How to Word a Business Plan
A business plan, while invaluable for planning and understanding your business, is fundamentally a sales pitch. You'll need to carefully word your plan in specific, professional, sales-oriented terms that will be accessible to investors and lenders from a wide variety of industry backgrounds. Infuse your writing with clarity and confidence.
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Instructions
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Determine your audience. If you're writing the business plan to pitch to investors or lenders, include sales-oriented language and specific dollar amounts. If the plan is designed to help employees or partners understand how the business works, focus on step-by-step planning and a "how-to" approach.
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Write an outline of your business plan. Parts of a business plan include an Executive Summary, which gets people excited to read more; Market Opportunity, which describes your customers and how you'll solve their problems; About the Business, which says who and where you are; Operations, which details how you produce your goods or provide your service; Business Environment, which describes the competitive and regulatory landscape; Strategy, which describes how you'll compete, grow and eventually exit the business in order to extract your investment from it; and Financials, which includes financial graphs and statements.
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Expand your sales pitch. Particularly in the Executive Summary, your language should convey your excitement and passion. Use strong, specific action words like "we provide" and "our customers need" to describe what you are doing and what you will do. Never contradict yourself or hedge, and remove "maybe," "perhaps" and "if" from your description. Speak about being passionate and serving needs. Avoid exclamation points or emoticons.
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Include graphs, charts and pictures. The Financials and Operations sections are where pictures speak more strongly than words. Include flowcharts with very concise descriptions. Concentrate on conveying the maximum amount of information in the smallest space. Bullet points are helpful.
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Remove jargon. If your plan will be seen by investors, they might know nothing about your industry. Write about what you do as if your grandmother will be reading it, and assume that you will not have a chance to explain verbally. Avoid using "buzzwords" or management jargon, except in a section heading which you will then explain or while referring to specific analysis that you have provided. For instance, you can reference a SWOT analysis next to a graphic that clearly spells out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats acronym, or title a section "Blue Ocean Strategy" and then describe briefly what a blue ocean strategy is and how your business qualifies.
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References
- Photo Credit Writing of business plan image by Vasyl Dudenko from Fotolia.com
