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How to Write the Business Plan Products and Services Section

Get tips on writing the products and services part of your business plan

business plan product and services sample

The Products and Services Section
What to Include
Tips on Writing the Section

The products and services section of your business plan is more than just a list of what your business is going to provide. This section of your business plan should include details about how you'll price products and services, how you'll fulfill orders, and other details that investors need to hear before you can get funding . Learn more below.

Key Takeaways

Business plans include details about products and services you'll offer, including exactly how you plan to market, sell, and deliver on customer orders.
The best business plans are clear and concise.
The products and services section of your plan should show off why your product or service is needed.
The products and services section should also convey the expertise and experience you have to succeed.

Why You Need a Products and Services Section in a Business Plan

The business plan products and services section is the centerpiece of your plan. While other sections of your business plan are important, the products and services section is the essence of your business and the point around which every other part of the business plan is built .

What to Include in a Products and Services Section

The products and services section of your business plan outlines your product or service, why it's needed by your market, and how it will compete with other businesses selling the same or similar products and services.

Your products and services section should include a description of the products or services you are offering or plan to offer (including future products or services). You should explain how your products and services will be priced and a comparison of the products or services your competitors offer in relation to yours.

You should also include the sales literature you plan to use. Detail your marketing materials, and clarify the role your website will play in your sales efforts.

The products and services section will include a paragraph or so on how orders from your customers will be processed or fulfilled, as well as any needs you have to create or deliver your products, such as up-to-date computer equipment. If your process depends on intellectual property or legal issues, such as trademarks , then those need to be addressed.

Tips on Writing the Products and Services Section

This section of your business plan should excite those you're hoping will fund your business or work with you. To that end, here are a few tips to create a products and services section that appeals to the reader.

Indicate Why Your Product or Service Is Needed

Especially if you're venturing into a new concept or invention, or a place where there is no current market, you need to explain the need for your product or service.

Highlight the Features of Your Product or Service

A crucial part of business success is the ability to set yourself apart from other businesses that sell the same or similar products and services. What features, such as price point or level of service, do you offer that are unique to you?

Focus on Benefits

Unique features are important, but even more vital is how those features provide value to consumers. Translate your features (i.e., faster or cheaper) into benefits (i.e., get it now or save money). The goal is to highlight how your product or service will fix a problem or improve a client or customer's life.

Be Clear and Concise

Don't let your business plan get bogged down in too much description and information. Use bullets or numbered lists to quickly and easily highlight important information.

Show Off Expertise, Experience, and Accolades

You not only want to describe your products and services but also share why you're the best person to provide them. Include anything in your education or experience that makes you an expert in this business. If you have testimonials, awards, or endorsements, share those. Finally, if you've applied for a patent, copyright, or trademark, include that as well.

Be the Expert, But Use Layman's Terms

You should know your product, service, and industry well, but don't expect your potential funders and partners to have the same level of knowledge. Assume the reader doesn't know as much as you when you explain what you're offering.

Avoid acronyms and jargon when outlining your products and services.

Indicate What's Special About Your Products or Services

Will you be offering a special guarantee or refund policy? Do you have a quicker or more unique way of delivering your product or service?

Speak to Your Customer

While you don't want to write an advertorial, you do want to be customer-oriented when you write your products and services section.

Examples of a Products and Services Section

The Small Business Administration offers business plan examples that you can draw from to help guide your writing. Here's an example of a products section for someone creating "Wooden Grain Toys."

Wooden Grain Toys will sell wooden toys made from solid hardwoods (maple, beech, birch, cherry, and oak) and steel rivets. The toys are handcrafted and designed for small children to easily use. Our line currently includes the following nine models:

All-Purpose Pick-Up Truck w/movable doors and tailgate
Dump Truck w/functioning dumping mechanism and box
Biplane (two-seater) w/movable propeller
Steam engine with coal tender - additional cars available separately: caboose, flat car w/logs, box car, tank car, coal car
Flat-Bed Truck w/logs

Wooden Grain Toys will offer its products for the following prices:

All-Purpose Pick-Up Truck w/movable doors and tailgate - $25
Dump Truck w/functioning dumping mechanism and box - $30
Biplane (two-seater) w/movable propeller - $20
Additional train cars (single car) - $5
Additional train cars (three cars) - $12
City Bus - $12
Tow Truck - $18
Flat-Bed Truck w/logs - $35
Sports Car - $20
Sedan - $20

What Is Product and Service in a Business Plan?

A products and services section of a business plan clarifies exactly what your business will produce , how much it'll sell for, and other details along those lines.

What Are Examples of Products and Services?

A product or service can be anything a business creates to turn a profit. Some businesses have both products and services. For example, a restaurant's services include cooking for and serving customers. The restaurant's products are the dishes and drinks it creates.

Search Product category Any value Sample Label 1 Sample Label 2 Sample Label 3

Products & Services Section in a Business Plan (+ Examples)

March 21, 2024
Business Plan , How to Write

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through writing the products and services section of your business plan. We’ll cover how to describe what you’re selling and why it’s important in your business plan.

Whether you’re launching a new startup or creating a business plan for an existing business, this section is crucial for showing the value you bring to customers. Let’s get started!

Why do we include them in a business plan?

The products and services section of a business plan is more than just a list of what a company sells; it’s a vital narrative that tells the story of the business’s core offerings and their significance to the market.

This section is paramount for readers (especially potential investors) to grasp the essence of what the business is about, the unique problems it solves, or the specific needs it addresses.

A meticulously crafted products and services segment does much more than describe offerings. Indeed, it lays the groundwork for comprehensive marketing strategies , informs operational planning, and financial projections.

Moreover, understanding the business’s offerings in depth enables stakeholders to envision the company’s value proposition and competitive edge.

Where should you include them?

In a business plan, the Products and Services section is typically included within the business overview section.

This allows you to first introduce the business model and what it offers to customers. Only after this you can provide more details of the products and services.

The Products and Services section should clearly detail what you are selling, highlight the unique value proposition . It should also ideally explain how it meets the needs of your target market if it isn’t obvious. T

What to include: 2 Examples

Begin with a clear, engaging description of each product or service you offer. For services, describe the process, customer experience, and outcome. For products, discuss the materials, technology, and any unique features.

Services example: a Cryotherapy business plan

Products example: a Brewery business plan

Privacy Overview

How to describe your product and service in a business plan like a pro

It’s deceiving.

You’d think that this part of a business plan does exactly what it says on the tin–describe your product & service offering– right ?

And yes, you are partially right.

But there’s a very specific way in which this description should be written to make sure that your business has the best chance of succeeding – in real life and under the eagle eye of a potential backer (if you’re preparing a business plan for external financing purposes).

Keep reading to find out the secret sauce to writing a winning product and service description:

WHAT is the Product and Service Description in a Business Plan?

This business plan section is also known as:

Product and/or Service Overview

HOW Do You Write a Product and Service Description in a Business Plan?

So, what should a good product/service overview contain?

Here are some items to consider including into this section:

1. Portfolio:

The range of products and/or services that a business offers to potential and current customers.

2. Features and benefits (value proposition):

Explain what the product/service does and how it works.

3. Problem and solution (value proposition cont.):

The problem(s) the product or service solves. Every business needs to solve a problem that its customers face. Explain what the problem is and how the product or service solves it.

4. Innovation:

If the company is doing something new and different, explain why the world needs the innovation.

5. Proprietary advantages:

Any proprietary features that contribute to a competitive advantage. This could include: intellectual property (e.g., copyright, trademark, patent filings, trade secret), exclusive agreements with suppliers or vendors, exclusive licenses (e.g., for a product, service or technology), company’s own research and development activities.

6. Development stage:

Current stage of development of the product / service (e.g., idea, development, testing, prototype, already on the market).

7. Product life-cycle:

Estimate the life span of the product or service.

Specify whether the product or service under consideration is a short-lived fad or has a long-term potential.

8. Future:

Mention plans for changes and new additions to the current portfolio of products / services.

Describe any plans to move into new markets in the future (e.g., serving different types or sizes of customers, industries, geographic areas).

Make your best guess at when the business will be ready to address these markets and what it needs to do first to be ready.

9. Limitations:

If applicable, explain any risks or limitations associated with the product (e.g., liability issues like guarantees or returns), along with any legal advice received regarding these issues.

10. Visual aids:

Use photos, images, diagrams and other graphics to help the reader visualize and learn about the products / services.

If the business is tackling several distinct problems through different products / services, describe the solutions individually .

However, for a large line of products / services, there is no need to list each one, just identifying the general categories will suffice.

How LONG Is the Product and Service Chapter of a Business Plan?

This part of a business plan can be very short, just a couple of paragraphs, or it can spread over multiple pages, depending on how many products/services you offer and how much explanation they require.

If your products or services are particularly complex , technical , innovative , or proprietary , you will want to provide more information and spend considerable time describing them.

This is especially true if you are seeking funding for a new product or service, particularly one that is not immediately understandable to the business plan readers, and if potential funders are likely to be motivated by the specifics.

In any case, when describing a product or service, provide just enough information to paint a clear picture of what it is and does . A brief explanation of what you will be making, selling or doing is appropriate here.

Excessive detail makes this section cumbersome for a reader to wade through. Reserve detailed descriptions (e.g., production processes) for the Appendix.

In any case, it is a good idea to first summarize the value proposition of each product or service into a one short sentence, and only then continue with a more detailed description of the product or service.

If any images or graphics are available that would contribute to the understanding of the product or service, the writers of a business plan should use them.

Otherwise, include any product or service details , such as technical specifications, drawings, photos, patent documents and other support information, in the Appendix section of the business plan document.

TOP 4 TIPS for Writing a Product and Service Overview

Tip #1: features v. benefits.

Don’t just list the features of the product / service.

Instead, describe the specific benefits it will offer to customers – from their perspective.

Make it clear what your customers will gain through buying your product or service. Include information about the specific benefits of your product or service – from your customers’ perspective.

Features are not the same thing as benefits. And you need to understand both.

Confused? Let’s clarify:

What Is the Difference Between Features and Benefits?

Tip #2: problem v. solution.

If at all possible, present the information in the Problem >> Solution format.

Start by describing the key problem that your customers have, immediately followed by the solution with which you will address this need for your target market.

Tip #3: Competitive Advantage

You should also comment on your ability to meet consumers’ key problems or unmet needs in a way that brings your product or service advantages over the competition.

For example:

If you have a common business, such as a restaurant:

Explain why your customers need your particular restaurant. Do you offer lower prices? More convenient hours? A better location? A different concept, such as a vegan ice-cream pop up store? A specialty that is not otherwise available in your area, such as a Peruvian ceviche or Hungarian goulash?

If your company is doing something new and innovative :

What is it about the existing solutions that is subpar? Maybe you are improving on a mediocre product category, such as creating better medical uniforms for healthcare workers (e.g., more flattering cut, trendy designs, sustainable materials). Or perhaps your new blockchain solution has the potential to entirely eliminate the middle-men in an entire industry.

Although the subject of competitive advantage regarding the business as a whole will be fully explored in the Market and Competitor Analysis part of a business plan, it is advisable to touch on it here also – in the context of the company’s products and service.

Tip #4: Validating the Problem and Solution

Speaking of which, when you are doing market research and analysis for your business plan, remember to validate the problem and solution your product or service is addressing.

There is a plethora of minor issues out there that people are perfectly fine with just tolerating. To build a solid business, though, you need a problem that a sufficient number of people are motivated to solve. That is, that they recognize it as a problem that’s worth paying you to solve. Even if they didn’t realize it was solvable until they were presented with your solution.

So, how do you get evidence that prospects are willing to pay for your solution?

Validation of Problem

Describe what you’ve done so far to confirm that the problem you are focused on is a real problem for your customers.

Existing Business:

For an established business, this is probably just a matter of recapping your success in the marketplace. Your customers have already voted with their wallets.

New Business:

For a startup, it is important to survey and have conversations with as many potential customers as possible about where they are having problems, how they solve them today, and validate that they are interested enough in addressing those problems to pay for a good solution.

Validation of Solution

Describe how you have tested your ideas with existing or potential customers to confirm that there is a good market for the products or services you plan to offer. Summarize the positive customer feedback or market traction that you have achieved with your solution so far.

For an established business, the answers probably lie in your paying customer base – their existence itself, combined with their repeat business, word-of-mouth referrals, follow-up customer surveys, and other indicators of customer satisfaction.

For a new business, you can start validating your solution immediately by trying it out with potential customers, even informally or at no charge, to get their opinion. If your product or service does not exist yet, talk to prospects about what you plan to offer and measure their feedback.

In summary, this section should answer the million dollar question:

What makes you think that people will buy, be satisfied with, and recommend your products or services?

What is a Product Line?

Product line is a group of related products that are all produced or sold by one entity and typically marketed under one brand name.

What is a Service Line?

Service line is a group of related services that are all produced or sold by one entity and typically marketed under one brand name.

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How to Write Products and Services Section of Business Plan

Business plan products and services section gives details of your product or service, how it is different and if you have a reliable manufacturing or sourcing system for the product.

How do you write the business plan products and services section?

Show competitive advantages of your product or service. Convince investors or lenders that you can outperform competition; you’ll likely get the funding you need.

Use this article as a guide when writing the product and service section of your business plan.

Hire business plan writer now!

Your goal in writing the business plan products and services section should be to explain your offering in simple, layman’s terms.

Anyone reading about your products or services should be able to understand:

what you are offering
what is the unique value you are offering
how will you do quality assurance
How will you meet the increased demand?

The product service plan section should include the following.

Explain Your Products or Services

Explain your product or service in detail. Try to include a brief about all the aspects of your product or service that will improve the consumers’ lives or increase business efficiency.

Show why your Product is Unique

Talk about the distinctive features of your product. Show what competitors are offering and explain how your offer is unique and better.

Emphasize the Benefits

Your hopes of capturing a share of the market depend on the benefits your product or service provides. Describe the benefits in terms customers can relate to.

For example, if you are offering the same features as the competitors but at a low price, highlight the low price.

Manufacturing, Sourcing, and Fulfillment

Explain if you will manufacture your products or you’ll source. If you are going to source the product from a manufacturer, how will you select the manufacturer?

Also, briefly explain the product supply chain and fulfillment process. Potential lenders may want to know if your supply chain and fulfillment system can handle high demand.

Be Short and Concise

Keep to the point. The Product service section in a business plan is about introducing your offering with a fair amount of detail. However, don’t make it lengthy.

You will discuss your product or service in every section of the business plan one way or another.

Show your Expertise

A product coming from an acknowledged expert gets more acceptance in the market.

Show your education or experience with the offering. If your business has any patents, trademarks, or special permits, make sure you showcase them. That way, you can establish yourself as an authority.

For a sole proprietor, you can include your experience or education. For example, when an athlete starts a fitness brand, it becomes a quick success. However, other similar businesses face struggles at the start.

Explain in Simple Language

Make a detailed plan of product service but explain everything in simple language.

Every industry has its jargon and buzzwords. People familiar with your product can understand the technical details, but the lenders or investors may not know much about your industry.

Here is a pro tip for this. When you have written the product or service description, ask a trusted friend or family member to read it and explain your product to you. That way, you can know if your product service part of the business plan is generally understandable.

What is your Exclusive Advantage?

Your exclusive advantage is what makes you stand out. You spotted your exclusive advantage when you developed your product or service offering. Explain that exclusive advantage here.

If you think there is no exclusive advantage, see if you can lower your price or provide better after-sale support. Even if your exclusive advantage is indirectly related to your product, it can help you get ahead fast.

Assume you are talking to the customer

When you walk into the customer’s shoes, you can understand their needs better.

Assume you are talking to an actual customer and convincing them to buy from you. They know your competition and they know what they need. You will have to talk in layman’s terms without missing any important details. You will need to focus on your competitive advantage.

You will write an excellent product or service section when you think you are explaining it to a potential customer.

Key Questions to Answer in the Business Plan Products and Services Section

Do you have a ready product or an under-development product?
When will you bring new products or services to the market?
What is the unique advantage of your product or service?
What are the competitive advantages of your product or service?
Does your product or service have any competitive disadvantages?
Are you bound to charge a price in a short range, or can you charge a different price with a better offer?
Are your business operating costs reasonable?
Will you manufacture your products or buy from a supplier?
Do you sub-contract the parts of your product to different manufacturers and assemble the product at your facility?
Will you be able to keep a steady and reliable supply chain for your product when demand rises?

WiseBusinessPlans is one of the best business plan writing companies !

In the products and services section, describe your offerings in detail, including their features, benefits, and uniqueness. Include information on pricing, any proprietary technology or intellectual property, and how your products or services meet customer needs.

Differentiate your products or services from competitors by highlighting their unique selling points, such as superior quality, innovative features, customizable options, or exceptional customer service. Explain how these differentiators give you a competitive advantage.

Yes, it’s important to outline your pricing strategy in the products and services section. Explain your pricing model, whether it’s based on cost-plus, value-based, or market-based pricing. Justify your pricing strategy by considering factors such as market demand, competitors’ pricing, and perceived value.

Demonstrate the market need for your products or services by providing market research and analysis. Include data on customer demographics, target market size, and any trends or consumer preferences that support the demand for your offerings.

Yes, you can mention future product or service expansion plans in the products and services section. Briefly outline your growth strategy, such as introducing new product lines, expanding into new markets, or offering additional services. However, focus primarily on your current offerings and their value proposition.

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24 of My Favorite Sample Business Plans & Examples For Your Inspiration

Published: February 06, 2024

Free Business Plan Template

The essential document for starting a business -- custom built for your needs.

Thank you for downloading the offer.

I believe that reading sample business plans is essential when writing your own.

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As you explore business plan examples from real companies and brands, it’s easier for you to learn how to write a good one.

But what does a good business plan look like? And how do you write one that’s both viable and convincing. I’ll walk you through the ideal business plan format along with some examples to help you get started.

Table of Contents

Business Plan Format

Business plan types, sample business plan templates, top business plan examples.

Ask any successful sports coach how they win so many games, and they’ll tell you they have a unique plan for every single game. To me, the same logic applies to business.

If you want to build a thriving company that can pull ahead of the competition, you need to prepare for battle before breaking into a market.

Business plans guide you along the rocky journey of growing a company. And if your business plan is compelling enough, it can also convince investors to give you funding.

With so much at stake, I’m sure you’re wondering where to begin.

Outline your idea.
Pitch to investors.
Secure funding.
Get to work!

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Fill out the form to get your free template.

First, you’ll want to nail down your formatting. Most business plans include the following sections.

1. Executive Summary

I’d say the executive summary is the most important section of the entire business plan.

Why? Essentially, it's the overview or introduction, written in a way to grab readers' attention and guide them through the rest of the business plan. This is important, because a business plan can be dozens or hundreds of pages long.

There are two main elements I’d recommend including in your executive summary:

Company Description

This is the perfect space to highlight your company’s mission statement and goals, a brief overview of your history and leadership, and your top accomplishments as a business.

Tell potential investors who you are and why what you do matters. Naturally, they’re going to want to know who they’re getting into business with up front, and this is a great opportunity to showcase your impact.

Need some extra help firming up those business goals? Check out HubSpot Academy’s free course to help you set goals that matter — I’d highly recommend it

Products and Services

To piggyback off of the company description, be sure to incorporate an overview of your offerings. This doesn’t have to be extensive — just another chance to introduce your industry and overall purpose as a business.

In addition to the items above, I recommend including some information about your financial projections and competitive advantage here too.:

Keep in mind you'll cover many of these topics in more detail later on in the business plan. So, keep the executive summary clear and brief, and only include the most important takeaways.

Executive Summary Business Plan Examples

This example was created with HubSpot’s business plan template:

business plan sample: Executive Summary Example

This executive summary is so good to me because it tells potential investors a short story while still covering all of the most important details.

Business plans examples: Executive Summary

Image Source

Tips for Writing Your Executive Summary

Start with a strong introduction of your company, showcase your mission and impact, and outline the products and services you provide.
Clearly define a problem, and explain how your product solves that problem, and show why the market needs your business.
Be sure to highlight your value proposition, market opportunity, and growth potential.
Keep it concise and support ideas with data.
Customize your summary to your audience. For example, emphasize finances and return on investment for venture capitalists.

Check out our tips for writing an effective executive summary for more guidance.

2. Market Opportunity

This is where you'll detail the opportunity in the market.

The main question I’d ask myself here is this: Where is the gap in the current industry, and how will my product fill that gap?

More specifically, here’s what I’d include in this section:

The size of the market
Current or potential market share
Trends in the industry and consumer behavior
Where the gap is
What caused the gap
How you intend to fill it

To get a thorough understanding of the market opportunity, you'll want to conduct a TAM, SAM, and SOM analysis and perform market research on your industry.

You may also benefit from creating a SWOT analysis to get some of the insights for this section.

Market Opportunity Business Plan Example

I like this example because it uses critical data to underline the size of the potential market and what part of that market this service hopes to capture.

Business plans examples: Market Opportunity

Tips for Writing Your Market Opportunity Section

Focus on demand and potential for growth.
Use market research, surveys, and industry trend data to support your market forecast and projections.
Add a review of regulation shifts, tech advances, and consumer behavior changes.
Refer to reliable sources.
Showcase how your business can make the most of this opportunity.

3. Competitive Landscape

Since we’re already speaking of market share, you'll also need to create a section that shares details on who the top competitors are.

After all, your customers likely have more than one brand to choose from, and you'll want to understand exactly why they might choose one over another.

My favorite part of performing a competitive analysis is that it can help you uncover:

Industry trends that other brands may not be utilizing
Strengths in your competition that may be obstacles to handle
Weaknesses in your competition that may help you develop selling points
The unique proposition you bring to the market that may resonate with customers

Competitive Landscape Business Plan Example

I like how the competitive landscape section of this business plan below shows a clear outline of who the top competitors are.

Business plans examples: Competitive Landscape

It also highlights specific industry knowledge and the importance of location, which shows useful experience in this specific industry.

This can help build trust in your ability to execute your business plan.

Tips for Writing Your Competitive Landscape

Complete in-depth research, then emphasize your most important findings.
Compare your unique selling proposition (USP) to your direct and indirect competitors.
Show a clear and realistic plan for product and brand differentiation.
Look for specific advantages and barriers in the competitive landscape. Then, highlight how that information could impact your business.
Outline growth opportunities from a competitive perspective.
Add customer feedback and insights to support your competitive analysis.

4. Target Audience

Use this section to describe who your customer segments are in detail. What is the demographic and psychographic information of your audience?

If your immediate answer is "everyone," you'll need to dig deeper. Here are some questions I’d ask myself here:

What demographics will most likely need/buy your product or service?
What are the psychographics of this audience? (Desires, triggering events, etc.)
Why are your offerings valuable to them?

I’d also recommend building a buyer persona to get in the mindset of your ideal customers and be clear on why you're targeting them.

Target Audience Business Plan Example

I like the example below because it uses in-depth research to draw conclusions about audience priorities. It also analyzes how to create the right content for this audience.

Business plans examples: Target Audience

Tips for Writing Your Target Audience Section

Include details on the size and growth potential of your target audience.
Figure out and refine the pain points for your target audience , then show why your product is a useful solution.
Describe your targeted customer acquisition strategy in detail.
Share anticipated challenges your business may face in acquiring customers and how you plan to address them.
Add case studies, testimonials, and other data to support your target audience ideas.
Remember to consider niche audiences and segments of your target audience in your business plan.

5. Marketing Strategy

Here, you'll discuss how you'll acquire new customers with your marketing strategy. I’d suggest including information:

Your brand positioning vision and how you'll cultivate it
The goal targets you aim to achieve
The metrics you'll use to measure success
The channels and distribution tactics you'll use

I think it’s helpful to have a marketing plan built out in advance to make this part of your business plan easier.

Marketing Strategy Business Plan Example

This business plan example includes the marketing strategy for the town of Gawler.

In my opinion, it really works because it offers a comprehensive picture of how they plan to use digital marketing to promote the community.

Business plans examples: Marketing Strategy

Tips for Writing Your Marketing Strategy

Include a section about how you believe your brand vision will appeal to customers.
Add the budget and resources you'll need to put your plan in place.
Outline strategies for specific marketing segments.
Connect strategies to earlier sections like target audience and competitive analysis.
Review how your marketing strategy will scale with the growth of your business.
Cover a range of channels and tactics to highlight your ability to adapt your plan in the face of change.

6. Key Features and Benefits

At some point in your business plan, you'll need to review the key features and benefits of your products and/or services.

Laying these out can give readers an idea of how you're positioning yourself in the market and the messaging you're likely to use. It can even help them gain better insight into your business model.

Key Features and Benefits Business Plan Example

In my opinion, the example below does a great job outlining products and services for this business, along with why these qualities will attract the audience.

Business plans examples: Key Features and Benefits

Tips for Writing Your Key Features and Benefits

Emphasize why and how your product or service offers value to customers.
Use metrics and testimonials to support the ideas in this section.
Talk about how your products and services have the potential to scale.
Think about including a product roadmap.
Focus on customer needs, and how the features and benefits you are sharing meet those needs.
Offer proof of concept for your ideas, like case studies or pilot program feedback.
Proofread this section carefully, and remove any jargon or complex language.

7. Pricing and Revenue

This is where you'll discuss your cost structure and various revenue streams. Your pricing strategy must be solid enough to turn a profit while staying competitive in the industry.

For this reason, here’s what I’d might outline in this section:

The specific pricing breakdowns per product or service
Why your pricing is higher or lower than your competition's
(If higher) Why customers would be willing to pay more
(If lower) How you're able to offer your products or services at a lower cost
When you expect to break even, what margins do you expect, etc?

Pricing and Revenue Business Plan Example

I like how this business plan example begins with an overview of the business revenue model, then shows proposed pricing for key products.

Business plans examples: Pricing and Revenue

Tips for Writing Your Pricing and Revenue Section

Get specific about your pricing strategy. Specifically, how you connect that strategy to customer needs and product value.
If you are asking a premium price, share unique features or innovations that justify that price point.
Show how you plan to communicate pricing to customers.
Create an overview of every revenue stream for your business and how each stream adds to your business model as a whole.
Share plans to develop new revenue streams in the future.
Show how and whether pricing will vary by customer segment and how pricing aligns with marketing strategies.
Restate your value proposition and explain how it aligns with your revenue model.

8. Financials

To me, this section is particularly informative for investors and leadership teams to figure out funding strategies, investment opportunities, and more.

According to Forbes , you'll want to include three main things:

Profit/Loss Statement - This answers the question of whether your business is currently profitable.
Cash Flow Statement - This details exactly how much cash is incoming and outgoing to give insight into how much cash a business has on hand.
Balance Sheet - This outlines assets, liabilities, and equity, which gives insight into how much a business is worth.

While some business plans might include more or less information, these are the key details I’d include in this section.

Financials Business Plan Example

This balance sheet is a great example of level of detail you’ll need to include in the financials section of your business plan.

Tips for Writing Your Financials Section

Growth potential is important in this section too. Using your data, create a forecast of financial performance in the next three to five years.
Include any data that supports your projections to assure investors of the credibility of your proposal.
Add a break-even analysis to show that your business plan is financially practical. This information can also help you pivot quickly as your business grows.
Consider adding a section that reviews potential risks and how sensitive your plan is to changes in the market.
Triple-check all financial information in your plan for accuracy.
Show how any proposed funding needs align with your plans for growth.

As you create your business plan, keep in mind that each of these sections will be formatted differently. Some may be in paragraph format, while others could be charts or graphs.

The formats above apply to most types of business plans. That said, the format and structure of your plan will vary by your goals for that plan.

So, I’ve added a quick review of different business plan types. For a more detailed overview, check out this post .

1. Startups

Startup business plans are for proposing new business ideas.

If you’re planning to start a small business, preparing a business plan is crucial. The plan should include all the major factors of your business.

You can check out this guide for more detailed business plan inspiration .

2. Feasibility Studies

Feasibility business plans focus on that business's product or service. Feasibility plans are sometimes added to startup business plans. They can also be a new business plan for an already thriving organization.

3. Internal Use

You can use internal business plans to share goals, strategies, or performance updates with stakeholders. In my opinion, internal business plans are useful for alignment and building support for ambitious goals.

4. Strategic Initiatives

Another business plan that's often for sharing internally is a strategic business plan. This plan covers long-term business objectives that might not have been included in the startup business plan.

5. Business Acquisition or Repositioning

When a business is moving forward with an acquisition or repositioning, it may need extra structure and support. These types of business plans expand on a company's acquisition or repositioning strategy.

Growth sometimes just happens as a business continues operations. But more often, a business needs to create a structure with specific targets to meet set goals for expansion. This business plan type can help a business focus on short-term growth goals and align resources with those goals.

Now that you know what's included and how to format a business plan, let's review some of my favorite templates.

1. HubSpot's One-Page Business Plan

Download a free, editable one-page business plan template..

The business plan linked above was created here at HubSpot and is perfect for businesses of any size — no matter how many strategies we still have to develop.

Fields such as Company Description, Required Funding, and Implementation Timeline give this one-page business plan a framework for how to build your brand and what tasks to keep track of as you grow.

Then, as the business matures, you can expand on your original business plan with a new iteration of the above document.

Why I Like It

This one-page business plan is a fantastic choice for the new business owner who doesn’t have the time or resources to draft a full-blown business plan. It includes all the essential sections in an accessible, bullet-point-friendly format. That way, you can get the broad strokes down before honing in on the details.

2. HubSpot's Downloadable Business Plan Template

Sample business plan: hubspot free editable pdf

We also created a business plan template for entrepreneurs.

The template is designed as a guide and checklist for starting your own business. You’ll learn what to include in each section of your business plan and how to do it.

There’s also a list for you to check off when you finish each section of your business plan.

Strong game plans help coaches win games and help businesses rocket to the top of their industries. So if you dedicate the time and effort required to write a workable and convincing business plan, you’ll boost your chances of success and even dominance in your market.

This business plan kit is essential for the budding entrepreneur who needs a more extensive document to share with investors and other stakeholders.

It not only includes sections for your executive summary, product line, market analysis, marketing plan, and sales plan, but it also offers hands-on guidance for filling out those sections.

3. LiveFlow’s Financial Planning Template with built-in automation

This free template from LiveFlow aims to make it easy for businesses to create a financial plan and track their progress on a monthly basis.

The P&L Budget versus Actual format allows users to track their revenue, cost of sales, operating expenses, operating profit margin, net profit, and more.

The summary dashboard aggregates all of the data put into the financial plan sheet and will automatically update when changes are made.

Instead of wasting hours manually importing your data to your spreadsheet, LiveFlow can also help you to automatically connect your accounting and banking data directly to your spreadsheet, so your numbers are always up-to-date.

With the dashboard, you can view your runway, cash balance, burn rate, gross margins, and other metrics. Having a simple way to track everything in one place will make it easier to complete the financials section of your business plan.

This is a fantastic template to track performance and alignment internally and to create a dependable process for documenting financial information across the business. It’s highly versatile and beginner-friendly.

It’s especially useful if you don’t have an accountant on the team. (I always recommend you do, but for new businesses, having one might not be possible.)

4. ThoughtCo’s Sample Business Plan

One of the more financially oriented sample business plans in this list, BPlan’s free business plan template dedicates many of its pages to your business’s financial plan and financial statements.

After filling this business plan out, your company will truly understand its financial health and the steps you need to take to maintain or improve it.

I absolutely love this business plan template because of its ease-of-use and hands-on instructions (in addition to its finance-centric components). If you feel overwhelmed by the thought of writing an entire business plan, consider using this template to help you with the process.

6. Harvard Business Review’s "How to Write a Winning Business Plan"

Most sample business plans teach you what to include in your business plan, but this Harvard Business Review article will take your business plan to the next level — it teaches you the why and how behind writing a business plan.

With the guidance of Stanley Rich and Richard Gumpert, co-authors of " Business Plans That Win: Lessons From the MIT Enterprise Forum ", you'll learn how to write a convincing business plan that emphasizes the market demand for your product or service.

You’ll also learn the financial benefits investors can reap from putting money into your venture rather than trying to sell them on how great your product or service is.

This business plan guide focuses less on the individual parts of a business plan, and more on the overarching goal of writing one. For that reason, it’s one of my favorites to supplement any template you choose to use. Harvard Business Review’s guide is instrumental for both new and seasoned business owners.

7. HubSpot’s Complete Guide to Starting a Business

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know writing a business plan is one of the most challenging first steps to starting a business.

Fortunately, with HubSpot's comprehensive guide to starting a business, you'll learn how to map out all the details by understanding what to include in your business plan and why it’s important to include them. The guide also fleshes out an entire sample business plan for you.

If you need further guidance on starting a business, HubSpot's guide can teach you how to make your business legal, choose and register your business name, and fund your business. It will also give small business tax information and includes marketing, sales, and service tips.

This comprehensive guide will walk you through the process of starting a business, in addition to writing your business plan, with a high level of exactitude and detail. So if you’re in the midst of starting your business, this is an excellent guide for you.

It also offers other resources you might need, such as market analysis templates.

8. Panda Doc’s Free Business Plan Template

PandaDoc’s free business plan template is one of the more detailed and fleshed-out sample business plans on this list. It describes what you should include in each section, so you don't have to come up with everything from scratch.

Once you fill it out, you’ll fully understand your business’ nitty-gritty details and how all of its moving parts should work together to contribute to its success.

This template has two things I love: comprehensiveness and in-depth instructions. Plus, it’s synced with PandaDoc’s e-signature software so that you and other stakeholders can sign it with ease. For that reason, I especially love it for those starting a business with a partner or with a board of directors.

9. Small Business Administration Free Business Plan Template

sample business plan: Small Business Administration

The Small Business Administration (SBA) offers several free business plan templates that can be used to inspire your own plan.

Before you get started, you can decide what type of business plan you need — a traditional or lean start-up plan.

Then, you can review the format for both of those plans and view examples of what they might look like.

We love both of the SBA’s templates because of their versatility. You can choose between two options and use the existing content in the templates to flesh out your own plan. Plus, if needed, you can get a free business counselor to help you along the way.

I’ve compiled some completed business plan samples to help you get an idea of how to customize a plan for your business.

I chose different types of business plan ideas to expand your imagination. Some are extensive, while others are fairly simple.

Let’s take a look.

1. LiveFlow

One of the major business expenses is marketing. How you handle your marketing reflects your company’s revenue.

I included this business plan to show you how you can ensure your marketing team is aligned with your overall business plan to get results. The plan also shows you how to track even the smallest metrics of your campaigns, like ROI and payback periods instead of just focusing on big metrics like gross and revenue.

Fintech startup, LiveFlow, allows users to sync real-time data from its accounting services, payment platforms, and banks into custom reports. This eliminates the task of pulling reports together manually, saving teams time and helping automate workflows.

"Using this framework over a traditional marketing plan will help you set a profitable marketing strategy taking things like CAC, LTV, Payback period, and P&L into consideration," explains LiveFlow co-founder, Lasse Kalkar .

When it came to including marketing strategy in its business plan, LiveFlow created a separate marketing profit and loss statement (P&L) to track how well the company was doing with its marketing initiatives.

This is a great approach, allowing businesses to focus on where their marketing dollars are making the most impact. Having this information handy will enable you to build out your business plan’s marketing section with confidence. LiveFlow has shared the template here . You can test it for yourself.

2. Lula Body

Sometimes all you need is a solid mission statement and core values to guide you on how to go about everything. You do this by creating a business plan revolving around how to fulfill your statement best.

For example, Patagonia is an eco-friendly company, so their plan discusses how to make the best environmentally friendly products without causing harm.

A good mission statement should not only resonate with consumers but should also serve as a core value compass for employees as well.

Patagonia has one of the most compelling mission statements I’ve seen:

"Together, let’s prioritise purpose over profit and protect this wondrous planet, our only home."

It reels you in from the start, and the environmentally friendly theme continues throughout the rest of the statement.

This mission goes on to explain that they are out to "Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to protect nature."

Their mission statement is compelling and detailed, with each section outlining how they will accomplish their goal.

4. Vesta Home Automation

business plan example: Vesta executive summary

This executive summary for a smart home device startup is part of a business plan created by students at Mount Royal University .

While it lacks some of the sleek visuals of the templates above, its executive summary does a great job of demonstrating how invested they are in the business.

Right away, they mention they’ve invested $200,000 into the company already, which shows investors they have skin in the game and aren’t just looking for someone else to foot the bill.

This is the kind of business plan you need when applying for business funds. It clearly illustrates the expected future of the company and how the business has been coming along over the years.

5. NALB Creative Center

business plan examples: nalb creative center

This fictional business plan for an art supply store includes everything one might need in a business plan: an executive summary, a company summary, a list of services, a market analysis summary, and more.

One of its most notable sections is its market analysis summary, which includes an overview of the population growth in the business’ target geographical area, as well as a breakdown of the types of potential customers they expect to welcome at the store.

This sort of granular insight is essential for understanding and communicating your business’s growth potential. Plus, it lays a strong foundation for creating relevant and useful buyer personas .

It’s essential to keep this information up-to-date as your market and target buyer changes. For that reason, you should carry out market research as often as possible to ensure that you’re targeting the correct audience and sharing accurate information with your investors.

Due to its comprehensiveness, it’s an excellent example to follow if you’re opening a brick-and-mortar store and need to get external funding to start your business .

6. Curriculum Companion Suites (CSS)

business plan examples: curriculum companion suites

If you’re looking for a SaaS business plan example, look no further than this business plan for a fictional educational software company called Curriculum Companion Suites.

Like the business plan for the NALB Creative Center, it includes plenty of information for prospective investors and other key stakeholders in the business.

One of the most notable features of this business plan is the executive summary, which includes an overview of the product, market, and mission.

The first two are essential for software companies because the product offering is so often at the forefront of the company’s strategy. Without that information being immediately available to investors and executives, then you risk writing an unfocused business plan.

It’s essential to front-load your company’s mission if it explains your "Why?" and this example does just that. In other words, why do you do what you do, and why should stakeholders care? This is an important section to include if you feel that your mission will drive interest in the business and its offerings.

7. Culina Sample Business Plan

Culina's sample business plan is an excellent example of how to lay out your business plan so that it flows naturally, engages readers, and provides the critical information investors and stakeholders need.

You can use this template as a guide while you're gathering important information for your own business plan. You'll have a better understanding of the data and research you need to do since Culina’s plan outlines these details so flawlessly for inspiration.

8. Plum Sample Business Plan

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

Determined female African-American entrepreneur scaling a mountain while wearing a large backpack. Represents the journey to starting and growing a business and needing to write a business plan to get there.

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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Templates and examples

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How To Write the Products and Services of a Business Plan

Crucial to business plans designed to secure funding or partnerships, your products and services section needs to showcase the quality, value, and benefits your business offers.

It’s not just a list of what your business is going to produce or provide. Instead, it outlines what you make or do, why your market needs your products or services, how you will compete with other companies selling the same or similar products or services, and what you will charge.

What To Include In The Products and Services Section

When looking at how to write the Products and Services section of your plan, be sure to include:

A description of the products or services you offer or plan to offer
A pricing model for your products or service, including how you set your prices and how you will make a profit. Include a breakdown of your Costs of Goods (COG) and Costs of Services (COS), what your contingency plan is in the event of a shift in market conditions, changes to laws, or availability of supplies, and your markup strategy.
A comparison of your competitors’ products or services against yours, including a survey of what your competitors charge for similar items, along with a discussion explaining your pricing strategy
Any sales literature or marketing materials you will use, including your website’s role in your sales efforts.
An outline of how your orders will be processed or fulfilled.
Any needs required to create or deliver your products (for example, up-to-date computer equipment)
Any intellectual property (trademarks) or legal issues needing to be addressed.
Future product or services

How to Make The Products & Service Section Appealing

Ideally, this section should elicit excitement in your reader and entice them to fund your business or work with you.

Here are few ways to accomplish this when deciding how to write the Products and Services section of your business plan:

Showcase why there is a need for your product or service. Doing so is especially important if you’re introducing a new concept or invention or introducing your product or service into a place where there is currently no market for it.
Emphasize the features of your product or service. How does it differ from that of your competitors in terms of make, shape, form, or appearance? Or price point? Or the level of service? What makes it unique?
Focus on benefits. Once you’ve identified what features make your product unique, it’s vital to show how those features provide value to consumers. Is your product cheaper? Is your service faster? You want to clearly indicate how your product or service will fix a problem or improve a client or customer’s life.
Be clear and concise and talk in layman’s terms. Avoid getting bogged down in lengthy descriptions or unnecessary details. Use bullet points and numbered lists to highlight important information. Don’t assume that your potential funders, partners, or customers have the same level of knowledge. Instead, consider the reader doesn’t know as much as you do when explaining your offering. Stay away from acronyms, jargon, industry buzzwords, and aim to be customer-oriented. If you have to use acronyms or jargon, always provide a definition.
“ Why are you the best person to provide your products and services?”
“What education or experience do you have that makes you qualified to provide them?”

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Don’t forget to include any testimonials, awards, or accolades you’ve received as well as any patents, copyrights, or trademarks you own or have applications for. Have you had the product tested or certified? Gotten approvals from industry experts? Including these details adds credibility to your overall business plan.

Identify any liability issues: A liability lawsuit can significantly change the landscape of your business. Even if you don’t foresee any liability issues, include a statement to that effect rather than not address it at all. If there is a liability issue, real or apparent, acknowledge it and describe how you’ll deal with it. Let the reader know you will take all necessary steps to protect your business, your products, and yourself from litigation.
Be precise in your product or service descriptions. For example, you don’t want only to say, “I sell shoes.” You want instead to say, “I sell leather boots targeted at women aged 16 – 25 who buy online”. Wherever possible, also include pictures of your products.

Questions to Answer in Your Products & Services Section

Are your products or services in development or existing and on the market?
If they currently aren’t on the market, what is the timeline for bringing them to it? Do you have a prototype?
What makes your product or service different? What are your competitive advantages? What are your competitive disadvantages, and how will you overcome them?
Is your pricing an issue? Are your operating costs low enough to allow for a reasonable profit margin?
Where are you acquiring your products? Do you manufacture them, or do you assemble them using third-party components? Do you purchase from suppliers or wholesalers? If demand increases, do you have a steady supply of products available?
How are you going to sell your product or service? Will it be available online or in retail stores? Do you have any vendors lined up?

Once you’ve answered these questions, stop and reread the section. Ask yourself if you’ve tried to answer why a client would want your product or service. Consider whether your offering will make your customers’ lives better or more accretive.

Examine the need you are fulfilling or the problem you are solving. More importantly, does the section give the reader a clear understanding of why you’re in business, what you sell, and how you differ from your competitors?

After completing this exercise, if you’re still unsure or would like more support about how to write the Products and Services section of your business plan, we invite you to reach out to our team at Bsbcon.

We are available to help small-medium-sized enterprises worldwide tackle their most critical challenges and capture their most significant opportunities. We make a point to understand new trends, digital options, and partnerships that help our clients today and tomorrow. Call us toll-free at 1(888) 880-1898, write [email protected] , or fill out our contact form here .

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Write Products and Services Section of a Business Plan

Product and Service Description Workbook

Free Product & Service Description Worksheet

Ayush Jalan

January 3, 2024

The core purpose of any business is to sell its offerings to its target customers.

To do this, you devise a plethora of strategies, tactics, and plans. While that is important, your sales ultimately depend on the value you provide to your customers through your products and services.

FYI, we have used the term “product” in this article to refer to both products and services unless mentioned otherwise.

Table of Contents

What is a Products & Services Section?

What’s Included in the Products & Services Section
6 Tips on Writing a Good Products & Services Section
Persuade Interest with a Products & Services Section

The products and services section of your business plan is where you mention and elaborate on your product range, product descriptions, pricing strategies, and other relevant details.

If you’re looking for partners or investors, this section plays a crucial role in persuading them. What you include in this section and how you write it can deeply impact whether or not your investors will seal the deal with you.

What’s Included in the Products and Services Section

Things To Include In Products And Services Section

In the products and services section of your business plan, you provide an overview of what you offer. Here are all the key elements your products and services section should cover:

1. Description

In this part, you include all the important details of your offerings. To write an accurate description, you can use the 5W2H method and answer these questions:

Who can use this product? Mention the details of your ideal customer.
What are the fundamental aspects of your product? These may include features, materials, ingredients, costs, dimensions, etc.
When should someone use this product? Mention the occasion, or the season if it’s a seasonal product. You can also mention if it is designed for a specific purpose.
Where should your customers use the product? Is it used indoors or outdoors? Specify these details.
Why should your customers use your product? Mention how the product fulfills their needs.
How should they use your product? Mention if there are any important user instructions.
How much should they use it? Mention the ideal frequency of usage that’s essential to follow while using the product.

2. Pricing Procedure

A pricing strategy refers to the tactics you use to set a price for your products and services. There are several pricing strategies to choose from; you can pick the one that best fits your business model .

There are several things to consider before setting your price. Conduct a price analysis to get an idea of which pricing strategy works for you. Here are the steps involved in conducting a pricing analysis:

Determine cost of goods sold ( COGS ):

To calculate the total cost of your products and services, add all the expenses that you incurred before the sale. This will include costs such as manufacturing, labor, warehousing, distributing, packaging and labeling, marketing, etc.

Collect data about the price preferences of your customers:

Study your competitors’ prices:, consider all the legal and ethical aspects:.

After conducting a pricing analysis, you can look at these pricing strategies to choose one for your business.

3. Product Comparison

Regardless of what you’re selling, chances are someone in the market is already selling it. Unlike direct competitors, indirect competitors are those who sell similar products with slight variations.

Looking at your competitors can help you draw a comparison. To do that, examine their products and services and list down the similarities and differences.

Categorize this information into qualitative and quantitative aspects and organize it in tables. Finally, summarize it by including your advantages over competitors. Also, include how you will leverage them to balance your drawbacks.

4. Sales Literature

Sales literature refers to the promotional and informative materials you use to inform, clarify, and convince your customers to make buying decisions. These include brochures, catalogs, newsletters, price lists, customer testimonials, and case studies .

List out all the sales literature you use or plan to market your products and services; explain the information it conveys in brief. Another integral part of your sales literature is your website; explain how it contributes to your sales.

Perhaps you run a blog to promote your products and inform your customers about new releases. Maybe you sell your products and services directly from your website; in that case, your sales literature material will go there.

Sales literature is a quick and attractive tool to market your products and services.

5. Order Management

Order processing refers to the stages from the moment a customer places an order to the delivery of the product paired with after-sales services. Here, you explain how customers will order or buy the product and the delivery process.

For instance, if you are an online retail store , your order processing may include these stages:

Order Placement
Order processing
Picking inventory
Product Delivery
Customer support

Depending on your offerings, your order processing workflow can have several stages. Describe each step and provide elaborate details about the execution.

6. Delivery Requirements

If the delivery or creation of your products and services needs any resources, you mention them here. These include equipment, vehicles, technology, and software.

For instance, a cafe owner will need kitchen equipment and IT solutions to run and provide its services. These should be mentioned in this part of the products and services section.

To cite another example, a consumer electronics company needs an IT infrastructure and production facility to create its products. For delivery, it needs vehicles and an online portal for customers to place and receive orders. All these are mentioned here.

7. Intellectual Properties

Mention all the IP documents that are related to your products and services. These include trademarks, seller permits, patents, other licenses, etc. Here you can also include any legal issues you are currently facing. Explain how you are dealing with the existing issues.

Further, mention the issues that might occur in the future and the counteractive measures you will take to prevent them. These include adding safety labels, and disclaimers, opting for insurance policies, etc.

8. Future Offerings

This is a chance to impress your investors or partners by briefing them about your future products or services. This shows that you’re already working on new ideas which help convey your potential and dedication.

If your future products are an extension of your current ones, you can rodenticide an outline of the improvements made. Mon whether your future products are under development or ready for launch.

6 Tips on Writing a Good Products and Services Section

Tips To Write Products And Services Section

1. Opt for a customer-centric approach:

Your goal is to cater to the needs of your customers through your products or services. Hence, write as if you are talking to your customers and directly addressing their issues. Point out how your product will make their lives better and easier.

2. Keep it simple:

Clearly represent the information. You can use bullet points and lists to convey your message. You can also use tables and charts to display product comparisons, strengths, etc.

3. Ditch buzzwords and industrial jargon:

Everyone who reads your business plan may not understand the industrial jargon and buzzwords. Therefore, it is best to skip the complicated lingo and use layman’s terms.

4. Specify market pain points:

Elaborate on the problems your target audience is facing. You can gather this data by conducting a market analysis. Mention the various pain points and the features of your product that address them. Consider citing examples and relevant statistics to display how your product solves a customer problem .

5. Emphasize your USP:

Highlight the benefits and the unique features of your products and services. Mention the things you do differently than your competitors and how you offer more value in comparison.

6. Flaunt your achievements:

Make sure to show off the business milestones you’ve achieved such as awards, news articles, customer reviews, etc. You can also include your past sales numbers, your customer base, and the projects you fulfilled. These instill trust and help investors, clients, and partners to make decisions.

Persuade Interest with a Products and Services Section

Products and services are the lifeblood of your business. An accurate representation of your offerings is crucial to scoring funding and demonstrating your potential to grow in the market.

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About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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Popular Templates

Describing Your Products or Services in Your Business Plans

The products and services section of your business plan describes your products and services, how they are better than existing offerings, and most importantly, how they solve a problem or fill an unmet need for your target customers.

Describing your Products or Services

In the introduction of your business plan, you will have referred to the problem your company solves and the market or market segment you’ll be addressing. Now it’s time to tell your readers about your products and services in more detail. Here again, you’ll want to keep the focus on how your products or services solve a real problem or fill an unmet need in the marketplace.

This section is typically the one that future business owners are most comfortable writing. As a result, a common mistake is to make this the primary focus of the business plan or to convey too many details. Follow the guidelines below to strike the right balance.

A business plan outline for the products and services section should include the following:

Brief description of products or services
Problem solved, or unmet need filled
Unique selling proposition
Other differentiators

Important Considerations

Write it for your audience.

In the description of your products and services, remember that your business plan will address potential investors or lenders, not consumers. This section will convey that this is a good business, not that they should want to become a customer. Similarly, this section should describe the benefits of your products and services without trying to provide training or instructional information on how to use them.

Example of Products and Services Description

So, if you’re starting a bakery, you might explain how you offer ready-to-eat sandwiches, specialty bread, and dinner rolls. You can emphasize that your products meet customers’ needs by making baked goods with all-natural ingredients, freshly made products, and seasonal and ethnic offerings. Callout that you also offer low-sugar and gluten-free choices. Further, you would explain that these products include options to address all three mealtimes: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

If there are factors that help control costs at your bakery, include them. Such things would improve margins and therefore be important to a lender or investor.

This approach will be much more meaningful than telling a banker how your dinner rolls are made with double-zero flour, and all ingredients are measured in grams, not ounces, or that doughs rise for 3 hours in your rising room. Unless your banker is a baker, these details probably won’t improve your business plan.

If you have sales literature, a flier, brochure, or advertisement, include it as an appendix to your business plan and reference it in this section.

Problem Solved or Unmet need Filled.

The most crucial aspect of your business plan is convincing readers that your company solves a real problem or fills an unmet need, so much so that people will be willing to take their money and give it to you. Sadly, the world is full of businesses offering “solutions” for which there are no problems, which are not attractive to investors. So don’t simply describe your solution. Defining your business and your products in terms of the problem or need to be addressed in the marketplace will be essential.

Let’s go back to the bakery example from the section above. The bakery might describe the problem solved in this way:

Our bakery is located within one-half mile of three major office complexes. Over 50% of the workers are from households where two partners work, leaving them little time for preparing fresh-baked goods. Because our baked goods are prepared at 6 AM every morning, working people can come in for a pastry or a sandwich for the afternoon and take away a fresh loaf of bread to serve with dinner that evening.

Working people don’t have time to go to the store daily—which is what it takes to enjoy genuinely fresh baked goods. They have the money and the appetite for high-quality pastries and bread; they don’t have time for the daily stop required to enjoy them.

Now, the groundwork has been laid to talk about the unique selling proposition.

Unique Selling Proposition

The unique selling proposition or “USP” refers to what makes your business different from all the others. An excellent unique selling proposition answers the question, “Why will people buy from you?” Don’t overlook the word “unique.” Does this mean your business has to be the only one of its kind? No. However, it does need to solve the problem in a unique way for the segment of the market you intend to address.

The opposite of this would be a “same here” business in a crowded market of competitors offering similar products. Investors shy away from these types of companies because it’s unclear why customers will buy from them.

The previous section on the problem solved or unmet need filled is the setup for the unique selling proposition. Let’s use our bakery example again. We established above that the problem is time, and working people don’t have time. Now, let’s see our baker’s unique selling proposition in the form of an answer to the question, “Why will people buy from you?”

Premium quality baked goods must be consumed within 24 hours to retain their peak freshness. Two-income households have the money but lack time to go to the grocery store daily. They also care about quality ingredients and healthy options.

Because our bakery is near three major office complexes, we save customers time by letting them address two or even three needs in one stop. Customers will buy from our bakery because, in one visit, they can get a fresh sandwich for the day’s lunch, pick up a freshly baked loaf of bread for dinner, and a bag of freshly baked cinnamon rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast.

We satisfy our customers’ appetite for quality baked goods and help solve their problem of too little time by combining breakfast, lunch, and dinner options in one stop, five minutes from where they work.

Other Differentiators

Most entrepreneurs have several aspects of their business that make them stand apart from competitors. Customers buy for different reasons so these differentiators can be important. Also, as mentioned before, investors shy away from “me too” companies that are just like every other competitor. For these reasons, including additional differentiators in your business plan is important.

The most important differentiators are those that can be expressed in the format outlined above, those that speak to a problem or need that is addressed, and the unique selling proposition. Isolate those differentiators from the others by including them in the section above and have the others here under the category “Other Differentiators.”

In this section of your business plan, you can also discuss future products and services, the target markets you aim to serve, and any intellectual property you possess, such as copyright or patent protections.

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What is a business plan?

1. write an executive summary, 2. describe your company, 3. state your business goals, 4. describe your products and services, 5. do your market research, 6. outline your marketing and sales plan, 7. perform a business financial analysis, 8. make financial projections, 9. summarize how your company operates, 10. add any additional information to an appendix, business plan tips and resources.

A business plan outlines your business’s financial goals and explains how you’ll achieve them over the next three to five years. Here’s a step-by-step guide to writing a business plan that will offer a strong, detailed road map for your business.

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A business plan is a document that explains what your business does, how it makes money and who its customers are. Internally, writing a business plan should help you clarify your vision and organize your operations. Externally, you can share it with potential lenders and investors to show them you’re on the right track.

Business plans are living documents; it’s OK for them to change over time. Startups may update their business plans often as they figure out who their customers are and what products and services fit them best. Mature companies might only revisit their business plan every few years. Regardless of your business’s age, brush up this document before you apply for a business loan .

» Need help writing? Learn about the best business plan software .

This is your elevator pitch. It should include a mission statement, a brief description of the products or services your business offers and a broad summary of your financial growth plans.

Though the executive summary is the first thing your investors will read, it can be easier to write it last. That way, you can highlight information you’ve identified while writing other sections that go into more detail.

» MORE: How to write an executive summary in 6 steps

Next up is your company description. This should contain basic information like:

Your business’s registered name.

Address of your business location .

Names of key people in the business. Make sure to highlight unique skills or technical expertise among members of your team.

Your company description should also define your business structure — such as a sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation — and include the percent ownership that each owner has and the extent of each owner’s involvement in the company.

Lastly, write a little about the history of your company and the nature of your business now. This prepares the reader to learn about your goals in the next section.

» MORE: How to write a company overview for a business plan

The third part of a business plan is an objective statement. This section spells out what you’d like to accomplish, both in the near term and over the coming years.

If you’re looking for a business loan or outside investment, you can use this section to explain how the financing will help your business grow and how you plan to achieve those growth targets. The key is to provide a clear explanation of the opportunity your business presents to the lender.

For example, if your business is launching a second product line, you might explain how the loan will help your company launch that new product and how much you think sales will increase over the next three years as a result.

» MORE: How to write a successful business plan for a loan

In this section, go into detail about the products or services you offer or plan to offer.

You should include the following:

An explanation of how your product or service works.

The pricing model for your product or service.

The typical customers you serve.

Your supply chain and order fulfillment strategy.

You can also discuss current or pending trademarks and patents associated with your product or service.

Lenders and investors will want to know what sets your product apart from your competition. In your market analysis section , explain who your competitors are. Discuss what they do well, and point out what you can do better. If you’re serving a different or underserved market, explain that.

Here, you can address how you plan to persuade customers to buy your products or services, or how you will develop customer loyalty that will lead to repeat business.

Include details about your sales and distribution strategies, including the costs involved in selling each product .

» MORE: R e a d our complete guide to small business marketing

If you’re a startup, you may not have much information on your business financials yet. However, if you’re an existing business, you’ll want to include income or profit-and-loss statements, a balance sheet that lists your assets and debts, and a cash flow statement that shows how cash comes into and goes out of the company.

Accounting software may be able to generate these reports for you. It may also help you calculate metrics such as:

Net profit margin: the percentage of revenue you keep as net income.

Current ratio: the measurement of your liquidity and ability to repay debts.

Accounts receivable turnover ratio: a measurement of how frequently you collect on receivables per year.

This is a great place to include charts and graphs that make it easy for those reading your plan to understand the financial health of your business.

This is a critical part of your business plan if you’re seeking financing or investors. It outlines how your business will generate enough profit to repay the loan or how you will earn a decent return for investors.

Here, you’ll provide your business’s monthly or quarterly sales, expenses and profit estimates over at least a three-year period — with the future numbers assuming you’ve obtained a new loan.

Accuracy is key, so carefully analyze your past financial statements before giving projections. Your goals may be aggressive, but they should also be realistic.

NerdWallet’s picks for setting up your business finances:

The best business checking accounts .

The best business credit cards .

The best accounting software .

Before the end of your business plan, summarize how your business is structured and outline each team’s responsibilities. This will help your readers understand who performs each of the functions you’ve described above — making and selling your products or services — and how much each of those functions cost.

If any of your employees have exceptional skills, you may want to include their resumes to help explain the competitive advantage they give you.

Finally, attach any supporting information or additional materials that you couldn’t fit in elsewhere. That might include:

Licenses and permits.

Equipment leases.

Bank statements.

Details of your personal and business credit history, if you’re seeking financing.

If the appendix is long, you may want to consider adding a table of contents at the beginning of this section.

How much do you need?

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We’ll start with a brief questionnaire to better understand the unique needs of your business.

Once we uncover your personalized matches, our team will consult you on the process moving forward.

Here are some tips to write a detailed, convincing business plan:

Avoid over-optimism: If you’re applying for a business bank loan or professional investment, someone will be reading your business plan closely. Providing unreasonable sales estimates can hurt your chances of approval.

Proofread: Spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors can jump off the page and turn off lenders and prospective investors. If writing and editing aren't your strong suit, you may want to hire a professional business plan writer, copy editor or proofreader.

Use free resources: SCORE is a nonprofit association that offers a large network of volunteer business mentors and experts who can help you write or edit your business plan. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Small Business Development Centers , which provide free business consulting and help with business plan development, can also be a resource.

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How to Write a Business Plan in 2023 [Examples Included]

So you have come up with a business idea that will turn your company into a Forbes 500 enterprise? Sounds great!

However, you are going to need much more than an idea. You will need to do some comprehensive research, create operational standpoints, describe your product, define your goals, and pave out a road map for future growth.

In other words, you are going to need a business plan.

A business plan is a document that precisely explains how you are going to make your startup a success. Without it, your chances of attracting funding and investments significantly decrease.

Do you want to learn how to create a winning business plan that will take your company to the next level? We created a guide that will help you do just that.

Let’s dive in.

What Is a Business Plan?

Why and when do you need a business plan, types of business plans (what to include in each).

How Do You Write a Business Plan?

Best Practices for Writing a Winning Business Plan

Business plan examples.

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A business plan is a comprehensive document that defines how a business will achieve its goals. It is essentially a road map for growth that includes operational standpoints from all the key departments such as marketing, financial, HR, and others.

Startups use business plans to describe who they are, what they plan to do, and how they plan to achieve it. This is an extremely valuable document for attracting investors.

However, they are valuable for the company members as well. A good business plan keeps executive teams on the same page regarding the strategies they should implement to achieve their set objectives.

Related : Reporting to Investors: 6 Best Practices to Help Increase Funding

While business plans are especially useful for startups, each business should include them. In the best-case scenario, this plan will be updated from time to time and reviewed whether the goals of the company have been met.

The main things that investors want to check out in the business plan are:

Product-market fit – Have you researched the market demand for your products and services?
Team efficiency – Does your startup have devoted professionals that will work on achieving your goals?
Scalability – How probable is growth in sales volumes without proportional growth or fixed costs?

An organized business plan is essentially a blueprint of your goals and it showcases your abilities as an entrepreneur.

Related : Business Report: What is it & How to Write a Great One? (With Examples)

If you want to persuade venture capitalists and banking institutions to invest in your startup, you won’t be able to do it without a solid business plan. Following a clear business plan format is crucial, as it structures your plan in a way that is easily understandable and demonstrates your business’s potential.

A business plan is helpful in two ways – it allows you to focus on the specific goals you set for the future and it provides external parties with evidence that you have done your research in advance.

But don’t just take our word for it – here are some of the things that researchers from Bplans found out when they were analyzing the benefits of business plans with the University of Oregon.

Companies that use business plans have recorded a 30% faster growth compared to those that didn’t use them.
Getting investments and loans is twice as likely to happen with the help of business plans.
There is a 129% increased chance for entrepreneurs to go past the ‘startup’ phase through business plans.

You should create a business plan before you decide to quit your regular job. It can help you realize whether you are ready or not.

Also, creating a business plan is helpful when:

You want to attract investments or funding from external parties
You want to find a new partner or co-founder
You want to attract talented professionals to join your startup
You need to change things up due to the slow growth

While creating a business plan is an important step, you first have to know how to differentiate all the different types. This will help you choose the one that is most suitable for your business.

Here are the most common types of business plans and what you should include in each.

One-Pager Business Plan

Startup business plan, internal business plan, strategic business plan, feasibility business plan.

The one-pager is a business plan that only includes the most important aspects of your business. It is essentially a simplified version of a traditional business plan.

When creating the one-pager business plan, your primary focus should be on making it easily understandable.

Since this business plan is rather short, you should avoid using lengthy paragraphs. Each section should be around 1-2 sentences long.

The things you should include in a one-pager business plan are:

The problem – Describe a certain problem your customers have and support the claim with relevant data.
The solution – How your products/services can solve the issue.
Business model – Your plan on how to make money. Include production costs, selling costs, and the price of the product.
Target market – Describe your ideal customer persona. Start with a broad audience and narrow it down by using TAM, SAM, and SOM models. This lets investors in on your thought process. To understand these models better, check out, for example, the importance of proper TAM evaluation for B2B startups .
Competitive advantage – How are you different from your competitors?
Management team – Include your business’s management structure.
Financial summary – This part should revolve around the most significant financial metrics (profit, loss, cash flow, balance sheet, and sales forecast).
Required funding – Define how much money you need to make your project a success.

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New businesses use startup business plans to outline their launching ideas and strategies to attract funding and investment opportunities. When creating startup business plans, you should primarily focus on the financial aspect and provide evidence that supports it (e.g. market research).

These are some of the main things that should be included:

Vision statement – Explain your vision for the company and include the overall business goals you will try to achieve.
Executive summary – A quick overview of what your company is about and what will make it successful. Make sure to include your products/services, basic leadership information, employees, and location.
Company description – A detailed overview of your company. Talk about the problems you will solve and be specific about customers, organizations, and growth plans. This is the place where you should state your business’s main advantages.
Market Analysis – Show investors that you have a good understanding of your industry and target market by providing a detailed market analysis. Try to point out certain trends, themes, or patterns that support your objective.
Organization and management – This section explains the structure and the management hierarchy. Also, describe the legal structure of your business.
Service or product line – Go into detail about the products and services you are going to sell. Explain the benefits they bring and share your intellectual property plans.
Marketing and sales – Talk about your marketing strategy and describe how you plan to attract new customers.
Financial projections – This section should be about convincing your readers why the business will be a financial success. Create a prospective financial outlook for the next few years and it includes forecasts.

An internal business plan is a document that specifically focuses on the activities within your company. While external business plans focus on attracting investors, internal business plans keep your team aligned on achieving goals.

Related : Internal vs. External Reporting: What Are the Differences?

This business plan can differentiate based on how specific you want it to be. For example, you can focus on a specific part of the business (e.g. financial department) or on the overall goals of the whole company.

Nonetheless, here are some things that should universally be included in all internal business plans:

Mission statement – Focus on the practical, day-to-day activities that your employees can undertake to achieve overall objectives.
Objectives – Provide specific goals that you want your company to achieve. Make the objectives clear and explain in which way they can be reached. Focus more on short-term objectives and set reasonable deadlines.
Strategies – Talk about the general activities that will help your team reach the set objectives. Provide research that will describe how these strategies will be useful in the long term.
Action plans – These plans revolve around particular activities from your strategy. For example, you could include a new product that you want to create or a more efficient marketing plan.
Sustainability – This refers to the general probability of achieving the goals you set in the internal report. Sometimes, plans may seem overly ambitious and you are going to have to make amends with certain things.

A strategic business plan is the best way to gain a comprehensive outlook of your business. In this document, forecasts are examined even further and growth goals tend to be higher.

By creating a strategic business plan, you will have an easier time aligning your key stakeholders around the company’s priorities.

Here is a quick overview of what a strategic business plan should include:

Executive summary – Since strategic business plans are generally lengthy, not all executives will have time to go through it. This is why you should include a quick overview of the plan through an executive summary, you can also create an executive summary template to make the step easily repeatable.
Vision statement – Describe what you wish to achieve in the long term.
Company overview – This refers to past achievements, current products/services, recent sales performances, and important KPIs.
Core values – This section should provide an explanation of what drives the business to do what it does.
Strategic analysis of internal and external environments – Talk about the current organizational structure, mission statements, and department challenges.
Strategic objectives – Go into detail about the short-term objectives your team should reach in a specific period. Make sure the objectives are clear and understandable.
Overall goals – This section should include operational goals, marketing goals, and financial goals.

A feasibility business plan is also known as a feasibility study. It essentially provides a foundation for what would be a full and comprehensive business plan. The primary focus of a feasibility plan is research.

The things you should include in a feasibility plan are:

Product demand – Is there a high demand for your product? Would customers be interested in buying it?
Market conditions – Determine the customer persona that would be interested in buying your products. Include demographic factors.
Pricing – Compare your desired price with the current pricing of similar products. Which price would make your service profitable?
Risks – Determine the risks of launching this new business.
Success profitability – Is there a good way to overcome the risks and make your company profitable?

How Do You Write a Business Plan Report?

As we explained in the previous heading, there are a few different types of business plan. Depending on the audience you are referring to, the language you use in the plan should be adjusted accordingly.

Nonetheless, there are certain key elements that should be included in all business plans, the only thing that will vary is how detailed the sections will be.

Include these elements in your business plan.

Executive summary

Company description, market opportunity and analysis, competitive landscape, target audience, describe your product or service, develop a marketing and sales strategy, develop a logistics and operations plan, financial projections, explain your funding request, compile an appendix for official documents.

An executive summary is a quick overview of the document as a whole that allows investors and key stakeholders to quickly understand all the pain points from the report.

It is the best way to layout all the vital information about your business to bank officials and key stakeholders who don’t have the time to go through the whole business plan.

If you summarize the sections well, the potential investors will jump into the sections they are most interested in to acquire more details.

You should write the executive summary last since you will then have a better idea of what should be included.

A good executive summary answers these questions:

Who are you?
What do you sell?
How profitable is it?
How much money do you need?

This section of the business plan aims to introduce your company as a whole. The things you include in the company description can vary depending on if you are only starting a business or you already have a developed company.

The elements included in this section are:

Structure and ownership – Talk about who the key shareholders in your company are and provide a full list of names. Also, mention details such as where the company is registered and what the legal structure looks like. In most countries, this is a legal requirement for AML regulations.
History – This segment is if you already have an existing company. Use this section to show your credibility. Include company milestones, past difficulties, and a precise date for how long your company has been operating.
Objectives – Describe the overall objectives of your company and how you plan to reach them.

Market analysis refers to creating your ideal customer persona and explaining why they would be interested in buying your products.

Market opportunities are the gaps that you found in the current industries and creating a way for your product to fill those gaps.

The most important step in this section is to create a target market (persona) through demographic factors such as location, income, gender, education, age, profession, and hobbies.

Make sure that your target market isn’t too broad since it can put off potential investors.

A good idea is to also include a detailed analysis of your competitors – talk about their products, strengths, and weaknesses.

Related : 12 Best Tools Marketers Use for Market Research

Although you may include a competitive analysis in the market analysis section, this segment should provide a more detailed overview.

Identify other companies that sell similar products to yours and create a list of their advantages and disadvantages. Learning about your competitors may seem overwhelming, but it’s an indispensable part of a good business plan.

Include a comparison landscape as well that defines the things that set you apart from the competitors. Describe the strengths of your product and show which problems it could solve.

Related : How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

Use the target audience section to fully describe the details of your ideal customer persona. Include both demographic and psychographic factors.

Ask yourself:

What are the demographic characteristics of the people who will buy my product?
What are their desires?
What makes my product valuable to them?

Make sure to answer all of these questions to get in the mindset of your customers.

If you need more details on how to identify your target audience , check our full expert guide.

When talking about your products and services, be as precise as possible. Mention your target audience and the marketing channels you use for targeting this audience.

This section should reveal the benefits, life cycle, and production process of your products/services. Also, it is a good idea to include some pictures of your products if possible.

When describing your products, you should highlight:

Unique features
Intellectual property rights
What makes the product beneficial

Marketing is the blood flow to your business’s body. Without a good marketing and sales strategy, the chances of your product succeeding are very slim.

It’s always best to already have a marketing plan in place before launching your business. By identifying the best marketing channels, you will show your investors that you researched this topic in detail.

Some of the things you should include are:

Reach – Explain why a specific channel will be able to reach your target market
Cost – Is the marketing strategy going to be cost-effective? How much money do you plan on spending on the strategy?
Competition – Are your competitors already using this channel? If so, what will make your product stand out?
Implementation – Who will be taking care of the implementation process? Is it a marketing expert? Which suppliers did you reach out to?

Related : 14 Reasons Sales And Marketing Alignment Is Crucial for Skyrocketing Company Growth

This section should explain the details of how exactly your company is going to operate.

These are the things you should include:

Personnel plan – Define how many people you plan to employ and their roles. Also, if you plan on increasing your staff, you should explain what would be the cause of that.
Key assets – This refers to assets that will be crucial for your company’s operation.
Suppliers – Mention who your suppliers will be and what kind of relationship you have with them. Your investors will be interested in this part of the section since they want to be reassured that you are cooperating with respectable counterparties.

The financial projections section is one of the most important parts of your business plan. It includes a detailed overview of expected sales, revenue, profit, expenses, and all the other important financial metrics .

You should show your investors that your business will be profitable, stable, and that it has huge potential for cash generation.

Monthly numbers for the first year are crucial since this will be the most critical year of your company.

At the very least, you should provide:

Funding needs
Profit-and-loss statement forecast
Balance sheet forecast
Cash-flow statement forecast

Related : How to Write a Great Financial Report? Tips and Best Practices

When providing the funding request, be realistic. Explain why you need that exact amount of money and where it will be allocated.

Also, create both a best-case and worst-case scenario. New companies don’t have a history of generating profits which is why you will probably have to sell equity in the early years to raise enough capital.

This will be the final section of your business plan. Include any material or piece of information that investors can use to analyze the data in your report.

Things that could be helpful are:

Local permits
Legal documents
Certifications that boost credibility
Intellectual properties or patents
Purchase orders and customer contracts

After reading the previous heading, you should have a clear idea of how to write a compelling business plan.

But, just to be sure, we prepared some additional information that can be very helpful.

Here are some of the best practices you should implement in your business plan according to the most successful companies.

Keep it brief

Make it understandable, be meticulous about money, design is important.

Generally, business plans will be around 10-20 pages long. Your main focus should be to cover the essentials that we talked about, but you don’t want to overdo it by including unnecessary and overwhelming information.

In business plan, less is more.

Create a good organizational outline of your sections. This will allow investors to easily navigate to the parts they are most interested in reading.

Avoid using jargon – everyone should be able to easily understand your business plan without having to Google certain terms.

Make a list of all the expenses your business incurs. Financial information should be maximally precise since it will directly impact the investor’s decision to fund your business idea.

After you wrap up your business plan, take a day off and read it again. Fix any typos or grammatical errors that you overlooked the first time.

Make sure to use a professional layout, printing, and branding of your business plan. This is an important first impression for the readers of the document.

Now you know what a business plan is, how you can write it, and some of the best practices you can use to make it even better.

But, if you are still having certain difficulties coming up with a great business plan, here are a few examples that may be helpful.

HubSpot’s One-Page Business Plan

Bplan’s free business plan template, small business administration free business plan template.

This One-Page Business Plan was created by HubSpot and it can be a great way to start off your business plan journey on the right foot.

You already have fields such as Implementation Timeline, Required Funding, and Company Description created so you will just need to provide your specific information.

This free business plan template highlights the financial points of the startup. If your primary focus will be your business’ financial plan and financial statements, you can use this template to save up some time.

It can also be useful for making sure everyone in your company understands the current financial health and what they can do to improve it.

If you need additional inspiration to kick start your own business plan, you can check out this free template by small business administration .

You just have to decide which type of plan you want to create and then review the format of how it should look like.

Small Business Administration Free Business Plan Template

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The 7 Best Business Plan Examples (2024)

As an aspiring entrepreneur gearing up to start your own business , you likely know the importance of drafting a business plan. However, you might not be entirely sure where to begin or what specific details to include. That’s where examining business plan examples can be beneficial. Sample business plans serve as real-world templates to help you craft your own plan with confidence. They also provide insight into the key sections that make up a business plan, as well as demonstrate how to structure and present your ideas effectively.

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Example business plan

To understand how to write a business plan, let’s study an example structured using a seven-part template. Here’s a quick overview of those parts:

Executive summary: A quick overview of your business and the contents of your business plan.
Company description: More info about your company, its goals and mission, and why you started it in the first place.
Market analysis: Research about the market and industry your business will operate in, including a competitive analysis about the companies you’ll be up against.
Products and services: A detailed description of what you’ll be selling to your customers.
Marketing plan: A strategic outline of how you plan to market and promote your business before, during, and after your company launches into the market.
Logistics and operations plan: An explanation of the systems, processes, and tools that are needed to run your business in the background.
Financial plan: A map of your short-term (and even long-term) financial goals and the costs to run the business. If you’re looking for funding, this is the place to discuss your request and needs.

7 business plan examples (section by section)

In this section, you’ll find hypothetical and real-world examples of each aspect of a business plan to show you how the whole thing comes together.

Executive summary

Your executive summary offers a high-level overview of the rest of your business plan. You’ll want to include a brief description of your company, market research, competitor analysis, and financial information.

In this free business plan template, the executive summary is three paragraphs and occupies nearly half the page:

Company description

You might go more in-depth with your company description and include the following sections:

Nature of the business. Mention the general category of business you fall under. Are you a manufacturer, wholesaler, or retailer of your products?
Background information. Talk about your past experiences and skills, and how you’ve combined them to fill in the market.
Business structure. This section outlines how you registered your company —as a corporation, sole proprietorship, LLC, or other business type.
Industry. Which business sector do you operate in? The answer might be technology, merchandising, or another industry.
Team. Whether you’re the sole full-time employee of your business or you have contractors to support your daily workflow, this is your chance to put them under the spotlight.

You can also repurpose your company description elsewhere, like on your About page, Instagram page, or other properties that ask for a boilerplate description of your business. Hair extensions brand Luxy Hair has a blurb on it’s About page that could easily be repurposed as a company description for its business plan.

Market analysis

Market analysis comprises research on product supply and demand, your target market, the competitive landscape, and industry trends. You might do a SWOT analysis to learn where you stand and identify market gaps that you could exploit to establish your footing. Here’s an example of a SWOT analysis for a hypothetical ecommerce business:

You’ll also want to run a competitive analysis as part of the market analysis component of your business plan. This will show you who you’re up against and give you ideas on how to gain an edge over the competition.

Products and services

This part of your business plan describes your product or service, how it will be priced, and the ways it will compete against similar offerings in the market. Don’t go into too much detail here—a few lines are enough to introduce your item to the reader.

Marketing plan

Potential investors will want to know how you’ll get the word out about your business. So it’s essential to build a marketing plan that highlights the promotion and customer acquisition strategies you’re planning to adopt.

Most marketing plans focus on the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. However, it’s easier when you break it down by the different marketing channels . Mention how you intend to promote your business using blogs, email, social media, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Here’s an example of a hypothetical marketing plan for a real estate website:

marketing section template for business plan

Logistics and operations

This section of your business plan provides information about your production, facilities, equipment, shipping and fulfillment, and inventory.

Financial plan

The financial plan (a.k.a. financial statement) offers a breakdown of your sales, revenue, expenses, profit, and other financial metrics. You’ll want to include all the numbers and concrete data to project your current and projected financial state.

In this business plan example, the financial statement for ecommerce brand Nature’s Candy includes forecasted revenue, expenses, and net profit in graphs.

It then goes deeper into the financials, citing:

Funding needs
Project cash-flow statement
Project profit-and-loss statement
Projected balance sheet

You can use Shopify’s financial plan template to create your own income statement, cash-flow statement, and balance sheet.

Types of business plans (and what to write for each)

A one-page business plan is a pared down version of a standard business plan that’s easy for potential investors and partners to understand. You’ll want to include all of these sections, but make sure they’re abbreviated and summarized:

Logistics and operations plan
Financials

A startup business plan is meant to secure outside funding for a new business. Typically, there’s a big focus on the financials, as well as other sections that help determine the viability of your business idea—market analysis, for example. Shopify has a great business plan template for startups that include all the below points:

Market research: in depth
Financials: in depth

Internal

Your internal business plan acts as the enforcer of your company’s vision. It reminds your team of the long-term objective and keeps them strategically aligned toward the same goal. Be sure to include:

Market research

Feasibility

A feasibility business plan is essentially a feasibility study that helps you evaluate whether your product or idea is worthy of a full business plan. Include the following sections:

A strategic (or growth) business plan lays out your long-term vision and goals. This means your predictions stretch further into the future, and you aim for greater growth and revenue. While crafting this document, you use all the parts of a usual business plan but add more to each one:

Products and services: for launch and expansion
Market analysis: detailed analysis
Marketing plan: detailed strategy
Logistics and operations plan: detailed plan
Financials: detailed projections

Free business plan templates

Now that you’re familiar with what’s included and how to format a business plan, let’s go over a few templates you can fill out or draw inspiration from.

Bplans’ free business plan template

Bplans’ free business plan template focuses a lot on the financial side of running a business. It has many pages just for your financial plan and statements. Once you fill it out, you’ll see exactly where your business stands financially and what you need to do to keep it on track or make it better.

PandaDoc’s free business plan template

PandaDoc’s free business plan template is detailed and guides you through every section, so you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. Filling it out, you’ll grasp the ins and outs of your business and how each part fits together. It’s also handy because it connects to PandaDoc’s e-signature for easy signing, ideal for businesses with partners or a board.

Miro’s Business Model Canvas Template

Miro’s Business Model Canvas Template helps you map out the essentials of your business, like partnerships, core activities, and what makes you different. It’s a collaborative tool for you and your team to learn how everything in your business is linked.

Better business planning equals better business outcomes

Building a business plan is key to establishing a clear direction and strategy for your venture. With a solid plan in hand, you’ll know what steps to take for achieving each of your business goals. Kickstart your business planning and set yourself up for success with a defined roadmap—utilizing the sample business plans above to inform your approach.

Business plan FAQ

What are the 3 main points of a business plan.

Concept. Explain what your business does and the main idea behind it. This is where you tell people what you plan to achieve with your business.
Contents. Explain what you’re selling or offering. Point out who you’re selling to and who else is selling something similar. This part concerns your products or services, who will buy them, and who you’re up against.
Cash flow. Explain how money will move in and out of your business. Discuss the money you need to start and keep the business going, the costs of running your business, and how much money you expect to make.

How do I write a simple business plan?

To create a simple business plan, start with an executive summary that details your business vision and objectives. Follow this with a concise description of your company’s structure, your market analysis, and information about your products or services. Conclude your plan with financial projections that outline your expected revenue, expenses, and profitability.

What is the best format to write a business plan?

The optimal format for a business plan arranges your plan in a clear and structured way, helping potential investors get a quick grasp of what your business is about and what you aim to achieve. Always start with a summary of your plan and finish with the financial details or any extra information at the end.

Want to learn more?

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Business Plan Section 4: Products and Services

To give others a clear understanding of the value your product or service provides, read about 11 important things to include in this section of your plan.

This is the part of your business plan where you will describe the specific products and services you’re going to offer. You’ll fully explain the concept for your business, along with all aspects of purchasing, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution. You’ll go over suppliers, costs, and how what you’re offering fits into the current market and stacks up against your competitors.

How do you write the Products and Services section of a business plan?

While your product may be technical, don’t get caught up in complicated industry jargon. Explain and describe what you’re offering in layman’s terms, so someone who isn’t familiar with your business will understand and be excited about it. It may be necessary to give some basic background if this is an area or industry people are unfamiliar with.

While you write up the Products and Services section of your business plan, keep your reader in mind. Things that you might take for granted or know inside-out might not be common knowledge to potential lenders or investors. As you write, avoid being too technical, assuming too much knowledge from your readers, and using buzzwords.

You don’t want to come off as condescending, but you do want to make sure everyone understands what you’re talking about. To see if you’ve succeeded, have some trusted people who aren’t in your industry proof-read this section for you, and ask them to explain your product or service in their own words, along with the benefits to using them.

Here are the points you want to write up in the Products and Services section of your business plan:

The Product or Service Description

What is your product and service, and how does it work? How does it benefit customers? How do you make it or how will you get it made?

Product Comparison

What makes this product or service unique or better than what’s already available in the market? Why would someone choose to buy your product or do business with you over someone else?

Accreditations/Intellectual Property

Have you had the product tested or certified? Gotten approvals from industry experts? Did you trademark, copyright, or patent your product ? These can add substance and credibility, so be sure to mention them.

Where are you currently with this product or service? Is it in the idea stage or do you have a prototype? Have you produced some and are looking to expand? Have you started offering this service already or are you still in the planning stages ?

How much will you charge for the products or services you’re offering? Where does this fit in with what’s currently available?

Sales and Distribution Strategy

How will you sell it? Will you market it online or in retail stores? Have you lined up any vendors? How will you distribute it or deliver the service you’re providing?

Fulfillment

How will you fill orders or deliver the service? Will you manufacture items yourself or outsource to someone else? Who will handle distribution, and how?

Requirements

Will you need any special equipment or technology to provide your product or service?

Do you envision future products or services as an extension of the business once it’s successfully launched?

Photos or Brochures

It’s beneficial to include a visual representation of your offering. Photos or brochures would generally get put in the plan’s appendix, but you would refer to them in this section.

How Do You Stand Out?

Perhaps most importantly, emphasize how and why you are competitive. How do you stand out, and why does this business have such a terrific chance at succeeding? In talking about your product or service, always try to answer why a client would want it. How will your offering make your customers’ lives better or more profitable? What need are you fulfilling or what problem are you solving?

To sum up, the product and services section of your business plan gives the reader a clear understanding of why you’re in business, what you sell, how you compete with what’s already available, or how you fill a niche that no one else is meeting.

Next > Business Plan Section 5: Market Analysis

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Service Business Plan Template

Over the past 20+ years, we have helped over 10,000 entrepreneurs and business owners create business plans to start and grow their service businesses. On this page, we will first give you some background information with regards to the importance of business planning. We will then go through a service business plan template step-by-step so you can create your plan today.

Before we get into how to write a service business plan, here are links to several service business plan templates:

Beauty Salon Business Plan
Car Detailing Business Plan
Car Wash Business Plan
Catering Business Plan
Cell Phone Repair Business Plan
Child Care Business Plan
Cleaning Services Business Plan
Computer Repair Business Plan Template
Construction Business Plan
Consulting Business Plan
Day Care Business Plan
Dog Daycare Business Plan
Dog Grooming Business Plan
Financial Advisor Business Plan
Hair Salon Business Plan
Indoor Playground Business Plan
Insurance Business Plan
Janitorial Business Plan
Landscaping Business Plan
Massage Therapy Business Plan
Nail Salon Business Plan
Photography Business Plan
Plumbing Business Plan
Salon Business Plan
Spa Business Plan
Staffing Agency Business Plan
Tutor Business Plan

Download our Ultimate Business Plan Template here >

What Is a Service Business Plan?

A service business plan provides a snapshot of your service company as it stands today, and lays out your growth plan for the next five years. It explains your goals and your business strategy for reaching them. It also includes market research to support your company plans.

Why You Need a Business Plan

If you’re looking to start a service business or grow your existing business you need a good business plan. A business plan helps you attract investors to satisfy your funding requirements, and plan out the growth of your entire business in order to improve your chances of success. Your service business plan is a living document that should be updated annually as your company grows and changes.

How to Secure Funding for a Services Business

With regards to funding, the main source of funding for a services business are personal savings, credit cards, bank loans, and angel investors.

With regards to bank loans, banks will want to review your service business plan and gain confidence that you will be able to repay your loan and interest. To acquire this confidence, the loan officer will not only want to confirm that your financials are reasonable, but they will want to see a professionally written plan. Such a plan will give them the confidence that you can successfully and professionally operate a business.

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who will write you a check. They will either take equity in return for their funding or, like a bank, they will give you a loan.

Finish Your Business Plan Today!

How to write a business plan for a service business.

The traditional service business plan format includes these 10 key elements:

Executive Summary

Your executive summary provides an introduction to your business plan in 1 – 2 pages, but it is normally the last section you write because it provides a summary of each key section of your plan.

The goal of your executive summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of services business you are operating and the status. For example, are you a startup, do you have a services business that you would like to grow, or are you operating a chain of services businesses?

Next, provide an overview of each of the subsequent sections of your plan. For example, give a brief overview of the service industry trends. Discuss the type of service business you are operating. Detail your direct competitors and your competitive advantage. Give an overview of your ideal customers. Provide a snapshot of your marketing plan. Identify the key members of your team, and offer an overview of your financial plan.

Company Overview

In your company description, you will detail the type of service business you are operating.

In addition to explaining the type of service business you operate, the company analysis section of your service business plan needs to provide background on the business.

Include answers to questions such as:

When and why did you start the business?
What milestones have you achieved to date? Milestones could include sales goals you’ve reached, new store openings, etc.
Your legal structure. Are you incorporated as an S-Corp? An LLC? A sole proprietorship? Explain your legal structure here.

Industry Analysis

In your industry analysis, you need to provide an overview of the service business.

While this may seem unnecessary, it serves multiple purposes.

First, researching your specific niche of the service market educates you. It helps you gain insights and understand the market in which you are operating.

Secondly, market research can improve your strategy particularly if your research identifies market trends. For example, if there was a trend towards more eco-friendly services, your company might want to emphasize its environmentally friendly initiatives.

The third reason for market research is to prove to readers that you are an expert in your industry. By conducting the research and presenting it in your plan, you achieve just that.

The following questions should be answered in the industry analysis section of your service business plan:

How big is the service business (in dollars)?
Is the market declining or increasing?
Who are the key competitors in the market? What is your market share?
Who are the key suppliers in the market?
What trends are affecting the industry?
What is the industry’s growth forecast over the next 5 – 10 years?
What is the relevant market size? That is, how big is the potential market for your service business. You can extrapolate such a figure by assessing the size of the market in the entire country and then applying that figure to your local population.

Customer Analysis

The customer analysis section of your service business plan must detail the target market you serve and/or expect to serve.

The following are examples of customer segments in the service industry:

Businesses in need of a specific service, such as computer repair or consulting
People who have a need for a service that is not currently being met
People who are price conscious and are looking for the best deal on a service
People who want to support businesses with social responsibility values

As you can imagine, the customer segment(s) you choose will greatly depend on the type of service business you operate. Some of your clients may want different pricing and product options and would respond to different marketing promotions compared to other target customer segments.

Try to break out your target market in terms of their demographic and psychographic profiles. With regards to demographics, including a discussion of the ages, genders, locations, and income levels of the customers you seek to serve. Because most service businesses primarily serve customers living in the same city or town, such demographic information is easy to find on government websites.

Psychographic profiles explain the wants and needs of your target customers. The more you can understand and define these needs, the better you will do in attracting and retaining your existing clients.

Finish Your Service Business Plan in 1 Day!

Don’t you wish there was a faster, easier way to finish your business plan?

With Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template you can finish your plan in just 8 hours or less!

Competitive Analysis

Your competitive analysis should identify the indirect and direct competitors your business faces and then focus on the latter.

Direct competitors are other businesses that provide similar services.

Indirect competitors are other options that customers have to purchase from that aren’t direct competitors. This includes businesses that provide an alternative solution to the services that you provide, but not the exact service. Think do-it-yourself and public options for similar services. You need to mention such competition to show you understand that not everyone who needs the specific services will engage your service business.

With regards to direct competition, you want to detail the other service businesses with which you compete. Most likely, your direct competitors will be service businesses located very close to your location.

For each such competitor, provide an overview of their businesses and document their strengths and weaknesses. Unless you once worked at your competitors’ businesses, it will be impossible to know everything about them. But you should be able to find out key things about them such as:

What types of customers do they serve?
What products and services do they offer?
What is their pricing (premium, low, etc.)?
What are they good at?
What are their weaknesses?

With regards to the last two questions, think about your answers from the customers’ perspective. And don’t be afraid to stand outside your competitors’ locations and ask customers as they leave what they like most and least about them.

The final part of your competitive analysis section is to document your competitive advantages. For example:

Will you provide superior services?
Will you provide services that your competitors don’t offer?
Will you make it easier or faster for customers to book your services?
Will you provide better customer service?
Will you offer better pricing?

Think about ways you will outperform your competition and document them in this section of your plan.

Marketing Plan

Traditionally, a marketing plan includes the four P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. For a service business plan, your marketing plan should include the following:

Product : in the product section, you should reiterate the type of service business that you documented in your Company Analysis. Then, detail the specific services you will be offering. For example, in addition to a lawn care business, you may offer to trim trees, bushes, and hedges.

Price : Document your business’s pricing strategy including the prices you will offer and how they compare to your competitors. Essentially in the product and price sub-sections of your marketing plan, you are presenting the services you offer and their prices.

Place : Place refers to the location of your service business. Document your location and mention how the location will impact your success. Discuss how your location might provide a steady stream of customers.

Promotions : the final part of your service business marketing strategy is the promotions section. Here you will document how you will drive new customers to your location(s). The following are some promotional methods and marketing materials you might consider:

Advertising in local papers and magazines
Reaching out to local bloggers and websites
Social media advertising
Local radio advertising
Pay per click advertising
Banner ads at local venues

Client Retention

Your service business plan should discuss not just how you will find clients, but how you’ll hold on to them and discourage them from switching to one of your competitors. After all, it should be much less expensive to keep a client than to market and sell services to a new one. Some methods of retaining customers involve creating the perception of switching costs; that is, that they will lose money and time when switching to a new service company. Others involve fine-tuning your customer service skills into a system designed around retention.

Loyalty Program

Creating a loyalty program is a positive way to retain customers. This could involve a punch card system where customers receive a free service after a certain number of visits, or it could involve a points system where customers accumulate points that can be redeemed for discounts or free services. Other loyalty programs offer exclusive deals and privileges to members, such as special access to new services before they are made available to the general public.

Premium Customer Levels

Another related retention strategy is to reward the frequency and/or the amount of money that customers spend with your service business. This is often done by creating different customer levels and providing perks to customers who reach a certain level. The higher the customer level, the more exclusive the perks. Common perks include discounts on services, express service, access to unique services or products, and early notice of promotional deals.

Referral Program

A referral program is a great way to keep customers happy and encourage them to refer their friends and family members. This could involve rewarding customers with a discount or free service for every new customer they refer, or it could involve giving customers a set amount of credit for each referral. Either way, the referral program should be designed to be as simple as possible for customers to participate in.

Customer Testimonials

Finally, customer testimonials can be a powerful retention tool. As potential customers research your service business, they will likely come across your website and online profiles. Seeing positive customer testimonials on your website and across the internet will help convince them that you provide outstanding customer service. You can create a separate page on your website that is dedicated to client testimonials, or you could set up a separate social media profile that features client testimonials and allows customers to provide feedback through a special email address.

Tracking Retention

Simply tracking the numbers and percentages involved in your customer retention can yield valuable information about what you’re doing right or wrong and how successful new initiatives are over time. Statistics to track may include client complaints, the average speed of complaint resolution, the percentage of customers in a given month who were using your services last month, 3 months ago, 6 months ago, a year ago, etc, and so on. When your staff is aware of these statistics and is given targets to work towards, the message that customer service and retention is a priority is heard loud and clear.

Operations Plan

While the earlier sections of your service business plan explained your goals, your operations plan describes how you will meet them. Your plan should have two distinct sections as follows.

Everyday short-term processes include all of the tasks involved in running your service business such as serving customers, procuring supplies, etc.

Long-term goals are the milestones you hope to achieve. These could include the dates when you expect to serve your 100th client, or when you hope to reach $X in sales. It could also be when you expect to hire your Xth employee or launch in a new city.

Management Team

To demonstrate your service business’s ability to succeed as a business, a strong management team is essential. Highlight your key players’ backgrounds, emphasizing those skills and experiences that prove their ability to grow a company.

Ideally, you and/or your team members have direct experience in the service business. If so, highlight this experience and expertise, but also highlight any experience that you think will help your business succeed.

If your team is lacking, consider assembling an advisory board. An advisory board would include 2 to 8 individuals who would act as mentors to your business. They would help answer questions and provide strategic guidance. If needed, look for advisory board members with experience in a service business and/or successfully running small businesses.

Financial Plan

Your plan should include your 5-year financial statement broken out both monthly or quarterly for the first year and then annually. Your financial statements include your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statements.

Income Statement : an income statement is more commonly called a Profit and Loss statement or P&L. It shows your revenues and then subtracts your costs to show whether you turned a profit or not.

In developing your income statement, you need to devise assumptions. For example, will you serve 20 customers per week or 50? And will sales grow by 2% or 10% per year? As you can imagine, your choice of assumptions will greatly impact the financial forecasts for your business. As much as possible, conduct research to try to root your assumptions in reality.

Balance Sheets : While balance sheets include much information, to simplify them to the key items you need to know about, balance sheets show your assets and liabilities. For instance, if you spend $50,000 on building out your service business, that will not give you immediate profits. Rather it is an asset that will hopefully help you generate profits for years to come. Likewise, if a bank writes you a check for $50.000, you don’t need to pay it back immediately. Rather, that is a liability you will pay back over time.

Cash Flow Statement : Your cash flow statement will help determine how much money you need to start or grow your business, and make sure you never run out of money. What most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t realize is that you can turn a profit but run out of money and go bankrupt. For example, let’s say a company approached you with a massive $100,000 damage restoration contract that would cost you $50,000 to fulfill. Well, in most cases, you would have to pay that $50,000 now for supplies, equipment rentals, employee salaries, etc. But let’s say the company didn’t pay you for 180 days. During that 180 day period, you could run out of money.

In developing your Income Statement and Balance Sheets be sure to include several of the key costs needed in starting or growing a service business:

Cost of equipment to perform the service
Cost of maintaining an adequate amount of supplies
Payroll or salaries paid to staff
Business insurance
Taxes and permits
Legal expenses

Attach your full financial projections in the appendix of your plan along with any supporting documents that make your plan more compelling. For example, you might include any insurance company affiliations or remediation licenses.

Service Business Plan Summary

Writing a business plan for your service business is a worthwhile endeavor. If you follow the template above, by the time you are done, you will truly be an expert. You will really understand the service business, your competition, and your potential customers. You will have developed a marketing plan and will really understand what it takes to launch and grow a successful cleaning services business.

Service Business Plan FAQs

What is the easiest way to complete my service business plan.

Growthink's Ultimate Business Plan Template allows you to quickly and easily complete your Service Business Plan.

What is the Goal of a Business Plan's Executive Summary?

The goal of your Executive Summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of service you are providing and the status; for example, are you a startup, do you have a service that you would like to grow, or are you operating a chain of service locations?

Don’t you wish there was a faster, easier way to finish your Service business plan?

OR, Let Us Develop Your Plan For You

Since 1999, Growthink has developed business plans for thousands of companies who have gone on to achieve tremendous success. Click here to see how our professional business plan consultants can create your business plan for you.

Building your own copilot with Copilot Studio

Richard Riley , , Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Learn how you can use Copilot Studio to build your own copilot, available on multiple channels, designed for your audiences, and tailored specifically to your business processes and workflows.

In November, we introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio , a conversational AI platform that allows you to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build your own copilot.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 offers AI assistance to create, find, and ask for information across Microsoft 365 apps and provides a Copilot chat available across several employee experiences like Microsoft Teams, Windows, and Bing. However, sometimes you may want generative AI assistants that can reach users on multiple channels outside of those, like embedding on your internal websites, mobile apps, and social channels. You may want to design individual AI assistants that can serve employees, customers, and partners. Or you might want a custom copilot that you can tailor to specific roles and functions, where you can control the orchestration of your large language model using the dialog manager for managed topics with specific workflows.

When you create your own copilot with Copilot Studio, you are building intelligent chat experiences using ready-made large language models, a dialog manager, 1200+ data connectors, and more within a low code SaaS. These custom copilots are AI assistants that help humans with complex cognitive tasks using your organization’s knowledge, connectors to LOB applications, and your own custom topics. For example, a copilot for IT support, a copilot to help your customers choose the right product, or even help your suppliers track the status of orders.

How Copilot Studio works

Let’s talk through the steps to building your own copilot. You can start by logging in to Copilot Studio which will spin up all of the required services for you so it’s ready for building in a matter of minutes.

Imagine you wanted to create a custom copilot to serve customers on your website, for example assisting with product knowledge questions and order management.

First, start by grounding your copilot in your data. Using generative answers , you can enable multi-turn chat over your organizations real-time data—from local files to SharePoint sites, from public websites to data in your own custom backends creating the ability to chat over a wide set of topics within minutes. For this scenario, you would use your public website including your product information.

For critical topics such as account management, which involves handling customer details, you can design the specific conversational flow that you want Copilot to follow. You have the option to use visual authoring or natural language to design these prioritized topics before proceeding to generative AI. For instance, consider a topic that collects user details, authenticates the user, and interacts with your order management systems following a specific sequence of steps. Another example of a managed topic is discounting, where responses may involve legal and compliance matters, and therefore, you provide the managed response.

With generative actions , you can now provide a list of plugins to the copilot, selecting from 1200+ data connectors like SAP, Workday, Salesforce etc, and these will be dynamically executed to help the copilot take action. This allows copilot to effortlessly handle complex queries that were unforeseen or not previously constructed.

For developers that want more custom development, you can use Azure models and services with Copilot Studio. This hybrid approach of low code with custom pro code integration allows you to bring custom language models , Azure OpenAI on your data , knowledge bases , image generation with DALL-E, telemetry, and more into your Copilot Studio copilot.

When you’re ready, you can publish your copilot to multiple channels which can be internal or external facing to interact with users across different platforms, such as websites, Microsoft Teams, social apps, mobile apps, Azure Bot Service channels and more. You can also escalate the conversation to 1st party Dynamics 365 and 3rd party tools like Genesys, LivePerson, Salesforce and ServiceNow when the copilot requires human assistance.

Once the copilot is live, be sure to review the copilot performance with the built-in analytics dashboard that helps makers monitor key metrics, evaluate performance, and find new copilot topics. Secure and manage your copilot with governance and control features with the central admin center to protect copilot data with data loss prevention policies, role-based access control, environment management and more.

These are just some of the foundational steps to getting started, but there are many other features you can include in your copilot.

How Copilot Studio will evolve in the future

When you build custom copilots using Copilot Studio today, you are designing chat-based experiences to support users with knowledge discovery, such as finding answers to their queries, and task/business process completion, such as calling APIs and following workflows.

We are continuously enhancing the capabilities of Copilot Studio in the upcoming months through several key areas of focus:

Generative AI knowledge sources– Generative Answers currently supports several data sources to ground your Copilot. Today, you can chat over unstructured data by providing your URLs and data sources. We are expanding both the number of sources and sizes over time. Learn about the existing capabilities today .
Multi-modality – You can design powerful text-based Copilots today, and even create copilots optimized for speech , which can be used with Dynamics 365 or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) ISVs. Over time, we will provide even more ways to interact with your chat-based experiences.
Generative AI availability – Copilot Studio is available across several regions, languages, and data centers which we are expanding here .

Be sure to read the Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365 blog for information on plugins .

We appreciate your ongoing feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve the experience. Stay tuned for more updates at Microsoft Build.

What else can you do with Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio offers features that can be consumed both within your custom copilots and Copilot for Microsoft 365 via plugins, such as 1200+ data connectors, workflow design, and generative answers all through the low code authoring canvas. The difference is in the channel and audience in which the copilot/plugin is consumed.

If you have invested in Copilot for Microsoft 365 today, you may look to use Copilot Studio to bring in your data outside of Copilot for Microsoft 365 into the Copilot chat, design custom workflows or help control the conversation for specific topics. You would achieve this by designing plugins in Copilot Studio which is included in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 user license for customization of Copilot for Microsoft 365 only. Custom copilot development requires a standalone license . There is no dependency to purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365 to make your own custom copilot.

With Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can create plugins for various transactional scenarios. For example, if you want to know how much travel budget is left for the rest of the quarter, you can design a plugin to query a SAP connector to retrieve the information. For sales data, you could ask “What are the sales targets for the fiscal?” querying a data source like Salesforce or Dynamics 365, or even query HR data in Workday and ask questions like “How many vacation days do I have left?”.

And the best part is, you only need to build your plugin once, and it can be reused across your organization after being approved by IT in the admin center.

Get inspired with use cases

Copilot Studio provides you with the platform to build a copilot for your specific needs, for your industry, department, with your data. These custom copilots can cover Business to Employee (B2E) Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C).

An image of the usecases for Copilot Studio. Each industry and department has an example of the types of questions you can ask the copilot.

Copilot for IT Service Management: “Check the progress of my current IT ticket” or “Initiate a request for device upgrades” connected to ServiceNow.
Copilot for Human Resources: “Start the onboarding sequence for our new team member” or “Show me the remaining training budget for this quarter.” Using your HRM systems like Workday.
Copilot for Frontline workers : “How do I find the manual for Contoso Blender” or “How do I fix the printing machine model XB100”
Copilot for Legal and Compliance: “Summarize the latest updates to our brand usage guidelines” or “Explain the company’s stance on intellectual property rights.”

Business to business examples:

Copilot for Project Management: “Give me a summary of completed tasks for Project X’s second phase” or “List the pending deliverables for phase two.”
Copilot for Supplier Management: “Show the fulfillment status of purchase order #452” or “Track the shipment of our recent bulk order.”
Copilot for Sales Enablement: “Generate a quote for a large-scale supply of office essentials” helping your business assess the lead potential for a prospective client.

Business to consumer examples:

Copilot for Customer Support: Guide a customer through the product return process or requests like “Help me with account recovery.”
Copilot for Product Consultation: “Recommend the best laptop for travel-intensive users” or “Compare the latest smartphone models for photography enthusiasts.”
Copilot for Service Booking: Navigate a customer through scheduling a service appointment with queries like “Check availability for in-store consultations next Thursday.”
Copilot for Travel Assistance: “Help me book a trip for a family of four with top-rated family resorts for this summer” connected to your travel booking system.

Check out some of the use cases from customers such as Paypal, AnPost, HP and more .

Get started with Copilot Studio today

We are eager to keep delivering the newest advances to Copilot Studio and we can’t wait to see the amazing solutions you create. Be sure to take advantage of the training content like Copilot Studio in a day and the learning paths to begin your skilling journey.

To learn more about Copilot Studio, visit aka.ms/copilotstudio . To try it for yourself, go to aka.ms/trycopilotstudio . And don’t miss out Microsoft Build , where we’ll share more announcements and demos.

Additional Resources:

Copilot Studio website: https://aka.ms/copilotstudio
Blog: https://aka.ms/copilotstudioblog
Demo: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodemo
Product documentation: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodocs
Community page: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiocommunity
Implementation guide: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioImplement
Responsible AI: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioResponsibleAI
Analyst report: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioIDC
Learning resources: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioLearn

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11 Sample Business Plans to Help You Write Your Own
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How to Write the Business Plan Products and Services Section
The products and services section of your business plan is more than just a list of what your business is going to provide. This section of your business plan should include details about how you'll price products and services, how you'll fulfill orders, and other details that investors need to hear before you can get funding. Learn more below.
Products & Services Section in a Business Plan (+ Examples)
In a business plan, the Products and Services section is typically included within the business overview section. This allows you to first introduce the business model and what it offers to customers. Only after this you can provide more details of the products and services. The Products and Services section should clearly detail what you are ...
How to Write a Great Business Plan: Products and Services
Apr 6, 2015. Shutterstock. This article is part of a series on how to write a great business plan. In the Products and Services section of your business plan, you will clearly describe--yep--the ...
Product and Service Description in a Business Plan: Complete Guide
1. Portfolio: The range of products and/or services that a business offers to potential and current customers. 2. Features and benefits (value proposition): Explain what the product/service does and how it works. 3. Problem and solution (value proposition cont.): The problem (s) the product or service solves.
How to Write a Business Plan Products and Services Section
The products and services section of your business plan provides the chance to describe why you're in business. This will range from specific product or service details, such as pricing information, to more personally driven elements like your mission statement. The point is that you need to paint a convincing picture, both technical and ...
How to Write Business Plan Products and Services Section
Your goal in writing the business plan products and services section should be to explain your offering in simple, layman's terms. Anyone reading about your products or services should be able to understand: what you are offering. what is the unique value you are offering. how will you do quality assurance.
24 of My Favorite Sample Business Plans & Examples For Your Inspiration
This is a fantastic template for an existing business that's strategically shifting directions. If your company has been around for a while, and you're looking to improve your bottom line or revitalize your strategy, this is an excellent template to use and follow. 5. BPlan's Free Business Plan Template.
550+ Sample Business Plan Examples to Inspire Your Own
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. The structure ditches a linear format in favor of a cell-based template.
How to Write a Business Plan: Guide + Examples
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. ... Sample business plan library. Explore over 500 real-world business plan ...
How To Write the Products and Services of a Business Plan
When looking at how to write the Products and Services section of your plan, be sure to include: A description of the products or services you offer or plan to offer. A pricing model for your products or service, including how you set your prices and how you will make a profit. Include a breakdown of your Costs of Goods (COG) and Costs of ...
Write Products and Services Section of a Business Plan
1. Opt for a customer-centric approach: Your goal is to cater to the needs of your customers through your products or services. Hence, write as if you are talking to your customers and directly addressing their issues. Point out how your product will make their lives better and easier. 2.
The Products and Services Section of Your Business Plan
As a result, a common mistake is to make this the primary focus of the business plan or to convey too many details. Follow the guidelines below to strike the right balance. A business plan outline for the products and services section should include the following: Brief description of products or services Problem solved, or unmet need filled
Business Plan: What it Is, How to Write One
Learn about the best business plan software. 1. Write an executive summary. This is your elevator pitch. It should include a mission statement, a brief description of the products or services your ...
How to Write a Business Plan in 2023 [Examples Included]
The things you should include in a one-pager business plan are: The problem - Describe a certain problem your customers have and support the claim with relevant data. The solution - How your products/services can solve the issue. Business model - Your plan on how to make money.
Business Plan Templates: 26 FREE Samples
Get unlimited eSignatures. Create, manage, and eSign documents for only $19 per month. Create your success roadmap with a laundromat business plan template, designed to arrange the essentials of the laundry business. Empower your path to long-term success with our 5-year business plan template.
The 7 Best Business Plan Examples (2024)
Marketing plan: A strategic outline of how you plan to market and promote your business before, during, and after your company launches into the market. Logistics and operations plan: An explanation of the systems, processes, and tools that are needed to run your business in the background. Financial plan: A map of your short-term (and even ...
7 Business Plan Examples to Inspire Your Own (2024)
7 business plan examples: section by section. The business plan examples in this article follow this example template: Executive summary. An introductory overview of your business. Company description. A more in-depth and detailed description of your business and why it exists. Market analysis.
Simple Business Plan Template (2024)
This section of your simple business plan template explores how to structure and operate your business. Details include the type of business organization your startup will take, roles and ...
Business Plan Section 4: Products and Services
Business Plan Section 4: Products and Services. To give others a clear understanding of the value your product or service provides, read about 11 important things to include in this section of your plan. This is the part of your business plan where you will describe the specific products and services you're going to offer.
How To Write A Business Plan (2024 Guide)
Describe Your Services or Products. The business plan should have a section that explains the services or products that you're offering. This is the part where you can also describe how they fit ...
Service Business Plan Template & Guide [Updated 2024]
Service Business Plan Template. Over the past 20+ years, we have helped over 10,000 entrepreneurs and business owners create business plans to start and grow their service businesses. On this page, we will first give you some background information with regards to the importance of business planning. We will then go through a service business ...
How To Write an Effective Business Plan Product Description
Your business plan should have an appendix for photos and brochures, but be sure to refer to them in the product description section. Related: 10 Important Components of a Successful Business Plan Product description example Family Treasure Knits Products and Services Family Treasure Knits manufactures high-quality, custom-knitted blankets. My ...
Building your own copilot with Copilot Studio
Copilot for Sales Enablement: "Generate a quote for a large-scale supply of office essentials" helping your business assess the lead potential for a prospective client. Business to consumer examples: Copilot for Customer Support: Guide a customer through the product return process or requests like "Help me with account recovery."

How to Write the Business Plan Products and Services Section

Key Takeaways

Why You Need a Products and Services Section in a Business Plan

What to Include in a Products and Services Section

Tips on Writing the Products and Services Section

Indicate Why Your Product or Service Is Needed

Highlight the Features of Your Product or Service

Focus on Benefits

Be Clear and Concise

Show Off Expertise, Experience, and Accolades

Be the Expert, But Use Layman's Terms

Indicate What's Special About Your Products or Services

Speak to Your Customer

Examples of a Products and Services Section

What Is Product and Service in a Business Plan?

What Are Examples of Products and Services?

Products & Services Section in a Business Plan (+ Examples)

Why do we include them in a business plan?

Where should you include them?

What to include: 2 Examples

Services example: a Cryotherapy business plan

Products example: a Brewery business plan

Privacy Overview

WHAT is the Product and Service Description in a Business Plan?

HOW Do You Write a Product and Service Description in a Business Plan?

How LONG Is the Product and Service Chapter of a Business Plan?

TOP 4 TIPS for Writing a Product and Service Overview

What Is the Difference Between Features and Benefits?

Tip #3: Competitive Advantage

Tip #4: Validating the Problem and Solution

Validation of Problem

Validation of Solution

Related Questions

What is a Product Line?

What is a Service Line?

How to Write Products and Services Section of Business Plan

How do you write the business plan products and services section?

Hire business plan writer now!

Explain Your Products or Services

Show why your Product is Unique

Emphasize the Benefits

Manufacturing, Sourcing, and Fulfillment

Be Short and Concise

Show your Expertise

Explain in Simple Language

What is your Exclusive Advantage?

Assume you are talking to the customer

Key Questions to Answer in the Business Plan Products and Services Section

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Business Plan Format

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1. Executive Summary

Company Description

Products and Services

Executive Summary Business Plan Examples

Tips for Writing Your Executive Summary

2. Market Opportunity

Tips for Writing Your Market Opportunity Section

3. Competitive Landscape

Competitive Landscape Business Plan Example

Tips for Writing Your Competitive Landscape

4. Target Audience

Target Audience Business Plan Example

Tips for Writing Your Target Audience Section

5. Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy Business Plan Example

Tips for Writing Your Marketing Strategy

6. Key Features and Benefits

Key Features and Benefits Business Plan Example

Tips for Writing Your Key Features and Benefits

7. Pricing and Revenue