Practical example of a business plan outline

A business plan is essentially a roadmap that outlines your business goals and the steps you need to take to achieve them.

Think of it as a blueprint that covers everything from your company's mission and vision to its marketing strategies and financial projections.

This guide contains a detailed example of business plan outline as well as a complete, section by section, guide to writing a business plan for investors.

What is a business plan and why write one?

Before we delve into the intricacies of the perfect business plan outline, let's take a second to remind ourselves of what a business is and why it is important to business success.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a comprehensive document detailing the objectives and strategies for your business over the next three to five years.

To simplify, a business plan is composed of two complementary parts:

• A numerical part, the financial forecast, which highlights the amount of financing needed to launch or grow the business and the expected revenues, profits and cash flows over the next 3 to 5 years,
• A written part, which presents in detail the business and its strategies, and provides the necessary context to enable the reader of the business plan to judge the relevance and coherence of the figures included in the forecast.

Why write a business plan?

Crafting a well-structured business plan is more than just a formality—it's a critical step in setting your business up for success.

Your business plan serves as a roadmap that helps you navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship, making informed decisions and mitigating risks along the way.

Let's explore why having a well-thought-out business plan is essential:

To serve as a roadmap

Firstly, a business plan provides clarity and direction. It forces you to articulate your business goals, target market, competitive landscape, and operational strategies, giving you a clear sense of purpose and direction.

For example, a café owner might outline their vision for creating a cozy neighborhood spot that serves locally sourced coffee and pastries, catering to young professionals and families in the area.

To secure financing

Secondly, a well-structured business plan is a powerful tool for attracting investors and securing financing.

Whether you're seeking funding from a bank, venture capitalist, or angel investor, a comprehensive business plan demonstrates your commitment to your venture and your ability to execute your vision.

Investors want to see a solid plan that outlines how you'll use their capital to drive growth and generate profits.

To identify opportunities and mitigate risks

Moreover, a business plan serves as a strategic planning tool, helping you identify potential challenges and opportunities before they arise.

By conducting thorough market research and financial analysis, you can anticipate industry trends, competitive threats, and changing customer preferences, allowing you to pivot and adapt your business strategies accordingly.

For instance, a small manufacturing business might adjust its production processes in response to supply chain disruptions or shifting consumer demand.

Throughout this guide, we'll explore each section of the business plan outline in detail, providing practical examples and tools to help you save time and streamline your planning process.

Now that we've emphasized the significance of a thorough business plan, let's explore the importance of following a well-structured outline.

Why having a well-structured business plan outline matters

There is a lot of information to digest in a business plan. Especially for an investor or lender who is not familiar with your market or company.

Using a well-structured business plan outline will help structure the document and present the information in a logical way. This makes your business plan easy to read, and enables the reader to quickly refer back to specific sections if needed.

A good business plan structure will take the reader by the hand and walk them through: who you are as a business, what you sell, to whom, and against which competitors. It will then get into the strategic, operational and financial details around your goals for the next three to five years.

Following a standard busines plan outline also makes it easier for investors and lenders, who are used to having the information structured in a specific way which we will detail below.

Example of a standard business plan outline

Now that we understand its importance, let's have a look at a practical example of business plan outline.

Below is an example of all of the sections and subsections a typical business plan outline for a bank or investor would contain.

This particular business plan structure is the standard outline we use at The Business Plan Shop. It is based on our founder's experience writing and reviewing business plans in investment banking and private equity.

1. Executive summary
   1. Business overview
   2. Market overview
   3. Financial highlights
   4. Our ask
2. Company
   1. Structure and ownership
   2. History
   3. Location
   4. Management team
3. Products and services
4. Market analysis
   1. Demographics and segmentation
   2. Target market
   3. Market need
   4. Competition
   5. Barriers to entry
   6. Regulation
5. Strategy
   1. Competitive edge
   2. Pricing
   3. Marketing plan
   4. Milestones
   5. Risks and mitigants
6. Operations
   1. Personnel plan
   2. Key assets and IP
   3. Suppliers
7. Financial plan
   1. Start-up funding
   2. Important assumptions
   3. Sales forecast
   4. Cost structure
8. Appendix

Let's now explore each section and get into the details of what to write and where to find the information.

1. Executive summary

The first section, the executive summary, is the most important one. It is only if they find this section attractive enough that potential investors will dive into the other sections of your plan to get more details.

Because this section is a summary of the rest of the plan, this is the one you will write last.

The executive summary aims to captivate your investor's interest in just five minutes. Avoid overwhelming with details; keep it concise and focused.

There are four things that you must cover:

• Who you are
• What you sell
• How big and profitable your business can become
• Your financing requirements

2. Company

The objective of this section is to introduce the company and its management. The content of this section will vary slightly depending on if you already have a business or if you are starting a new venture.

Structure and ownership

This is a purely descriptive part, the key questions you need to answer here are:

• Who are the shareholders
• Where is the company registered and what is the legal structure

Who are the shareholders

As part of the anti-money laundering regulation, investors have the legal obligation to check the identity of the shareholders of any business they invest in or lend money to.

Giving them the full list enables them to do a quick sanity check and gives them the opportunity to raise any concerns they might have.

If your reader is an equity investor it also gives them a grasp of who the other shareholders are. It is also important that you mention if any of your co-shareholders bring more than just money to the company.

For example, one of your shareholders might be an expert in your industry and also bring advice and credibility to the company.

Where is the company registered and what is the legal structure

This is also one of the anti-money laundering requirements. But it also gives the reader an indication of the size of the business and the applicable tax system.

Some investors also have geographical restrictions on investments, hence this is also where they will check if you are eligible.

History

If you are writing a business plan for an existing company, this is where you would present the key highlights to date.

The idea here is to build your credibility and show to your reader that you have a viable business. The main points you want to touch on are:

• How long you have been in business: this is a real reassuring factor for any investor as it proves that your business is a viable one.
• Company milestones: you want to show what has been achieved so far in terms of growth, product launches, and internationalisation. If you are seeking growth capital this will build your credibility and show that you have the ability to execute your plan.
• Past difficulties: if there have been periods when the company was in danger (for example because of a new entrant in the market, or a sudden drop in demand) and you managed to turn things around and stay in business.

Location

If you are writing a plan for a business for which location is important (for example a shop or a restaurant), or if you are managing a large business with multiple stores or factories, this is where you would describe (ideally using a map) the main location(s) of your business.

Management team

This is one of the most important sections of your business plan. You must demonstrate that your team has strong experience in your sector and the skills to run this business.

If there are any important skill gaps in your team, you need to address them and mitigate them here. It could be that you are looking for someone with these skills or that you have a board member or a non-executive director who can fill the gap.

Try to put some pictures if you can. From experience, is always better when one can put a face on a name! And it helps if you are due to meet your investors at some point.

Now that you have introduced the company it is time to dive into what it does.

3. Products and services

The key to writing a good product and services section is to be precise about what you sell, the client you are targeting, and the channel you are targeting them through.

Whilst reading this section, the reader will probably start thinking about how big, how crowded and how profitable your market is and try to guess what the overall strategy is going to be.

You want to send them in the right direction! So be ultra-precise, don't say for example "I sell shoes" but "I sell leather boots targeted at women aged 16-25 who buy online".

If you can try to include pictures of your products.

By now your reader knows who you are and what business you are in. It is time you show them why this is a good opportunity.

4. Market analysis

This part is a summary of our guide on how to do a market analysis, please refer to our for more details.

The objectives of the market analysis section are to show the investors that:

• The market is large enough to build a sustainable business
• You know who your customers are and why they buy
• Despite the competition, there is a gap in the market that your business can fill

The first step of the analysis consists of assessing the size of the market.

Demographics and Segmentation

The way you look at the market will depend on your type of business. If it is a small business, such as a coffee shop for example, then you need to look at the market on a local basis (your town, your street). If you are targeting a wider audience, then you need to evaluate the market at a national or an international level.

When assessing the size of your market, you need to come up with two variables: the number of potential customers and the value of the market.

The idea here is to get a sense of how atomised your market is:

• If you are in a market where there is a small set of high-value customers then it might be complicated to compete against more established players and your business is likely to be dependent on a handful of customers - meaning that losing one would potentially threaten your business.
• If you are in a market with lots of low-value customers, it might be complicated and costly to reach enough of them to get to the minimum volume for your business to be profitable.
• Ideally, you want to be in a market with a high number of medium value customers meaning that there are enough customers to leave room for a few players and that each customer brings a decent amount of revenues.

Once you have estimated the market size, you need to explain to your reader which segment(s) of the market you view as your target market.

Target market

The target market is the type of customers you target within the market. You need to identify the different segments in your market and explain who you are going after and why.

One way to identify the segments is to group customers using buying patterns or demographics. For example in the fashion market you could have:

• Men vs. women
• Low price vs. premium clothing
• Online vs. in-store
• Shoes, accessories, and outfit

Market need

This section is where you demonstrate that you have insight into your market. You know what makes people buy!

You need to describe the buying patterns of your target customers. What triggers a purchase? Is it something they need such as food? Is it a value associated with the product or a brand perception? Etc.

Later in your plan, you will use this analysis to justify your market positioning.

Competition

Here you have to explain who your competitors are, how they are positioned on the market, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Some of the items you need to cover include:

• Who are they? (name, brand, independent vs. part of a larger group, location)
• How big are they? (turnover, number of staff, etc.)
• Which customers do they target? (segments)
• What are the key characteristics of their business? (price, associated services, etc.)

You should write this part in parallel with the competitive edge part of the Strategy section, as the idea here is to find a weakness in your competitors' positioning or a gap in the market that your company will be able to use in its own market positioning.

Barriers to entry

Here, the objective is to show investors that the risk of having new competitors entering the market is fairly remote. Hence if you are writing your business plan for a start-up then this section is a bit tricky as you need to show that you will succeed where others will fail!

Regulation

In this section, you need to detail which regulation is applicable to your sector and how you are going to comply with them.

5. Strategy

Until now, all the sections of the business plan outline we covered were very descriptive, this is where things get a bit more interesting.

Strategy is a big word for what is really just explaining your view of the market, how you want to attack it, and why it should work.

The first part of the strategy section is the competitive edge sub-section which is where you explain your market positioning.

Competitive edge

The competitive edge part is where you answer investors' favourite question: "What makes you different from the competition?"

Hopefully, you will have laid the groundwork for this section in the previous ones and orientated your analysis of the market in a way that prepares the reader to embrace your positioning.

Pricing

In order to explain and justify your pricing strategy you must:

• Compare it to your competitor's pricing strategy
• Show that you are profitable at the prices you have stated
• Explain the rationale behind your price

I won't touch on the two first points which are pretty obvious but I think the third one deserves a bit more explanation. Setting a price is not easy but there are a couple of techniques you can use to guide you.

The first thing to do is to assess if you have control over your prices. It could very well be that you have limited control over your prices. If you are in a price-driven market where all your competitors price at £9.99, it can be complicated to justify a higher price to your customers.

Assuming you have some control over your prices, you then need to come up with a figure. Here are the two main strategies that you can use to do so:

• Cost-plus pricing: this consists of adding a percentage margin to the cost of the good or service you are selling. The advantage of this strategy is that you are guaranteed to earn your margin on every sale. The disadvantage is that your price could be below or above what customers are willing to pay for a product or service.
• Benefit-driven pricing: this consists of estimating the gain procured by your good or service to the customer and setting the price as a fraction of this gain. It is easier to do when your product or service procures a hard benefit (i.e. when you can quantify the money your customer will save) than when your product procures a soft benefit (i.e. when you cannot easily quantify the value of the benefit as for example if it helps your customer save time during an activity). The advantage of this technique is that it allows you to maximise the price of your goods and services. The disadvantage is that it usually requires trying different price points in order to find the right market price.

It is always a good thing to test different prices. Do one week with price A and one week with price B and compare the results in terms of sales and volume.

So now we know who you will target and how you will price your products. It is time to explain how you are going to reach those customers.

Sales and marketing plan

This is the first section where we start to leave aside the helicopter view of the market to really dive into the implementation and execution strategy of your plan. Therefore, you need to show your investor that you not only know your market inside-out but that you also have a credible plan to "conquer" the market.

The best way to show that your business plan is realistic is to get into the specifics of the implementation. Your reader needs to feel that you are ready to go and that he or she just has to push a button (write you a check) to make it happen.

In the marketing plan section, you need to show that you have identified the best channels to use to target your customers.

By channel, I mean both the distribution network (online, owned stores, third party network, door to door, etc.) and the means of communication (flyers, print advertising, online marketing, etc.).

You want to start by listing all the different options and then start diving into the ones you picked and explain why you think they are the most relevant in terms of:

• Reach: why do you think you will be able to touch most of your potential customers through that channel?
• Cost: why do you think this will be cost-effective? What is the budget allocated in your plan?
• Competition: why do you think you stand a better chance against your competitors by using this channel?
• Implementation: who is going to be responsible for that? What makes him or her relevant? Which partners/suppliers have you approached so far?

Milestones

This section is where you set the goals for your company. This is a commitment you are making to your investors and you will be judged on your ability to achieve these goals. It is therefore important that you take time to identify goals that are:

• Relevant: i.e. objectives that will make a real difference to the business
• Achievable: you don't want to get labelled as a dreamer but rather want to be perceived as an entrepreneur who delivers his or her business plan
• Measurable: you want to be able to get back to your investors and say "We said we'll get 1,000 customers by year-end and we delivered 1,200!".

Here you will be judged on your ability to identify and focus on the key objectives to bring your business to the next level. This will help build your credibility towards your investor and ultimately play a part in his investment decision.

From a relationship perspective, being able to over-achieve these objectives will be key if you are to raise more money in the future.

Risks and mitigants

The risks and mitigants section has one key objective: enable you to anticipate any objection or doubt an investor might have about your plan or your ability to deliver it and give you an opportunity to show that:

1. You know this is a key risk,
2. You thought about it,
3. You have a contingency measure in place.

It is very important to be transparent in this section. If an investor spots a key risk in your plan that you haven't disclosed he is going to think "Well I am not sure they know this market as well as they claim", and that looks bad.

You want to do everything to build credibility and trust with your investors because the moment they start doubting you they will start doubting the investment.

6. Operations

This section is where you get into the details of how your company will operate. It usually starts with the personnel plan.

Personnel plan

In the personnel plan section, you must explain how many people you will employ and what their roles will be.

If your staffing team is planned to grow over the duration of your business plan, it is recommended to explain what the key driving force behind that is. It could be that you plan to open a new shop or that you will increase support staff with sales.

If you have a shop or a restaurant it is also recommended to put the staff plan in perspective with the opening hours.

Key assets and IP

The idea behind this section is to identify or dismiss any operational risks that could arise on the asset side.

You need to explain which are the assets and intellectual property without which the company could not operate (for example a delivery truck or a licence) and the steps you took to protect them.

Suppliers

In this section, your investor will want to check that you intend to do business with respectable counterparties and that you are not dependent on a single supplier.

Therefore, you need to explain who your main suppliers will be, the relationship you have with them (if any) and what your backup plan is (if one of them were to go out of business).

You also need to mention the main terms you have negotiated with your suppliers (price, days of credit, delivery schedule, etc.).

Now that you have explained how your company will operate, it is time to dive into the numbers.

7. Financial plan

This is the most crucial part of your business plan. The tone of this section will depend on who the recipient of your business plan is.

If the recipient of your business plan is a lender you need to show that your business is going to be stable, profitable and cash generative and that you are not going to take too many risks.

If it is an equity investor you need to show that your business can grow and generate enough cash to make it easy to sell and enable them to reach their target return.

As a minimum, you will need to show a full set of financial statements (P&L, cash flow statement and balance sheet) over three years and a monthly cash flow statement. It is also good practice to show a monthly P&L and balance sheet (at least for the first year).

The reason why investors like to see monthly numbers for the first year is that it is going to be the most critical year as:

• It is the year you are the most vulnerable
• Any delay or underperformance will have some repercussions over years 2 and 3

If you don't have a background in finance it is recommended that you use a professional tool to help you with the financial forecast.

The Business Plan Shop offers an easy to use online solution that can help you easily produce your financial statements - as well as a professional business plan exportable in PDF. In our application, you will find most of the tips included in this guide along with precise examples for each section of the plan.

You can learn more about our financial forecasting solution here.

Start-up funding

In this section, you will list the sources and uses of funds required to start your business.

The investor will look at how much is needed and how much money is brought to the table by the shareholders.

If you are writing your plan for a bank, it is important that you isolate the assets, inventory and VAT on a separate line as they often offer specific loans adapted to each of these categories.

Important assumptions

This section is a disclaimer section. You must identify the key assumptions underlying your financial forecasts.

These are the assumptions the investor will stress test (i.e. run scenarios on) to test the viability of your plan and estimate the potential downsides and upsides.

Try to identify and test assumptions on both the revenue and the cost side of the business.

Let's take an example and look at an e-commerce site.

If you are operating an e-commerce site, there are usually two main drivers to your business's profitability:

• The average basket: how much a customer is expected to spend on average, per visit
• The customer acquisition cost: how much you need to spend in marketing expenses to acquire a customer

The average basket is revenue related and has the most significant impact on your plan. This assumption has a 1:1 impact on your sales forecast and an even greater impact on your profit. The customer acquisition cost is also crucial as it impacts your profitability and your ability to scale.

Let's look at a numerical example in order to get a better understanding of the impacts of these two drivers:

As you can see from the table above a 10% deviation in price could have a 30% impact on profit and a 10% deviation in the customer acquisition cost could compromise 20% of your profit, and both scenarios could reduce your profit by 50%!

And these are not remote possibilities. Let's say that your acquisition costs are related to pay-per-click advertising on the internet and that your average cost per click is £0.4. An £8 cost per customer means that you have a conversion rate of 5%: it takes 20 clicks to make one sale. Now, a £8.8 cost per customer means that it takes you 22 clicks to make one sale. As little as 2 more clicks can cost you 20% of your profit!

Now, the positive thing is that if you built a complete financial model and identified these key drivers you can closely monitor these two elements.

Chances are that you will get these wrong in your first plan but if you monitor them you will be able to quickly update your plan and get a revised financial projection.

This will enable you to get a better view of how much cash your business will generate or need. And gives you the ability to anticipate any upcoming difficulties with your investors or plan what to do with the excess cash flow if things go better than expected.

Note that in my example I did not take the number of customers or repeat purchases as key assumptions. This is because I made the assumption that 100% of the traffic was coming from advertising. This is specific to new e-commerce sites: chances are your site in its first year will rank on page 20 of Google and that you will have to acquire the main part of your traffic.

Sales forecast

The sales forecast section is probably the second most important one in your business plan.

This section relates directly to the market analysis, competitive edge, marketing plan and pricing sections.

The objective here is to build and justify your sales estimate for the next three years.

Building a sales forecast is a two-part exercise. You first need to build the numbers using a bottom-up approach and then do sanity checks them using a top-down approach. For a complete how-to guide, we encourage you to read our sales forecast article.

Once you have built a realistic top line, you need to focus on the costs.

Cost structure

This part is all about analysing the operational risk of a business. The analysis resides in two fundamental notions: operating leverage and breakeven point.

Breakeven

Let's start with the breakeven point which is the level of sales required to reach profitability.

Every business has two types of costs: fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs as their name indicates are the costs that will be incurred independently from the level of sales. Rental costs are one such example.

Variable costs are the costs that depend on the level of activity. For example, raw material costs.

The breakeven point is then computed by dividing the total amount of fixed costs by the margin of variable costs.

Let's take an example. If the only fixed cost of a shop is its rent of £2,000/month and if the shop sells goods it buys at £30/item at a price of £50/item.

Then the shops make 50 - 30 = £20 of profit over variable costs per item. This means it needs to sell 2,000 / 20 = 100 items to cover the cost of the rent. The breakeven point of this shop is therefore 100 items.

The direct conclusion of this is that the higher the fixed costs, the more sales are required to cover them, and therefore the higher the risk of the business is.

In plain English: variable costs are great and fixed costs are bad!

Operating leverage

What about operating leverage then? Well, operating leverage has to do with operating profit elasticity, which is the impact of a difference of 1% in sales on the operating profit.

This seems complex but it is in fact really simple. There are two dimensions in the operating leverage: the level of fixed vs. variable costs, and the margin on variable costs.

As we just saw above, the more fixed costs a business has, the more sales it needs in order to start making a profit. But this is not the whole story.

Consider two businesses in the same industry. Business A is manufacturing its own goods, while Business B is outsourcing the process to a supplier.

As a result, business A has higher fixed costs than Business B (the cost of the factory), but at the same time business A is earning more on each sale than Business B because it doesn't have to pay the supplier's margin.

Therefore, there is an expectation that a more operationally leveraged business will generate higher returns past its breakeven point.

The second aspect of operating leverage is the level of contribution (or margin on variable costs).

If your contribution is high then it takes only a few sales to cover your fixed costs and start making a profit.

The flip side of this is that a small forecasting error will have a huge impact on your level of profit and cash flows.

The key takeaways here are that investors will look at the level of fixed vs. variable costs in your business to evaluate its operating risk. They will expect to see the calculation of your breakeven point either expressed in units or days of sales.

Investors will also judge you on your ability to use operating leverage to your advantage. If you are starting up in a niche where the market is uncertain they will expect you to focus on sales and to have outsourced as many services as possible.

You will probably make less profit but will require fewer sales to make a profit hereby de-risking the cost side of your business to balance with the risks on the revenue side.

Now if you are an established business in a price-driven market, investors will expect you to do the exact opposite: outsource services only if it saves money and try to limit margin frictions to the maximum by using vertical integration and economies of scale to either increase your margin or reduce your price to increase market share.

Financial statements

This section is where you present your financial statements. Be sure to include your yearly statements here along with the monthly cash flow projections and put the monthly balance sheet and P&L in the appendix.

You need to walk the reader through the key items of each statement:

• P&L: revenues, growth, EBITDA, EBITDA margin and any unusual or one-off items.
• Cash flow statement: operating cash flow, operating cash flow conversion (% of EBITDA), any major investments, main debt repayments if any, and any unusual items.
• Monthly cash flow statement: any working capital swings or seasonal peaks or troughs.
• Balance sheet: level of cash, debt and equity.

Your funding requirements need to be balanced (positive cash position), and you need to break even during the course of your business plan.

You might also want to touch on some additional ratios. In particular, if your business has a significant working capital requirement, you can mention the working capital ratios (WC / sales, days of payables and receivables).

You can also mention either some credit ratios if the plan is for a bank (debt/EBITDA, net debt/EBITDA, interest coverage ratio), or some more equity-focused ratios (operating cash flow / capital employed, revenues / total assets, dividend yield and dividend per share, if relevant).

Appendix

This is where you add any detailed piece of data or backup materials you might have.

The objective of the appendix section is to serve as a reserve of materials that the investor can use either to investigate certain areas of your business plan in more details, or as a starting point to do their due diligence.

Now that you know the intricacies of a standard business plan outline, let's look at the tools you can use to write your business plan.

Tools you can use to craft a good business plan

In this section, we will review three solutions for creating a business plan for your business: using Word and Excel, hiring a consultant to write the business plan, and utilizing an online business plan software.

Use an online business plan software for your business plan

Nowadays, the most efficient way to write a business plan that investors will trust is to use online business plan software.

There are several advantages to using specialized software:

• You are guided through the writing process by detailed instructions and examples for each part of the plan
• You can be inspired by already written business plan templates
• You can easily make your financial forecast by letting the software take care of the financial calculations for you without errors
• You get a professional document, formatted and ready to be sent to your bank
• The software will enable you to easily track your actual financial performance against your forecast and update your forecast as time goes by

If you're interested in using this type of solution, you can try The Business Plan Shop for free by signing up here.

Create your business plan using Word or Excel

This is the old-fashioned way of creating a business plan (1990s style) and using Word or Excel has both pros and cons.

On the one hand, using either of these two programs is cheap and they are widely available. 

However, creating an error-free financial forecast with Excel is only possible if you have expertise in accounting and financial modeling.

Because of that investors and lenders might not trust the accuracy of your forecast unless you have a degree in finance or accounting.

Also, writing a business plan using Word means starting from scratch and formatting the document yourself once written - a process that can be quite tedious - especially when the numbers change and you need to manually update all the tables and text.

Ultimately, it's up to the business owner to decide which program is right for them and whether they have the expertise or resources needed to make Excel work. 

Hire a consultant to write your business plan

Outsourcing your business plan to a consultant can be a viable option, but it also presents certain drawbacks. 

On the plus side, consultants are experienced in writing business plans and adept at creating financial forecasts without errors. Furthermore, hiring a consultant can save you time and allow you to focus on the day-to-day operations of your business.

However, hiring consultants is expensive: budget at least £1.5k ($2.0k) for a complete business plan, more if you need to make changes after the initial version (which happens frequently after the first meetings with lenders).

For these reasons, outsourcing the plan to a consultant or accountant should be considered carefully, weighing both the advantages and disadvantages of hiring outside help.

Ultimately, it may be the right decision for some businesses, while others may find it beneficial to write their own business plan using an online software

Key takeaways

As we wrap up our discussion on crafting a business plan outline, let's recap the key points covered in this guide:

• Having a well-structured business plan is key to ensure the plan is easy to follow and navigate.
• Lenders and investors will expect your business plan to follow the standard outline detailed in this guide.
• Using The Business Plan Shop's online business planning software is the most efficient way to write a business plan. You get a structured outline, examples and instructions to help you at every step.

By following these key takeaways, you can create a business plan outline that effectively communicates your business vision, goals, and strategies, setting you up for success in your entrepreneurial journey.

Also on The Business Plan Shop

• Free business plan template
• How investors analyse business plans
• TAM SAM SOM - what it means and why does it matter
• The difference between business case and business plan
• How to design a business plan cover page
• Is business proposal and business plan the same?
• Research & Development in a business plan
• Difference between business plan vs internal plan

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