So you know that you need a business plan, but how to start writing it? How should a normal business plan look like? What important financial details you can incorporate in your plan apart from the usual business & market details?

Well, if you need answers to these questions then read on:

Business plan is made by different businesses and by different business owners, each of them may have their own points to add to this plan. Hence determining the length of an ideal business plan can be confusing at times. Typically a business plan should have not more than 25 pages. This is because you want the person reading it to understand your concepts and your plan only partly.

The rest should be explained by you in detail over the course of your discussion time. And the other point is, you don’t want to bore them with all the details in one go. Remember this is not your college examination time where the weight of the paper matters the most, but in fact it is the content of your plan that matters the most.

But then if your business venture is about something totally new to the world, you may want to go up to 100 pages. This may include diagrammatic and graphical representations also. Similarly if the main aim of writing the plan is to get capital or financial help, then you have to include more pages for covering all financial forecasting and budgeting.

Hence in short, if it’s an already covered business area or something which is not new, limit your business plan to 25 pages, and if it is something new, never attempted before then limit it till 100 pages, but not more than that.

A normal business plan will have the following chapters. In order to be unique you may want to change the chapter names but in reality a good business plan will contain the following: An executive summary, the description about your new business, market details and strategies to cover the market, an analysis of the competition and their success/failure, how you will go ahead covering the implementation steps, the management team and details about operation, and a chapter on financial management.

Important financial forecasts needed for your business plan: You have to show graphs related to sales forecast (1st year, 2nd year etc till you break even and may be after that too), all costs associated with sales (again on yearly basis), estimated capital needed as per you for the start-up, more on the long term debts of your business for start up, HR plan and the expenses associated with it, cash flow analysis & forecasts, finding the break-even point and showing its analysis and finally the usual Income & loss statement and the balance sheet. You must also include key financial ratios to summarize your financial planning chapter.