giving yourself yardsticks to work towards. This means all tasks that you as the entrepreneur should focus on should be geared towards achieving your next goal. In a nutshell that’s where your focus should be.

Projections and the need for an accountant

Raise finance.

The likelihood is to support your growth will require an injection of funding. That's unless you have an extremely cash generative business model. More often than not you probably won’t have enough customers and thus free cash flow to finance the next opportunity. You'll have a working capital requirement and thus need investment beyond the reach of your business.

You’ll likely have to approach potential sources of finance and they’ll want to assess the your income statements/profit and loss statements, and business plan. If you’re still at concept stage, or haven’t begun making sales, then their decision will rest solely on the strength of you and your business plan.

The statements help prospective lenders and investors understand the history of the organisation to date. The business plan provides them with a view of your future direction. They’ll look for many things in your plan. Ultimately their interest will focus on whether the expansion or development of your business will generate sufficient cash to both operate effectively while also fulfilling debt obligations.

This means you’re going to need to detail both profit and cashflow projections. Good forecasting and planning is seen as a way of understanding income and expenditure. This is particularly useful as a means to prevent payment issues over things like suppliers and staff wages. Many businesses close when such issues arise.

The likelihood is unless you’ve done this before, and know what you’re doing, then you’re going to need the help of an accountant. They’ll work with you to model the probable amount of cash in the business over time. This will then act as evidence to potential investors and financiers. They'll see if sufficient money will be generated by the activities of the business, to both fund future growth, while meeting financial commitments.

Manage your business effectively

The usefulness of a cashflow forecast doesn’t end there though. Managing your cash position , as you may have already gathered, is fundamental to the long term future of your business. There’s a common quote that “most businesses fail because they run out of money”. This means they’re no longer able to pay their debts when they’re due.

You should reference your cashflow projections in your business plan regularly. When you invest in your business, there will be significant out flows of money before any cash comes in. The timing of your investments thus needs to be considered against your projections and statements. Consider trading patterns, seasonal variations and the likely impact on cash flows.

If, for example, you sell through a credit extension then you’re going to receive payment in the future. That means after the goods or services have changed hands. The likelihood then is you’ll have to make payments in relation to the usual operations of your business before that income comes in from your customer.

So you can then see how poor cash management creates real issues. Make sure you work with your accountant, in the creation of your business plan and monitoring performance in relation to it. The documentation of well thought through ideas, combined with a shrewd strategy, and carefully planned projections will markedly improve your chances of long term survival and growth.

This post was created on 03/11/2016 and updated on 24/02/2022.

Please be aware that information provided by this blog is subject to regular legal and regulatory change. We recommend that you do not take any information held within our website or guides (eBooks) as a definitive guide to the law on the relevant matter being discussed. We suggest your course of action should be to seek legal or professional advice where necessary rather than relying on the content supplied by the author(s) of this blog.

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12.1: Purpose of Business Plan

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The business plan serves many purposes. The business plan presents a succinct overview of the what, how, when, and why of the business. First, it is used to communicate with investors. It provides investors with a concise overview of what the business is about and how investors can make money. In many ways, the business plan is a prototype of the business model. It is a scaled-down version that describes how the business will function. The business plan also serves as a platform for the business founders to communicate and it can be used as a blueprint for operating the business the first year.Sahlman (1997, July-August). It also helps mentors and consultants to identify weaknesses, missed opportunities, strange assumptions, and overly optimistic projections. Finally, the business plan also serves as a tool for educating new employees on how the business works and how they will fit into the business activities.

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9 Essential Elements of a Business Plan

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A business plan outlines your goals and your plans to achieve them. It also – and we’ll come back to this – helps you stay on strategy, outlining the best way to reach your chosen goals.

The type of business plan you need will vary. If your company is a start-up, your plan helps explain the business – to yourself, your team, and to outside investors. If you’re expanding your growing business and need funding, a formal plan is must-have to explain your vision to lenders.

As a start-up you’ll need to take the time to project sales, costs and expenses to know how much money you’ll need and when you’ll need it. If you’re trying to convince friends or family to invest in your new venture, these components show them your idea has potential, that you’ve taken the time to work out the finances, and that your team has the experience to get the job done.

In the case of an existing business with no plans for expansion , a business plan helps you manage the company and course-correct when markets change, obstacles arise or new opportunities appear. In these cases, your business plan can be a less formal and more dynamic document.

If you’re writing an informal document for internal purposes only , your business plan will be a short summary on a few pages. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you’re hoping to meet with potential investors and raise money for your company’s growth, a longer, polished, more formal plan is the only way to go.

Regardless of the type of plan your business needs, here are 9 essential sections you need to consider. The amount of work you put into each section will depend on the intended use of your plan.

1: Executive Summary

Your business plan should begin with a brief executive summary providing a high-level overview of your business plan. If the purpose of your plan is to raise money, be sure to clearly outline the amount of money you’re requesting … and when you need it … in the summary.

Although your business plan begins with an executive summary, it should be the final section you write. If you’re trying to raise money, your executive summary is a pitch. It should use the information in your plan to present a brief, compelling argument as to why investors should choose to invest in you.

2: Company Description

Include the name of your business, its location, legal status (incorporated, partnership or sole proprietor), the type of operation (retail, wholesale, manufacturing, professional service), and a short description of what you sell.

You should also include a short history of your business. Is it a start-up? Or has it existed for several years? What is your mission statement or company focus?

3: Market Analysis

Do a complete analysis of the market for your service or product. Don’t skip this step. This exercise forces you to think about the best way to position your brand so you can realize the full potential of your product or service.

How big is your target market? Does it have a seasonal component? Who is your primary customer? What major trends are driving their behaviour or affecting the size of your audience? Who is your competition? How will you differentiate your brand from the major players?

4: Service or Product

Write a complete description of your service or product outlining its features … and most importantly its benefits for the end-user. This information will help you draft a unique selling proposition , or USP, that clearly differentiates your brand from the competition.

5: Marketing Plan

The marketing plan—how you will actually promote and sell your product – is the lifeblood of your existence. Without sales, you have no business.

How will you promote your product? Where will it be available for sale? Does your business require a sales force? Will you sell your product through retail outlets? What is the selling price?

Consider competitors. How are they promoting their products? Keep in mind the need to ensure their tactics are actually viable before you adapt their promotion plan.

6: Financials including Projections

Include current financial statements (an income statement, cash-flow projections and a balance sheet) in your business plan to show the current state of your business, as well as a 3-5 year history.

Once you’ve analyzed the market and set your business objectives, develop financial projections. Be sure to explain the assumptions you made to arrive at your figures.

7: Funding Requirements

If you’re trying to raise money to start or expand a business, include the amount of financing required, how you plan to spend this money, and when it’s needed.

8: Management Team

Provide a description of your management team, their roles and responsibilities and their qualifications. If you haven’t filled all your management positions yet, include a timeline on when your team will be complete. If labor shortages exist in your industry, how will you overcome this challenge?

9: The Review Schedule

You’ve got one simple yet critical step left: the review schedule . It’s as simple as marking the third Monday of every month as the day you’ll review your plan and ensure your business is on track.

Remember, it’s called a plan for a reason. Your business plan requires regular review and is never done. It’s a critical aspect of running a successful business. Dedicate the time to creating a plan if you don’t have one, and then make sure you stick to that review schedule. Very soon, you’ll see how it pays off.

There you have it, the nine essential elements. One way to get started on your plan, if you haven’t already, is to create a schedule with a deadline for each element, along with who, besides you, will be working on each piece.

Breaking the job into smaller pieces makes the project easier – one piece at a time, you’ll get it done. You’ll find that the exercise of both building it and using it is a tremendously positive one for your business.

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What Is the Importance & Purpose of a Business Plan?

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What Is an Appendix in a Business Plan?

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Small-business owners have been known to describe business plans in the most colorful terms. Since a business plan requires a huge time commitment, it's understandable why you may have heard it described as “detailed,” “expansive” and even “exhausting.” Business plans can be all of these things, but there probably isn't a small-business owner alive who wouldn't add another word to the list once the exercise is complete: “ Necessary.”

The main purpose of a business plan is to answer two key questions. What does this business hope to accomplish? How are we going to accomplish it?

Start from the Bottom Up

This is no lead-in to a pep talk, but if it serves as one, it would be OK with the U.S. Small Business Administration. It has long touted a business plan as the foundation of a business – and you know what would happen to a house if it were built on a shaky, unreliable foundation.

Small-business advocates like to say that a business plan is a must-have document for both potential business partners and investors. But after contemplating the purpose, importance and actual contents of a business plan, you might agree that it's most valuable to the small-business owner who writes it.

Grasp the Purpose of the Plan

Writers would say that they are guided by purpose; they have to know why they are writing and what they hope to achieve. Although it may ultimately consist of dozens of pages, a business plan must answer two fundamental questions:

• What do I hope to accomplish?* How am I going to accomplish it?

These questions serve as a backdrop as the business plan probes:

• The business model of a new venture
• The opportunities and risks it faces
• Current market trends, including customer demand, competition, business volume and prices
• The business' objectives
• Financial projections

All told, the business plan functions as a “road map for how to structure, run and grow” a business, the SBA says.

Grasp the Importance of the Plan

Anytime you assign your thoughts to paper, you hopefully achieve clarity of purpose; good writing demands it. For the small-business owner who is understandably a bit “fuzzy” on some of the details of launching a business and all that it involves, a business plan can crystallize concepts and ideas.

In this way, a business plan becomes a compass, supplying direction and focus as an entrepreneur's business vision takes shape.

Many small-business owners liken the launch of their business as a journey. It's an apt analogy – and one worth extending. If you wouldn't embark on a trip across town, much less across the country, without figuring out how you're going to get there, it defies logic how anybody could consider embarking on the journey of a lifetime without a business plan. It should take the front-row seat before the journey even begins.

The Plan Should be Written Without Delay

That distinction is important for two other reasons, besides navigational value:

• Many researchers, including those at Harvard Business Review, find that the most successful entrepreneurs don't procrastinate writing their business plan. They get to work on it between six and 12 months after deciding to start a business.
• Once you make the commitment to launch a business, you will have time for little else. It will become the focus of your time and energies.

Open the Table of Contents

Like that demanding college professor with high expectations, reviewing a template of a business plan has a way of dispelling any notion that a business plan can be written in one night, or even two. It takes time to do it right and complete the sections in a thoughtful manner. The sections include:

• The executive summary
• Company description
• Product or service offering
• Management and organization
• Market analysis
• Marketing and sales management

As you go about implementing the countless details involved in starting a business, you probably will refer to your business plan repeatedly. It may become your most valuable resource, so don't even think about filing it away – unless you file it under “N,” for “necessary.”

• U.S. Small Business Administration: Write your business plan
• SCORE: What is the purpose of a business plan?
• Business Case Analysis: Business Plan Purpose, Contents
• Harvard Business Review: When Should Entrepreneurs Write Their Business Plans?

Mary Wroblewski earned a master's degree with high honors in communications and has worked as a reporter and editor in two Chicago newsrooms. Then she launched her own small business, which specialized in assisting small business owners with “all things marketing” – from drafting a marketing plan and writing website copy to crafting media plans and developing email campaigns. Mary writes extensively about small business issues and especially “all things marketing.”

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• 1 What Are the Functions of a Business Plan?
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MENU EOIR Strategic Plan

• Tables & Figures
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• EOIR’s Organizational Overview
• EOIR Strategic Plan Construct Overview
• EOIR’s Strategic Context
• GPRA and GPRAMA Compliance
• Agency Priority Goals
• Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Quantifying the Purpose of this Strategic Plan

• Guidance for the Four EOIR Goals and Corresponding Objectives
• EOIR’s Goals, Objectives, and Strategies
• Conclusions and Discussion
• Appendix A: EOIR’s Mandates
• Appendix B: Current Operating Environment
• Appendix C: Enterprise Risk Management
• Appendix D: Evidence and Evaluation
• Appendix E: EOIR’s Agency Priority Goals
• Appendix F: EOIR Performance Goals
• Appendix G: Strategic Plan Implementation
• Appendix H: Glossary
• Appendix I: Base City Court Locations and Court Codes – February 2024
• Appendix J: EOIR’s Immigration Court Location Map – February 2024

To evaluate success, EOIR has included measures tailored to and aligned with each applicable DOJ objective (1.1, 1.2, 3.4, and 5.1). In addition, DOJ’s objectives of fairness and public confidence are interwoven throughout EOIR’s specific goals and objectives presented below. A successful outcome for EOIR will require the full support of each EOIR component. Additionally, EOIR recognizes that while success inherently bespeaks quality, such a subjective concept proves difficult to accurately measure in a manner that would allow for meaningful conclusions. Therefore, EOIR has identified objective, quantitative, and holistic measures as a proxy for quality, which will provide insight into the organizational and operational health across EOIR.

A general overview of EOIR’s approach to implementation of this Plan can be found in Appendix G: Strategic Plan Implementation.

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Starting July 1, 2024, California employers across all industries must have a written Workplace Violence Prevention Plan (“WVPP”) in place. As  previously reported , the recently enacted  SB 553  established this new requirement, along with mandatory employee training, initial and periodic workplace violence hazard inspections, and maintenance of a violent incident log and other related records. On March 18, 2024, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (“Cal/OSHA”), the agency responsible for enforcing the new law’s requirements, announced the creation of its  Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention Guidance and Resources webpage . The webpage contains guidance and educational materials on the new law and workplace violence prevention, a  model WVPP , fact sheets, and other resources for employers and employees. 

1. General Impact of Cal/OSHA Guidance

Cal/OSHA frequently publishes guidance, including model plans, to assist employers with compliance on safety regulations that require written plans and programs (such as California’s Injury and Illness Prevention Program regulation). Although employers are not required to use the model plans, they can serve as a “fillable template” and provide the basic framework for various required procedures and policies. That said, the plans usually are written in a way to make them broadly applicable to all employers. Moreover, because they are written with employee safety as the ultimate focus, some provisions may go above and beyond what regulations require. 

2. Summary of Cal/OSHA’s Guidance

The newly created Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention Guidance and Resources webpage on Cal/OSHA’s website contains various types of guidance and educational materials on the new law and workplace violence prevention. The page notes that “FAQs on the new requirements of SB 553 and other related information” are “coming soon.”

Cal/OSHA’s model WVPP is nineteen pages long and includes the following:

• A brief overview of the new law;
• Directions on drafting the plan;
• The WVPP itself, including definitions for key terms and various sections covering the requirements of the new law; and
• A Violent Incident Log form.

Cal/OSHA also published two fact sheets: one for  employers  and one for  employees . The employer fact sheet is a three-page document that provides an overview of the various requirements for employers under SB 553 (codified as new California Labor Code section 6401.9). Specifically, the employer fact sheet lists the various items employers must include in their WVPP, information that employers must include in their violence incident logs, training topics, additional employer responsibilities, and related regulations. Cal/OSHA also created a  Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention for General Industry (Non-Health Care Settings)webpage  that contains much of the same information. The fact sheet for employees explains what constitutes workplace violence and identifies the four types of workplace violence. It also identifies training that employers must provide, explains how employees can help prevent workplace violence, and identifies what rights employees have under the new law.

3. Substantial Customization of the Model WVPP Is Necessary

In some instances, an employer can utilize Cal/OSHA’s model plan without having to add much. However, section 6401.9 requires employers to develop and implement various procedures to respond to and investigate workplace violence incidents, acts, threats, concerns, and emergencies. The type of response and risk of potential exposure to workplace violence can vary by workplace, location, industry, etc. Consequently, the model WVPP contains suggestions, questions, and examples for employers to consider as they assess potential risks in their workplaces. For example, the model WVPP includes a lengthy list of hazards (e.g., whether employees have cash on hand, whether employees are exposed to hostile situations) and potential corrective action (e.g., installation of surveillance systems, controlling access by non-employees). Cal/OSHA notes that an employer’s use of the model WVPP by itself does not ensure compliance with section 6401.9 and that employers are still liable for any violations of section 6401.9 regardless of their use of the model WVPP. In other words, the model WVPP is merely a starting point for employers to build upon, and employers still must identify, add, and implement sufficient procedures themselves. 

4. Some Areas of Focus in Cal/OSHA’s WVPP

Notably, the model WVPP asks employers to describe procedures involving employees, specifically: (i) how employees can report concerns or incidents; (ii) how employees will be trained; (iii) how employee compliance will be ensured; (iv) how investigation findings will be delivered to employees; (v) how anything related to workplace violence will be communicated to employees; and (vi) how employees will be rewarded for contributing to making the workplace more secure. Thus, a WVPP that generically addresses the requirements of section 6401.9 without providing any specifics may result in further investigation by Cal/OSHA.

The model WVPP also places a large emphasis on employees’ involvement in developing the WVPP, likely stemming from the law’s requirement that the WVPP include “[e]ffective procedures to obtain the active involvement of employees and authorized employee representatives in developing and implementing the plan, including, but not limited to, through their participation in identifying, evaluating, and correcting workplace violence hazards, in designing and implementing training, and in reporting and investigating workplace violence incidents.” As such, employers should ensure they do not just pay that requirement lip service and actually take some steps to involve employees in the process of developing their WVPP. 

5. Main Takeaways

Although California employers still have a few months before section 6401.9 becomes effective, they should begin drafting their WVPP soon if they have not done so already. The model WVPP reflects that the procedures required by section 6401.9 are industry and worksite-specific, and thus an employer’s WVPP will be unique and require some level of attention and customization to ensure compliance. Employers with any questions or concerns about compliance should consult with experienced employment law counsel.

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Rachel Schuster alson contributed to this article.

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House Republicans want to raise the Social Security age. It could hurt those who 'work their whole lives and die sooner,' the agency's head says.

• House Republicans proposed raising the age for receiving Social Security benefits.
• Social Security benefits are already facing funding issues over the next decade.
• The proposed change has sparked criticism from both Democrats and some Republicans.

House Republicans have a plan to raise the age at which Americans receive Social Security benefits — and the agency's leader isn't on board.

Earlier this week, the Republican Study Committee unveiled their fiscal year 2025 budget proposal — called Fiscal Sanity to Save America — which consisted of nearly 200 pages of funding priorities for key issues, including taxes , higher education , and healthcare.

The budget also addressed an issue that has long been contentious across both parties: Social Security. According to the proposal, the committee wants to "make modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy." The proposal did not specify the exact age they're eyeing for Americans to receive their benefits, but it would likely be above the current threshold of 67 years old.

The committee's chairman Kevin Hern emphasized in the budget that "we cannot be clearer: we WILL NOT adjust or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement."

Still, the proposal has some administration officials concerned for future retirees. During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Thursday, Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley said that "we have to be mindful of people who really do hard work, hard labor, their whole lives, and who die sooner than those of us who are privileged enough to do work that is not as taxing on our bodies and our physical well-being."

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Full Social Security benefits are already in jeopardy over the next decade. In March 2023, the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees estimated that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund might only be able to pay out full benefits over the next decade, which is earlier than anticipated.

"My dad had an expression, 'Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.' The Republican Study Committee budget shows what Republicans value," President Biden said in a statement on the RSC budget. "This extreme budget will cut Medicare, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act. It endorses a national abortion ban. The Republican budget will raise housing costs and prescription drugs costs for families. And it will shower giveaways on the wealthy and biggest corporations. Let me be clear: I will stop them."

Even some Republican lawmakers have been critical of the House's budget proposal. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley called the plan "the stupidest thing I ever heard," according to The Hill, and GOP Sen. Mitt Romney warned his House colleagues of the consequences of putting forth this plan during an election year.

"Talk about a gift to the Democrats," Romney said . "Seems like people have lost their political ear if they think any adjustments to the benefits of Social Security makes sense to talk about at any time, let alone during an election year."

Retirement is already looking bleak for some seniors, who are facing lower incomes and high healthcare and housing costs . A little over half of Americans over the age of 65 are earning under $30,000 a year, according to Census Bureau's Current Population Survey . And for many Americans, Social Security is a financial lifeline in their later years. Among typical retirees , just under 80% say Social Security is a source of income — a far greater share than retirement savings or wages.

Biden said that his "budget represents a different future," one where "we protect Social Security so the working people who built this country can retire with dignity."

"I see a future for all Americans and I will never stop fighting for that future," he said.

Watch: Surprising misconceptions about Trump and Biden ahead of the 2024 election

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Is Your AI-First Strategy Causing More Problems Than It’s Solving?

• Oguz A. Acar

Consider a more balanced and thoughtful approach to AI transformation.

The problem with an AI-first strategy lies not within the “AI” but with the notion that it should come “first” aspect. An AI-first approach can be myopic, potentially leading us to overlook the true purpose of technology: to serve and enhance human endeavors. Instead, the author recommends following 3Ps during an AI transformation: problem-centric, people-first, and principle-driven.

From technology giants like Google to major management consultants like McKinsey , a rapidly growing number of companies preach an “AI-first” strategy. In essence, this means considering AI as the ultimate strategic priority , one that precedes other alternative directions. At first glance, this strategy seems logical, perhaps even inevitable. The figures speak for themselves: the sheer volume of investment flowing into AI technologies shows the confidence levels in an increasingly AI-driven future.

• Oguz A. Acar is a Chair in Marketing at King’s Business School, King’s College London.

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