improving my business plan

How to make a business plan

Table of Contents

How to make a good business plan: step-by-step guide.

A business plan is a strategic roadmap used to navigate the challenging journey of entrepreneurship. It's the foundation upon which you build a successful business.

A well-crafted business plan can help you define your vision, clarify your goals, and identify potential problems before they arise.

But where do you start? How do you create a business plan that sets you up for success?

This article will explore the step-by-step process of creating a comprehensive business plan.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a formal document that outlines a business's objectives, strategies, and operational procedures. It typically includes the following information about a company:

Products or services

Target market

Competitors

Marketing and sales strategies

Financial plan

Management team

A business plan serves as a roadmap for a company's success and provides a blueprint for its growth and development. It helps entrepreneurs and business owners organize their ideas, evaluate the feasibility, and identify potential challenges and opportunities.

As well as serving as a guide for business owners, a business plan can attract investors and secure funding. It demonstrates the company's understanding of the market, its ability to generate revenue and profits, and its strategy for managing risks and achieving success.

Business plan vs. business model canvas

A business plan may seem similar to a business model canvas, but each document serves a different purpose.

A business model canvas is a high-level overview that helps entrepreneurs and business owners quickly test and iterate their ideas. It is often a one-page document that briefly outlines the following:

Key partnerships

Key activities

Key propositions

Customer relationships

Customer segments

Key resources

Cost structure

Revenue streams

On the other hand, a Business Plan Template provides a more in-depth analysis of a company's strategy and operations. It is typically a lengthy document and requires significant time and effort to develop.

A business model shouldn’t replace a business plan, and vice versa. Business owners should lay the foundations and visually capture the most important information with a Business Model Canvas Template . Because this is a fast and efficient way to communicate a business idea, a business model canvas is a good starting point before developing a more comprehensive business plan.

A business plan can aim to secure funding from investors or lenders, while a business model canvas communicates a business idea to potential customers or partners.

Why is a business plan important?

A business plan is crucial for any entrepreneur or business owner wanting to increase their chances of success.

Here are some of the many benefits of having a thorough business plan.

Helps to define the business goals and objectives

A business plan encourages you to think critically about your goals and objectives. Doing so lets you clearly understand what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there.

A well-defined set of goals, objectives, and key results also provides a sense of direction and purpose, which helps keep business owners focused and motivated.

Guides decision-making

A business plan requires you to consider different scenarios and potential problems that may arise in your business. This awareness allows you to devise strategies to deal with these issues and avoid pitfalls.

With a clear plan, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions aligning with their overall business goals and objectives. This helps reduce the risk of making costly mistakes and ensures they make decisions with long-term success in mind.

Attracts investors and secures funding

Investors and lenders often require a business plan before considering investing in your business. A document that outlines the company's goals, objectives, and financial forecasts can help instill confidence in potential investors and lenders.

A well-written business plan demonstrates that you have thoroughly thought through your business idea and have a solid plan for success.

Identifies potential challenges and risks

A business plan requires entrepreneurs to consider potential challenges and risks that could impact their business. For example:

Is there enough demand for my product or service?

Will I have enough capital to start my business?

Is the market oversaturated with too many competitors?

What will happen if my marketing strategy is ineffective?

By identifying these potential challenges, entrepreneurs can develop strategies to mitigate risks and overcome challenges. This can reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes and ensure the business is well-positioned to take on any challenges.

Provides a basis for measuring success

A business plan serves as a framework for measuring success by providing clear goals and financial projections . Entrepreneurs can regularly refer to the original business plan as a benchmark to measure progress. By comparing the current business position to initial forecasts, business owners can answer questions such as:

Are we where we want to be at this point?

Did we achieve our goals?

If not, why not, and what do we need to do?

After assessing whether the business is meeting its objectives or falling short, business owners can adjust their strategies as needed.

How to make a business plan step by step

The steps below will guide you through the process of creating a business plan and what key components you need to include.

1. Create an executive summary

Start with a brief overview of your entire plan. The executive summary should cover your business plan's main points and key takeaways.

Keep your executive summary concise and clear with the Executive Summary Template . The simple design helps readers understand the crux of your business plan without reading the entire document.

2. Write your company description

Provide a detailed explanation of your company. Include information on what your company does, the mission statement, and your vision for the future.

Provide additional background information on the history of your company, the founders, and any notable achievements or milestones.

3. Conduct a market analysis

Conduct an in-depth analysis of your industry, competitors, and target market. This is best done with a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, identify your target market's needs, demographics, and behaviors.

Use the Competitive Analysis Template to brainstorm answers to simple questions like:

What does the current market look like?

Who are your competitors?

What are they offering?

What will give you a competitive advantage?

Who is your target market?

What are they looking for and why?

How will your product or service satisfy a need?

These questions should give you valuable insights into the current market and where your business stands.

4. Describe your products and services

Provide detailed information about your products and services. This includes pricing information, product features, and any unique selling points.

Use the Product/Market Fit Template to explain how your products meet the needs of your target market. Describe what sets them apart from the competition.

5. Design a marketing and sales strategy

Outline how you plan to promote and sell your products. Your marketing strategy and sales strategy should include information about your:

Pricing strategy

Advertising and promotional tactics

Sales channels

The Go to Market Strategy Template is a great way to visually map how you plan to launch your product or service in a new or existing market.

6. Determine budget and financial projections

Document detailed information on your business’ finances. Describe the current financial position of the company and how you expect the finances to play out.

Some details to include in this section are:

Startup costs

Revenue projections

Profit and loss statement

Funding you have received or plan to receive

Strategy for raising funds

7. Set the organization and management structure

Define how your company is structured and who will be responsible for each aspect of the business. Use the Business Organizational Chart Template to visually map the company’s teams, roles, and hierarchy.

As well as the organization and management structure, discuss the legal structure of your business. Clarify whether your business is a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, or LLC.

8. Make an action plan

At this point in your business plan, you’ve described what you’re aiming for. But how are you going to get there? The Action Plan Template describes the following steps to move your business plan forward. Outline the next steps you plan to take to bring your business plan to fruition.

Types of business plans

Several types of business plans cater to different purposes and stages of a company's lifecycle. Here are some of the most common types of business plans.

Startup business plan

A startup business plan is typically an entrepreneur's first business plan. This document helps entrepreneurs articulate their business idea when starting a new business.

Not sure how to make a business plan for a startup? It’s pretty similar to a regular business plan, except the primary purpose of a startup business plan is to convince investors to provide funding for the business. A startup business plan also outlines the potential target market, product/service offering, marketing plan, and financial projections.

Strategic business plan

A strategic business plan is a long-term plan that outlines a company's overall strategy, objectives, and tactics. This type of strategic plan focuses on the big picture and helps business owners set goals and priorities and measure progress.

The primary purpose of a strategic business plan is to provide direction and guidance to the company's management team and stakeholders. The plan typically covers a period of three to five years.

Operational business plan

An operational business plan is a detailed document that outlines the day-to-day operations of a business. It focuses on the specific activities and processes required to run the business, such as:

Organizational structure

Staffing plan

Production plan

Quality control

Inventory management

Supply chain

The primary purpose of an operational business plan is to ensure that the business runs efficiently and effectively. It helps business owners manage their resources, track their performance, and identify areas for improvement.

Growth-business plan

A growth-business plan is a strategic plan that outlines how a company plans to expand its business. It helps business owners identify new market opportunities and increase revenue and profitability. The primary purpose of a growth-business plan is to provide a roadmap for the company's expansion and growth.

The 3 Horizons of Growth Template is a great tool to identify new areas of growth. This framework categorizes growth opportunities into three categories: Horizon 1 (core business), Horizon 2 (emerging business), and Horizon 3 (potential business).

One-page business plan

A one-page business plan is a condensed version of a full business plan that focuses on the most critical aspects of a business. It’s a great tool for entrepreneurs who want to quickly communicate their business idea to potential investors, partners, or employees.

A one-page business plan typically includes sections such as business concept, value proposition, revenue streams, and cost structure.

Best practices for how to make a good business plan

Here are some additional tips for creating a business plan:

Use a template

A template can help you organize your thoughts and effectively communicate your business ideas and strategies. Starting with a template can also save you time and effort when formatting your plan.

Miro’s extensive library of customizable templates includes all the necessary sections for a comprehensive business plan. With our templates, you can confidently present your business plans to stakeholders and investors.

Be practical

Avoid overestimating revenue projections or underestimating expenses. Your business plan should be grounded in practical realities like your budget, resources, and capabilities.

Be specific

Provide as much detail as possible in your business plan. A specific plan is easier to execute because it provides clear guidance on what needs to be done and how. Without specific details, your plan may be too broad or vague, making it difficult to know where to start or how to measure success.

Be thorough with your research

Conduct thorough research to fully understand the market, your competitors, and your target audience . By conducting thorough research, you can identify potential risks and challenges your business may face and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Get input from others

It can be easy to become overly focused on your vision and ideas, leading to tunnel vision and a lack of objectivity. By seeking input from others, you can identify potential opportunities you may have overlooked.

Review and revise regularly

A business plan is a living document. You should update it regularly to reflect market, industry, and business changes. Set aside time for regular reviews and revisions to ensure your plan remains relevant and effective.

Create a winning business plan to chart your path to success

Starting or growing a business can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, a well-written business plan can make or break your business’ success.

The purpose of a business plan is more than just to secure funding and attract investors. It also serves as a roadmap for achieving your business goals and realizing your vision. With the right mindset, tools, and strategies, you can develop a visually appealing, persuasive business plan.

Ready to make an effective business plan that works for you? Check out our library of ready-made strategy and planning templates and chart your path to success.

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Business Plan: 30 Ways How to Improve It

Guest Writer

• Published on October 13, 2020

Table of Contents

A business plan hinges on how well the entrepreneur has a plan for each stage of their market. Indeed, it is a mandatory requirement when pitching a business idea to potential investors. However, it outlines the milestones the business needs to achieve, break even, and stay profitable.

In this way, the main takeaway we learn from the thousands of speakers is to show what our business does. Additionally, we need to expound on the potential threats, weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities to counter our shortcomings and have higher numbers in order.

The vision that the business sets to achieve is another factor that every business plan must have. Also, it is the single most helpful strategy for first-time entrepreneurs seeking investors. Moreover, when we have a business idea, we are at a disadvantage in writing the business plan. So, here are 30 approaches to improve our business plan:

1. Do in-depth research and analysis

It is not something new to do in-depth research and analysis when improving our business plan. We should know the target market that we want to start. Significantly, discover who the key players are and what global competition is like. Here are four ways that we can do market research to create our business plan.

■ Take a look at other companies that have similar products and services.

■ Conducting online surveys or focus group sessions for knowing our customers’ feedback about our products and services.

■ Buy expert market research data from a lot of firms that focus on our distinct industry as well.

■ Hire a research firm to interview customers to select targets and figure out our target demographic’s buying habits and buying decisions.

Those are four brilliant ways of valuable market research we obtain to get our business a good start.

2. Know our potential consumers and audiences

This is an essential part of having a good business plan. We should know about the products or services we sell, the price, the target buyers, the durability, and the functionality in the future. Plus, are the products still on-trend or not? We must be critical in every single aspect.

Secondly, we also see the potential audiences we want to pitch. Who will see our brand? Is it the investors? Or bankers? Use those kinds of questions to anticipate the mistakes in doing analysis. For instance, if our audience is bankers, think like them and write what they need to support your business plan. A great business plan will show that we conceive our business idea clearly and develop it into a sustainable and successful business.

3. Define our target market to boost our business plan

Humans are difficult to please. Plus, we have no time to give a solution to match with everyone. When it comes to developing and offering our products, we must identify a particular group in the society who need our services and are willing to pay for them.

When a potential investor sees our investment in researching our target market, the funding is as adequate as yours. The next step in our business plan is to identify our market’s size and the changes that will affect the future scope. With it, our investors may want to see an opportunity for growth, transformation, and expandability.

4. Be aware of our competitors

Knowing our competitors is a crucial thing we do. It is not only from another business but also from new technology that can make us obsolete. We are in the middle of the global world right now, and we have no other options. To understand our competitors, the only thing is to do market research correctly to invest time and effort. Don’t hope to have a successful business if the owners don’t analyze their industry, target customers, or competitors.

5. Build a niche for business plan

Do you want to beat your competitors? Then, start to specialize the topics and a niche by analyzing certain companies. Get started by:

■ Describe your industry and the objectives.

■ Splitting a large market into a more specific niche.

■ Setting your specialty to the research using the SPAN(Subtopics, Pain, Attainable, Numbers) method.

■ Becoming an educator to support your niche within the content.

■ Publishing your products or services through an article or any creative approach publicly, like writing guest posts or making social media content.

Still, when we reach our goal, we will appreciate all the hard work we put in to make it real.

6. Write a comprehensive executive summary

Many would-be entrepreneurs fail to capture their potential investors’ attention as they mistake writing a shallow overview of the business. In contrast, others will see the summary as the description of the company. In this case, some experts suggest that the details in our executive summary should include;

■ The primary use of the business

■ Prospective outcome

■ Purpose of the business

■ Amount of the required capital

Incorporating the above particulars in the executive summary without being wordy also includes the essential elements to help the prospective investor decide in your favor.

7. A business plan is not a school examination

Improving our business plan is more than just the school examination, like filling in the blanks. It is more like we answer the essay section with an outside-the-box answer. A successful businessman thinks critically in a creative, realistic, and innovative way. We should be brave to think about groundbreaking things.

8. Be rational

It is okay for you to dream as the next tech billionaire, as long as you can consider these questions, how are you running to do it? What is the idea to get there? How does it drive you there? There is nothing sinful with audacious goals, but we need a sensible plan to accomplish them with a very technical action plan. Unrealistic financial steps without a logical action plan are a big fault.

9. Learn from the past

Reflect from your experience to your business to plan the process. We can’t get real entrepreneurial experience in school life, but we have to learn it the hard way independently. So, use it as guidance and adjust our continuing business plan into the lessons we learn through the knowledge.

10. List our hypothesis

It will be most important when we get to the financial prediction of our business plan. List what our assumptions are and then combine them into the action plan as target goals. That’s why, if the assumptions have been proven, then our financial predictions will be correct. By listing our hypotheses, we will bring reality to sharpen.

11. Develop our focus

We may have the courage to succeed in any business; however, it will automatically abandon if our company doesn’t focus. So, what should we do well? What is the product or service that we want to sell? What is our customer’s opinion? Pin it down before we launch.

12. Be specific on what we plan

We need to specify our continuity of plan from now on until the next few years, the priority, and where we want to focus our goal. Have a specific action plan that we want to track. We may feel so bored to hear it repeatedly, but many businesses collapse within the first year. Time is precious; we need to be as critical and prepared as possible. Set our plan based on “action targets.”

13. Cover all necessary components

Ensure that we don’t leave any crucial parts. If we can’t explain what we sell, how much you sell it for, how the process we sell it, how much it costs to produce, how we distribute and market it, who our competitors are, and what the risks we undertake, then we are ready to collapse.

14. Use our style to reflect the plan

Don’t copy someone else’s rules. If we feel uncomfortable using a particular type, then eliminate it. Our strategy should reflect on how we think and how we work. We want to have charismatic and well-known personalities. Well, just be ourselves that what our customers want. The only thing they want is someone who can connect and join with them because we are honest. Our truth, heart, values, and vision are the weapons we use to beat our competitors.

15. Make our business plan readable

A great business plan should be compelling, appealing, informative, and inspiring. We should include the details without overwhelming them. Use the attachments for the details, like resumes that block the body of the plan.

Be careful about spelling, grammar, punctuation, and part of speech. Secondly, get a second and third set of eyes to give us valuable feedback. Don’t be so miserly with charts, graphics, illustrations, and tables. They are helpful visual elements to perform our data more legibly .

16. Learn UI and UX concepts from basic

UX and UI design are a fundamental part of our brand’s closeness. Having a thoughtful and accessible design in both our visuals and functionality will help our company to succeed in our business plan increasingly.

We need to understand how to attract them to the most fantastic experience through capable web and mobile apps . Indeed, knowing the difference between UX and UI is a good start. What’s more, if you want to succeed in your product, you can learn how to include  decals to boost your brand awareness .

17. Don’t make our business plan complicated

Imagine we are in the speech contest with one minute talk. What would we say? Or, if we had to summarize our business plan on one page, what would we write? Both illustrations are crucial questions for us.

Pages to pages of market analysis sometimes don’t create anything to clarify their strategy. Think about it carefully, especially when we will make a cash flow before running out the money.

18. Think about the essence of the business plan instead of the form

Instead of worrying about the form, what matters is the substance. For example, when we spend many hours looking for templates on the Internet , we have waste time. We don’t need a fancy template, and a simple document will satisfy. Besides, the essential things are a wholesale product, a logical and practical method to grow our business plan.

19. Break down our action plan

For example, we break down the marketing objective into a particular segment to know how it runs to be accomplished. This action is potent because it defines the focus and sets potential targets that we measure.

Besides, being organized can complete tasks effectively and stay on top of everything. The primary step to start is by creating a daily to-do list. Also, it is a simple and effective way to keep focus without forgetting anything quickly.

20. Point out our progress

After receiving the progress, we should keep it up by maintaining it to be a living document. Most importantly, keep it as a portfolio or wherever we take it around. If we have accomplished our excellent job, then our business plan will be achieved as an expanse. Plus, it will guide us on what we will invest the time in every single day.

21. Join with the community

The achievement of your small business is a part of joining the community. When we enter a new geographic market, we can win over by observing the firms in the area. On top of that, we also use strategic testimonials, certifications, and professional pitch decks to earn trustworthiness.

22. Don’t just gain customers. Hold them

However, our customers are part of our soul in our business; we hold them like our close friends. Indeed, we need to keep them by:

■ Selling our goods or services to potential audiences via mass media, online, or printed publications.

■ Setting promotions like a discount, free trials, or a bundle package of products.

■ Creating referral programs where others get an incentive for introducing our business to someone else.

■ Producing top-notch customer services.

■ Building a brand that buyers want to stay, think like Apple.

Those are five tips to get you started, but let us know if you have more ideas for keeping your customers.

23. Employees are first

“Building a solid team is like we continue to innovate our brand,” said Vaynerchuk. Our employees are essential because they have a skill-set to keep our business running. Giving our employees happiness and well-being can create a work-life balance to do their job more productively. Secondly, we can provide our employees with independence and flexibility. Lastly, we can motivate them by complimenting them on their progress and making a trust-building. With those actions, we can grow our business plan faster.

24. Avoid business plan mistakes

People always make a mistake, and it is pretty okay. But it is fatal when it still makes the same error without repairing it better and is afraid to grow. So, here are five common mistakes small business owners make:

■ We overvalue our product or service

■ Entering our competitor without observing and planning

■ Not considering overlooked costs

■ Not preparing for profitability

Apart from those points, don’t be afraid of making a mistake. Think of our mistakes or bad experiences as part of the learning process and maturity, immensely to improve our business plan for the future.

25. Create a financial model

Secondly, a potential investor will look out for our projected numbers after going through our executive summary. Many entrepreneurs in the early stages of the business may refrain from setting long-term projections, which hardly works in their favor.

It may often come off as guesswork; however, the investors see the effort of planning for:

■ An increase in the size of the market

■ The appreciation in the production and operational costs

■ Fluctuation in prices of products and services

■ The profit margins

From popular television shows like Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den, entrepreneurs learn that investors need a concrete spending plan of the money they invest. Indeed, our numbers help investors and potential partners, such as a qualified business coach , to understand our ambition, idea, and rationalism in the business field.

26. Protect our cash flow

According to In Search of Solid Ground: Understanding the Financial Vulnerabilities of Microbusiness Owners, the key to successful small business is “a discipline in controlling our finances and business cash flow.” Take a look at the following points to ensure that our company has a good cash flow:

■ Improve our values.

■ Stimulate receivable models.

■ Enlarge receivable schedule.

■ Set inventory levels.

■ Get a loan when we need instant cash flow.

Besides, produce a cash flow plan for the next six-to-eight weeks to address any cash flow problems.

27. Control credit availability and authority

There will be moments when we need to secure our credit, like when we face a gap among receivables because of seasonality, inventory expansion, and business growth. Those issues can ruin our business growth, and we don’t have the cash in hand to return it. To overcome it, we should take control of credit for an emergency.

28. Use SWOT analysis for a better business plan

Conducting a SWOT analysis of our business is a lot more fun than it sounds. It won’t need much time, and doing it pushes us to reflect on our business in a whole new way.

SWOT analysis can develop a strong business strategy by ensuring we have considered the strengths and weaknesses, along with the opportunities and threats encountered in the marketplace .

29. Talk about our team

The best businesses that make it past the ten-year mark have one thing in common. They have a business plan, a good team, and a capable business leader. In investor circles, it is a common saying that they do not finance a business but invest in the people running it. Having the idea without a team will turn it into a reality that comes off as a business that will hardly get off the ground.

In addition to that, a team with strong relationships is vital to a business’s success, and investors push this point for startups and emerging companies. Including our team’s aspects in our business plan, we will have a high chance of getting funding from investors and attracting potential partners.

30. Upgrade our business plan

Everything has changed. We can’t predict what will happen later on. Our product or service may be outdated soon, making our financial situation lower than we expect. To anticipate it, we need to create new goals by moving forward in an organized and efficient way . These procedures can inspire us to forecast that possible thing:

■ Make a blueprint of our business to describe the concept, philosophy, and purpose.

■ Job responsibilities and discipline improvement

■ Scheduling meetings or tracking cash flow.

Hopefully, the three factors above will provide you with a clear explanation of your company’s processes to place you in the right policies.

See also: 18 Ways to Become PowerPoint Experts RRSlide 2.0: Why Do We Redesign Everything? How to Make Your Social Media Marketing Plan  7 CV Design Types that 100% Works for Online Job Seekers

What else do you need to improve your business plan?

Briefly, the best way to improve our business plan is to have an open and positive mindset. Most entrepreneurs write business plans to get funding, while others use them to run their businesses. Similarly, some areas will need some additions in generating your business plan, while others will require tweaks. Hopefully, those guidelines above will help us in improving our business plan.

Let’s visit RRSlide to download free PowerPoint presentation templates  with many categories. But wait, don’t go anywhere and stay here with our Blog to stay up-to-date on all the  best pitch deck template collections and design advice from our PowerPoint experts yet to come!

Lauren Clarke writes this article. Lauren writes guest posts for several innovative brands and media outlets around the world. Lauren loves red wine, and bush walks, and meditating. You can find Lauren on Twitter .

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4 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Business Plan

One of the most versatile documents a business can and must create is a business plan. While most companies know to create a plan when starting out, when done right, the real benefits come later.

Let’s start by discussing why most organizations create a business plan in the first place. There are two core reasons. The first is funding. Unless you’re Elon Musk, if you want funding for a new venture, you need to present banks or investors with a business plan.

The second reason why business plans are created when launching is for strategic purposes. When hashing out a new concept, putting it on paper helps you to cover all the bases. These bases include discussing your market size, customer targets, marketing plan, management team, operations plan, and financial projections.

Documenting your thoughts forces you to think through the opportunity. Is it worth pursuing? How am I going to attract customers? Who must I hire? How much funding do I need? Being able to answer these questions are key to your initial success.

Unfortunately, most businesses never update their business plans. This is a shame, since doing so can greatly improve your success. So, I encourage you to update your plan, and leverage the following 4 concepts to make it dramatically better.

1) Explain Why Your Company Is Uniquely Qualified to Succeed

In my business plan template , I have a key paragraph on the first page that starts with the following phrase: “My business is uniquely qualified to succeed because.”

This is one of the most important paragraphs in any business plan. Why? Because if your business isn’t uniquely qualified to succeed, how can it thrive? What’s to stop competitors from stealing your sales and profits?

Let me use an example of a local bakery to illustrate this. Let’s say your bakery is doing okay, but there’s nothing unique about it. And then one day, another bakery opens a block away. What’s going to happen to your sales and profits? Most likely they will go down significantly.

Now, let’s consider a scenario in which your bakery was uniquely qualified to succeed.

Let’s start with your team. If you had a highly trained team that knew how to bake superior products and provide great customer service, that would be a unique qualification that would keep sales and profits strong despite competition.

What about your customers? What if you had a large group of customers paying you on a monthly subscription for your baked goods. That would be unique. And what if your bakery had relationships with coffee shops and other retailers which sold your products. Most of these sales would survive competitive pressures.

And what about marketing? Let’s say you’ve secured an exclusive sponsorship for local events that constantly put your bakery’s name in front of customers. This too would make it harder for competitors to steal your business; in fact, it would probably deter competitors from even entering your market.

I hope you get the point. Creating unique qualifications to succeed, like the examples above, will fuel both your short-term and long-term success. So, when you write your business plan today, start by documenting why you are currently uniquely qualified to succeed. And, more importantly, brainstorm ways in which you could add new unique qualifications and how you will attain them.

2) Break Out Your Long-Term Goals into Smaller, Actionable Milestones

Great accomplishments do not occur overnight. Rather, they can take weeks, months and even years. And importantly, great accomplishments are often comprised of multiple pieces. The key to success is to break down your goals into smaller milestones you can attain.

Let’s say you’d like to build a new product in the next year (ideally a product that will make your company more uniquely qualified to succeed) . That’s a good annual goal. But in order to actually achieve it, you should break it into smaller milestones in your business plan.

For example, you might write that in the first month you’ll document the key product features you’d like to build. During months 2 and 3 you will build a basic prototype. During month 4 you will share the prototype with your team and gain feedback. During months 5 through 8 you will incorporate feedback and build the beta version of your product. During month 9 you will beta test the product with real customers. And during months 10, 11 and 12, you will refine the product and get it ready for launch.

By breaking out your long-term goal into smaller, actionable milestones, your chances of achieving it grow exponentially. It also makes management much easier. At the beginning of each month everyone on your team knows the goal, and at the end of the month you can assess performance against that goal. Importantly, you can course-correct each month as needed if you’re ahead of or behind the goal. Conversely, by simply setting an annual goal, you wouldn’t be able to course-correct for months, and would most likely not complete your goal on time.

3) Update Your Financial Projections

At a minimum, you need to create a new financial forecast annually. From a goal perspective, if your team doesn’t have clear sales goals, you’ll limit your success. Likewise, if sales are too low, and you haven’t accounted for this possibility, you may run out of cash. And conversely, if sales are too high, you may not have the funding to fulfill them.

By creating annual financial forecasts, you cannot only set goals to motivate your team, but you can be made aware of potential cash shortfalls in advance. This allows you the time to raise external funding if needed. Raising funding can often take 6 months or more, and many a company has either stalled or failed completed when hitting a cash crunch with not enough time to resolve it.

4) Identify Growth Opportunities

The fourth way to improve your business plan and your company’s success is to identify and pursue growth opportunities.

Most companies focus their growth on selling more of their current products/services to existing customers, which is known as “market penetration.”

While this is a solid growth strategy, there are 3 other options to consider:

1. Selling new products/services to existing customers (“product development”)

2. Selling existing products/services to new markets (“market development”)

3. Selling new products/services to new markets (“diversification”)

“Market penetration” and “product development” are the least risky (highest chance of success) of the four growth strategies and should be considered equally. While “market development” and “diversification” are riskier strategies, they must still be assessed as often the impact of succeeding with them can revolutionize your company’s success.

Importantly, when creating your business plan, brainstorm and consider all four strategies. Then decide as to which strategies you will pursue, and break each into smaller milestones as discussed above.

Updating your business plan at least annually ensures you have the best strategy and goals to succeed. Use the four tips above to make your plan even stronger, and to achieve the success you deserve.

Author Bio:

Dave Lavinsky is a serial entrepreneur and the president and founder of Growthink . Since 1999, Growthink has helped over 500,000 entrepreneurs and business owners to start and grow their companies.  Dave is also the founder of BusinessPlanTemplate.com which provides business plan templates for a wide range of industries.

About Author

Dave lavinsky.

Dave Lavinsky is a serial entrepreneur and the president and founder of Growthink. Since 1999, Growthink has helped over 500,000 entrepreneurs and business owners to start and grow their companies. Dave is also the founder of BusinessPlanTemplate.com which provides business plan templates for a wide range of industries.

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How to Improve Your Business Plan Using Visualization

Updated on: 26 August 2021

For the past 20 years, I’ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners write business plans. In doing so, I’ve learned that the perfect business plan must be both functional and easy to read.

With regards to functional, a business plan should provide a clear roadmap of how you’re going to grow your company. And with regards to “easy to read,” your plan can’t include pages and pages of text sure to make readers cringe.

Rather, you want people to enjoy reading your plan, so they take the action you desire such as funding your business.

Fortunately, when adding Creately to your business plan, you can make your plan both more functional and easier to read.

To confirm this, I used my core business plan template and brainstormed the best places to add Creately diagrams to improve your business plan. Below are five areas I found where Creately can provide significant value.

Company Overview

In the Company Overview section of your business plan, you want to detail what your company has already accomplished to date. This is because past accomplishments are a great indicator of future success.

A Creately chart, like the one below, is a great way to show these accomplishments.

Industry Analysis

It’s very important for readers to understand the size of your marketplace.

And oftentimes your business may compete in more than one market. Using a Venn Diagram within Creately is a great way to quickly explain to readers the markets you’re targeting and their sizes.

A great visualization technique to illustrate your company’s position within the industry is a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis illustrates the strengths and weaknesses that exist within the internal environment of the company and opportunities and threats that exist within the external environment of the organization.

It can help you effectively present the current position and the circumstances of your company within the industry to the reader. Creately has many professionally designed SWOT analysis templates so you can get started instantly.

Key Operational Processes

Your business plan should detail the key day-to-day processes that your company performs to generate sales and profits.

Having a Creately flowchart , like the one below, allows you to easily document your processes and show them to others.

Risk Mitigating Milestones

A “risk mitigating milestone” is a milestone that, once completed, reduces the risk your venture will fail. As such, investors and lenders need to understand your milestones and how they relate to one another.

The Creately Gantt chart below allows the reader to quickly and easily see your company’s milestones. You can even add in times when additional funding might be required.

Management Team

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great management teams are not.

The fact is that the quality of your management team is crucial to your company’s success. In your business plan, you should detail who is on your team and your reporting structure.

Also, if you need to hire a key person to improve your team, you should include the title and responsibilities of that person in your plan.

A great way to show your management team in your plan is via a Creately Organization Chart as shown below:

In summary, making your business plan both functional and easy to read will dramatically improve its success, and Creately is a great tool to achieve this most easily.

Dave Lavinsky is a serial entrepreneur and the president and founder of Growthink , which since 1999, has helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs create business plans.  Dave is also the founder of BusinessPlanTemplate.com which provides templates for specific niches ranging from restaurants to internet businesses.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

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10 Tips to Improve Business Efficiency

Briana Morgaine

8 min. read

Updated October 24, 2023

Your company is running smoothly enough, but you know things could be better. Sometimes, a project gets hung up a few days too long, or meetings that once felt productive and useful now seem to drag on for hours. It can feel like wheels spinning in the mud, and it’s hard to get that traction back.

How can you fix these kinds of issues? By focusing on improving the efficiency of your business. I asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council for their tips on how they keep their businesses running efficiently, which in turn helps them be more productive.

• 1. Automate whatever tasks you can

Whether it be sending out pay stubs to employees or sending receipts to vendors, automate whatever you can. “Business automation is not just a luxury; it is a necessity in today’s competitive environment,” says Sathvik Tantry of FormSwift. “Automating monotonous tasks saves your employees time and allows them to do more productive tasks that require critical thinking or a human touch.”

Sathvik adds that while it might be pricier to implement automated processes in the beginning, in the long run it will cut costs, as well as increase business efficiency.

• 2. Encourage your employees to chat face-to-face

While sending a quick email or chat message to a coworker might seem like a more efficient way of getting an answer, oftentimes it can have the opposite effect, as the subsequent back-and-forth can take longer than a quick face-to-face. “Skype, Google Chat and other online communication tools are always helpful when trying to shoot over a quick message to your colleagues,” says Miles Jennings of Recruiter. “However, face-to-face interaction really speeds up the process of solving a problem, answering a question, or getting something important clarified.”

How can you make sure your employees balance the two for optimum efficiency? “Encouraging employees to openly talk with each other when they need to will create a steady flow of information,” says Miles.

While chat and email have their place, by making sure your employees are comfortable communicating face-to-face, you’ll keep your business moving efficiently, and a problem that could have been solved in a five-minute face-to-face chat won’t end as a 20-message-long email thread.

• 3. Limit interruptions

Staff meeting at 9am, department meeting at 11am, lunch at noon—if your employees are having trouble completing tasks efficiently, it might be a result of constant interruptions. “We try to schedule multiple meetings on the same day rather than scattering them throughout the week, and we block out time on our calendars for actively working,” says Alexander Moore of Boomerang. Blocking out chunks of time for uninterrupted work may help your employees focus better, and work more efficiently as a result.

But, meetings aren’t the only offenders—constant email alerts, chat message pop ups, and notifications from your in-house project management software can all serve as distractions that interrupt the flow of work. “In general, it takes about a minute to resume working effectively after an interruption,” says Alexander. “For that reason, we use tools like Inbox Pause to reduce email notifications.” There are plenty of tools and apps to keep your work distraction free, which may help you work more efficiently.

• 4. Hold a daily, 10-minute company meeting

While meetings are generally considered a necessity, they can carry on to the point where they eat away at the work day. David Ciccarelli of Voices.com suggests shorter, more efficient meetings, that cover the basics in 10 minutes flat.

“Each day, we gather as a company for a 10-minute meeting called the Daily Huddle,” he says. “The meeting serves as a firehose of information that keeps everyone in the loop, including a roundup of our key performance indicators, the celebration of accomplishments, and the identification of opportunities to improve.”

Not only is it a good way to keep all employees up to speed on any new developments within the company, keeping meetings short and sweet forces a streamlined meeting process, and reduces time wasted. “This process keeps us running efficiently, as unnecessary meetings are eliminated,” says David.

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5. “Single-task” to get more done

We all think that we’re excellent multitaskers; I currently have 11 tabs open on my laptop—and that’s a conservative number compared with some days. However, it’s thought that while people can potentially multitask, they’re not necessarily being more productive. So, here’s where the idea of “single-tasking” (or focusing on one task only until completion) comes into play.

“Our entire company is currently working on upping our ‘single-tasking’ game and not moving on to the next project until the current one is complete,” says Laura Roeder of Meet Edgar.  

She goes on to explain: “‘Single-tasking’ allows you to get more done quickly by not letting projects rot on the vine when they’re almost complete. It’s easy to falsely feel productive when you have 10 projects going on, but nothing actually getting out into the world.”

Focusing on “single-tasking” until a project is complete helps you actually execute, rather than chipping away at so many different projects that nothing ever gets finished.

6. Discourage “Got a minute?” meetings

“One of the most common and inefficient uses of time and energy are frequent ‘got a minute?’ meetings,” says Kristopher Jones of LSEO. “These meetings are the ones that are unscheduled and typically distract from productivity.”

Why are these meetings bad for office efficiency? “The reality is that almost nothing important can be accomplished in one minute, which means one minute turns into 15 minutes or longer and ends up being a terribly inefficient management of time,” says Kristopher.

Instead, try to schedule quick meetings with a designated time span, and stick to the topic you need to discuss. Even a simple email asking, “Can we meet for 10 minutes at 3pm to discuss the completion of project X?” accomplishes the goals of keeping the meeting short, scheduled, and face-to-face.

• 7. Stick with the established process

If you have a project that is already underway, trying to speed things up can result in cutting corners. “Stick with the process that is established,” recommends Angela Harless of AcrobatAnt. “If we try to cut corners to speed up the process, something gets missed, which must be fixed later and costs time and money. Things go more smoothly if we stick to the process we started with.”

Does that mean never change things up? Of course not—that would probably render most of our earlier suggestions useless! But, if you’re changing a process, do so deliberately, not just on a whim or because you’re behind schedule. “Processes can be changed, but they should be changed intentionally and with communication to the full team after the potential change has been approved,” says Angela.

• 8. Use a task management software

“Email isn’t an ideal method of communication or collaboration on teams,” says Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff. “We use task management software like Trello so that our communication and work progress is all in one place.”

A task management software for designated teams can help everyone work together more efficiently, track progress, and stay on task. “It saves everyone the time of having to go back and forth on emails, and it also lets us track progress more efficiently,” says David. Here at Palo Alto Software, we agree—and we’re also big fans of Trello, too.

• 9. Promote a culture of open communication

Just like in tip number two, encourage your employees to communicate openly. But, that goes beyond the idea of communicating face-to-face to solve problems; do your employees feel comfortable voicing their concerns, or giving feedback on how your company is run?

“The main reason for our explosive growth is due to the fact that we have a culture of open communication,” says Raymond Kishk of Interstate Air Conditioning & Heating. “The best way to improve business efficiency is to encourage feedback, ideas, and communication between departments.”

You can’t be everywhere at once, nor will you see everything. Your employees may be able to spot an area of your company that could be made more efficient, or a process that could be streamlined. Make sure they feel comfortable voicing their opinions, and offering feedback, especially when it comes to improving efficiency. “By encouraging coworkers to be part of the efficiency process, it will result in a more productive and efficient team,” says Raymond.

• 10. Know when to stop

While it’s important to smooth out as many kinks as possible to help your company run more efficiently, you also need to know where to draw the line. Not every process can—or should—be automated, just like not every meeting will always end at its scheduled time.

“Efficiency is important—no question,” says Neill Feather of SiteLock, LLC. “But for startups and entrepreneurs, focusing too much on efficiency can distract from what is really important for our businesses: growth.”

Neill has experienced this with his own business: “At SiteLock, we do focus on efficiency in key areas: hardware utilization, service-level agreements, etc., but we always remind ourselves that our most important goal is growth. This includes customers served, products offered, and brand strength.”

It’s important to strive for efficiency, but don’t let the goal of running a more efficient business overshadow other goals. Through trial and error, and by getting feedback from your employees throughout the process, you’ll be able to monitor what is working and what isn’t, and improve your business efficiency—all the while continuing to grow and strengthen your business.

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

Bri Morgaine is a seasoned content marketing leader with a decade of experience in copy editing, social media operations, and content strategy— having honed her skills at industry giants like Palo Alto Software and Andreessen Horowitz.

Table of Contents

• 5. “Single-task” to get more done
• 6. Discourage “Got a minute?” meetings

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How to improve a business plan

Here are some tips for improving a business plan:

Keep it concise : A business plan should be clear and concise, no longer than 20-30 pages. Long, rambling business plans can be overwhelming and may not hold the reader's attention.

Use clear and simple language: Avoid using industry jargon or overly complicated language. Your business plan should be easy to understand and accessible to a wide audience, including investors and lenders who may not be familiar with your industry.

Use data to support your points : Back up your claims and strategies with data and research. This will help make your business plan more credible and persuasive.

Include financial projections : Financial projections are a key component of a business plan, as they help demonstrate the feasibility and potential profitability of your business. Make sure to include detailed income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.

Proofread and edit: A business plan with spelling and grammar errors can be a major turn-off to potential investors. Make sure to proofread and edit your business plan carefully before presenting it to others.

Update regularly : A business plan is not a one-time document; it should be reviewed and updated regularly as your business grows and changes. Make sure to set aside time to review and revise your business plan at least once a year.

By following these tips, you can improve the overall quality and effectiveness of your business plan.

A strong and well-written business plan can be a powerful tool for attracting investors, securing funding, and driving business growth.

If you need help with your business plan, get in touch with the expert business plan writers at PitchBuilder.

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How to Write a Business Plan (Plus Examples & Templates)

• 3 years ago

Have you ever wondered how to write a business plan step by step? Mike Andes, told us: 

This guide will help you write a business plan to impress investors.

Throughout this process, we’ll get information from Mike Andes, who started Augusta Lawn Care Services when he was 12 and turned it into a franchise with over 90 locations. He has gone on to help others learn how to write business plans and start businesses.  He knows a thing or two about writing  business plans!

We’ll start by discussing the definition of a business plan. Then we’ll discuss how to come up with the idea, how to do the market research, and then the important elements in the business plan format. Keep reading to start your journey!

What Is a Business Plan?

A business plan is simply a road map of what you are trying to achieve with your business and how you will go about achieving it. It should cover all elements of your business including: 

• Finding customers
• Plans for developing a team
•  Competition
• Legal structures
• Key milestones you are pursuing

If you aren’t quite ready to create a business plan, consider starting by reading our business startup guide .

Get a Business Idea

Before you can write a business plan, you have to have a business idea. You may see a problem that needs to be solved and have an idea how to solve it, or you might start by evaluating your interests and skills. 

Mike told us, “The three things I suggest asking yourself when thinking about starting a business are:

• What am I good at?
• What would I enjoy doing?
• What can I get paid for?”

If all three of these questions don’t lead to at least one common answer, it will probably be a much harder road to success. Either there is not much market for it, you won’t be good at it, or you won’t enjoy doing it. 

As Mike told us, “There’s enough stress starting and running a business that if you don’t like it or aren’t good at it, it’s hard to succeed.”

If you’d like to hear more about Mike’s approach to starting a business, check out our YouTube video

Conduct Market Analysis

Market analysis is focused on establishing if there is a target market for your products and services, how large the target market is, and identifying the demographics of people or businesses that would be interested in the product or service. The goal here is to establish how much money your business concept can make.

Product and Service Demand

A search engine is your best friend when trying to figure out if there is demand for your products and services. Personally, I love using presearch.org because it lets you directly search on a ton of different platforms including Google, Youtube, Twitter, and more. Check out the screenshot for the full list of search options.

With quick web searches, you can find out how many competitors you have, look through their reviews, and see if there are common complaints about the competitors. Bad reviews are a great place to find opportunities to offer better products or services. 

If there are no similar products or services, you may have stumbled upon something new, or there may just be no demand for it. To find out, go talk to your most honest friend about the idea and see what they think. If they tell you it’s dumb or stare at you vacantly, there’s probably no market for it.

You can also conduct a survey through social media to get public opinion on your idea. Using Facebook Business Manager , you could get a feel for who would be interested in your product or service.

 I ran a quick test of how many people between 18-65  you could reach in the U.S. during a week. It returned an estimated 700-2,000 for the total number of leads, which is enough to do a fairly accurate statistical analysis.

Identify Demographics of Target Market

Depending on what type of business you want to run, your target market will be different. The narrower the demographic, the fewer potential customers you’ll have. If you did a survey, you’ll be able to use that data to help define your target audience. Some considerations you’ll want to consider are:

• Other Interests
• Marital Status
• Do they have kids?

Once you have this information, it can help you narrow down your options for location and help define your marketing further. One resource that Mike recommended using is the Census Bureau’s Quick Facts Map . He told us,  

“It helps you quickly evaluate what the best areas are for your business to be located.”

How to Write a Business Plan

Now that you’ve developed your idea a little and established there is a market for it, you can begin writing a business plan. Getting started is easier with the business plan template we created for you to download. I strongly recommend using it as it is updated to make it easier to create an action plan. 

Each of the following should be a section of your business plan:

• Business Plan Cover Page
• Table of Contents
• Executive Summary
• Company Description
• Description of Products and Services

SWOT Analysis

• Competitor Data
• Competitive Analysis
• Marketing Expenses Strategy 

Pricing Strategy

• Distribution Channel Assessment
• Operational Plan
• Management and Organizational Strategy
• Financial Statements and/or Financial Projections

We’ll look into each of these. Don’t forget to download our free business plan template (mentioned just above) so you can follow along as we go. 

How to Write a Business Plan Step 1. Create a Cover Page

The first thing investors will see is the cover page for your business plan. Make sure it looks professional. A great cover page shows that you think about first impressions.

A good business plan should have the following elements on a cover page:

• Professionally designed logo
• Company name
• Mission or Vision Statement
• Contact Info

Basically, think of a cover page for your business plan like a giant business card. It is meant to capture people’s attention but be quickly processed.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 2. Create a Table of Contents

Most people are busy enough that they don’t have a lot of time. Providing a table of contents makes it easy for them to find the pages of your plan that are meaningful to them.

A table of contents will be immediately after the cover page, but you can include it after the executive summary. Including the table of contents immediately after the executive summary will help investors know what section of your business plan they want to review more thoroughly.

Check out Canva’s article about creating a  table of contents . It has a ton of great information about creating easy access to each section of your business plan. Just remember that you’ll want to use different strategies for digital and hard copy business plans.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 3. Write an Executive Summary

An executive summary is where your business plan should catch the readers interest.  It doesn’t need to be long, but should be quick and easy to read.

Mike told us,

How long should an executive summary bein an informal business plan?

For casual use, an executive summary should be similar to an elevator pitch, no more than 150-160 words, just enough to get them interested and wanting more. Indeed has a great article on elevator pitches .  This can also be used for the content of emails to get readers’ attention.

It consists of three basic parts:

• An introduction to you and your business.
• What your business is about.
• A call to action

Example of an informal executive summary 

One of the best elevator pitches I’ve used is:

So far that pitch has achieved a 100% success rate in getting partnerships for the business.

What should I include in an executive summary for investors?

Investors are going to need a more detailed executive summary if you want to secure financing or sell equity. The executive summary should be a brief overview of your entire business plan and include:

• Introduction of yourself and company.
• An origin story (Recognition of a problem and how you came to solution)
• An introduction to your products or services.
• Your unique value proposition. Make sure to include intellectual property.
• Where you are in the business life cycle
• Request and why you need it.

Successful business plan examples

The owner of Urbanity told us he spent 2 months writing a 75-page business plan and received a $250,000 loan from the bank when he was 23. Make your business plan as detailed as possible when looking for financing. We’ve provided a template to help you prepare the portions of a business plan that banks expect.

Here’s the interview with the owner of Urbanity:

When to write an executive summary?

Even though the summary is near the beginning of a business plan, you should write it after you complete the rest of a business plan. You can’t talk about revenue, profits, and expected expenditures if you haven’t done the market research and created a financial plan.

What mistakes do people make when writing an executive summary?

Business owners commonly go into too much detail about the following items in an executive summary:

• Marketing and sales processes
• Financial statements
• Organizational structure
• Market analysis

These are things that people will want to know later, but they don’t hook the reader. They won’t spark interest in your small business, but they’ll close the deal.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 4. Company Description

Every business plan should include a company description. A great business plan will include the following elements while describing the company:

• Mission statement
• Philosophy and vision
• Company goals

Target market

• Legal structure

Let’s take a look at what each section includes in a good business plan.

Mission Statement

A mission statement is a brief explanation of why you started the company and what the company’s main focus is. It should be no more than one or two sentences. Check out HubSpot’s article 27 Inspiring Mission Statement for a great read on informative and inspiring mission and vision statements. 

Company Philosophy and Vision

The company philosophy is what drives your company. You’ll normally hear them called core values.  These are the building blocks that make your company different. You want to communicate your values to customers, business owners, and investors as often as possible to build a company culture, but make sure to back them up.

What makes your company different?

Each company is different. Your new business should rise above the standard company lines of honesty, integrity, fun, innovation, and community when communicating your business values. The standard answers are corporate jargon and lack authenticity. 

Examples of core values

One of my clients decided to add a core values page to their website. As a tech company they emphasized the values:

•  Prioritize communication.
•  Never stop learning.
•  Be transparent.
•  Start small and grow incrementally.

These values communicate how the owner and the rest of the company operate. They also show a value proposition and competitive advantage because they specifically focus on delivering business value from the start. These values also genuinely show what the company is about and customers recognize the sincerity. Indeed has a great blog about how to identify your core values .

What is a vision statement?

A vision statement communicate the long lasting change a business pursues. The vision helps investors and customers understand what your company is trying to accomplish. The vision statement goes beyond a mission statement to provide something meaningful to the community, customer’s lives, or even the world.

Example vision statements

The Alzheimer’s Association is a great example of a vision statement:

A world without Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia.

It clearly tells how they want to change the world. A world without Alzheimers might be unachievable, but that means they always have room for improvement.

Business Goals

You have to measure success against goals for a business plan to be meaningful. A business plan helps guide a company similar to how your GPS provides a road map to your favorite travel destination. A goal to make as much money as possible is not inspirational and sounds greedy.

Sure, business owners want to increase their profits and improve customer service, but they need to present an overview of what they consider success. The goals should help everyone prioritize their work.

How far in advance should a business plan?

Business planning should be done at least one year in advance, but many banks and investors prefer three to five year business plans. Longer plans show investors that the management team  understands the market and knows the business is operating in a constantly shifting market. In addition, a plan helps businesses to adjust to changes because they have already considered how to handle them.

Example of great business goals

My all time-favorite long-term company goals are included in Tesla’s Master Plan, Part Deux . These goals were written in 2016 and drive the company’s decisions through 2026. They are the reason that investors are so forgiving when Elon Musk continually fails to meet his quarterly and annual goals.

If the progress aligns with the business plan investors are likely to continue to believe in the company. Just make sure the goals are reasonable or you’ll be discredited (unless you’re Elon Musk).

You did target market research before creating a business plan. Now it’s time to add it to the plan so others understand what your ideal customer looks like. As a new business owner, you may not be considered an expert in your field yet, so document everything. Make sure the references you use are from respectable sources. 

Use information from the specific lender when you are applying for lending. Most lenders provide industry research reports and using their data can strengthen the position of your business plan.

A small business plan should include a section on the external environment. Understanding the industry is crucial because we don’t plan a business in a vacuum. Make sure to research the industry trends, competitors, and forecasts. I personally prefer IBIS World for my business research. Make sure to answer questions like:

• What is the industry outlook long-term and short-term?
• How will your business take advantage of projected industry changes and trends?
• What might happen to your competitors and how will your business successfully compete?

Industry resources

Some helpful resources to help you establish more about your industry are:

• Trade Associations
• Federal Reserve
• Bureau of Labor Statistics

Legal Structure

There are five basic types of legal structures that most people will utilize:

• Sole proprietorships
• Limited Liability Companies (LLC)

Partnerships

Corporations.

• Franchises.

Each business structure has their pros and cons. An LLC is the most common legal structure due to its protection of personal assets and ease of setting up. Make sure to specify how ownership is divided and what roles each owner plays when you have more than one business owner.

You’ll have to decide which structure is best for you, but we’ve gathered information on each to make it easier.

Sole Proprietorship

A sole proprietorship is the easiest legal structure to set up but doesn’t protect the owner’s personal assets from legal issues. That means if something goes wrong, you could lose both your company and your home.

To start a sole proprietorship, fill out a special tax form called a  Schedule C . Sole proprietors can also join the American Independent Business Alliance .

Limited Liability Company (LLC)

An LLC is the most common business structure used in the United States because an LLC protects the owner’s personal assets. It’s similar to partnerships and corporations, but can be a single-member LLC in most states. An LLC requires a document called an operating agreement.

Each state has different requirements. Here’s a link to find your state’s requirements . Delaware and Nevada are common states to file an LLC because they are really business-friendly. Here’s a blog on the top 10 states to get an LLC.

Partnerships are typically for legal firms. If you choose to use a partnership choose a Limited Liability Partnership. Alternatively, you can just use an LLC.

Corporations are typically for massive organizations. Corporations have taxes on both corporate and income tax so unless you plan on selling stock, you are better off considering an LLC with S-Corp status . Investopedia has good information corporations here .

There are several opportunities to purchase successful franchises. TopFranchise.com has a list of companies in a variety of industries that offer franchise opportunities. This makes it where an entrepreneur can benefit from the reputation of an established business that has already worked out many of the kinks of starting from scratch.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 5. Products and Services

This section of the business plan should focus on what you sell, how you source it, and how you sell it. You should include:

• Unique features that differentiate your business products from competitors
• Intellectual property
• Your supply chain
• Cost and pricing structure 

Questions to answer about your products and services

Mike gave us a list  of the most important questions to answer about your product and services:

• How will you be selling the product? (in person, ecommerce, wholesale, direct to consumer)?
• How do you let them know they need a product?
• How do you communicate the message?
• How will you do transactions?
• How much will you be selling it for?
• How many do you think you’ll sell and why?

Make sure to use the worksheet on our business plan template .

How to Write a Business Plan Step 6. Sales and Marketing Plan

The marketing and sales plan is focused on the strategy to bring awareness to your company and guides how you will get the product to the consumer.  It should contain the following sections:

SWOT Analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Not only do you want to identify them, but you also want to document how the business plans to deal with them.

Business owners need to do a thorough job documenting how their service or product stacks up against the competition.

If proper research isn’t done, investors will be able to tell that the owner hasn’t researched the competition and is less likely to believe that the team can protect its service from threats by the more well-established competition. This is one of the most common parts of a presentation that trips up business owners presenting on Shark Tank .

SWOT Examples

Examples of strengths and weaknesses could be things like the lack of cash flow, intellectual property ownership, high costs of suppliers, and customers’ expectations on shipping times.

Opportunities could be ways to capitalize on your strengths or improve your weaknesses, but may also be gaps in the industry. This includes:

• Adding offerings that fit with your current small business
• Increase sales to current customers
• Reducing costs through bulk ordering
• Finding ways to reduce inventory
•  And other areas you can improve

Threats will normally come from outside of the company but could also be things like losing a key member of the team. Threats normally come from competition, regulations, taxes, and unforeseen events.

The management team should use the SWOT analysis to guide other areas of business planning, but it absolutely has to be done before a business owner starts marketing. 

Include Competitor Data in Your Business Plan

When you plan a business, taking into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the competition is key to navigating the field. Providing an overview of your competition and where they are headed shows that you are invested in understanding the industry.

For smaller businesses, you’ll want to search both the company and the owners names to see what they are working on. For publicly held corporations, you can find their quarterly and annual reports on the SEC website .

What another business plans to do can impact your business. Make sure to include things that might make it attractive for bigger companies to outsource to a small business.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing and sales part of business plans should be focused on how you are going to make potential customers aware of your business and then sell to them.

If you haven’t already included it, Mike recommends:

“They’ll want to know about Demographics, ages, and wealth of your target market.”

Make sure to include the Total addressable market .  The term refers to the value if you captured 100% of the market.

Advertising Strategy

You’ll explain what formats of advertising you’ll be using. Some possibilities are:

• Online: Facebook and Google are the big names to work with here.
• Print : Print can be used to reach broad groups or targeted markets. Check out this for tips .
• Radio : iHeartMedia is one of the best ways to advertise on the radio
• Cable television : High priced, hard to measure ROI, but here’s an explanation of the process
• Billboards: Attracting customers with billboards can be beneficial in high traffic areas.

You’ll want to define how you’ll be using each including frequency, duration, and cost. If you have the materials already created, including pictures or links to the marketing to show creative assets.

Mike told us “Most businesses are marketing digitally now due to Covid, but that’s not always the right answer.”

Make sure the marketing strategy will help team members or external marketing agencies stay within the brand guidelines .

This section of a business plan should be focused on pricing. There are a ton of pricing strategies that may work for different business plans. Which one will work for you depends on what kind of a business you run.

Some common pricing strategies are:

• Value-based pricing – Commonly used with home buying and selling or other products that are status symbols.
• Skimming pricing – Commonly seen in video game consoles, price starts off high to recoup expenses quickly, then reduces over time.
• Competition-based pricing – Pricing based on competitors’ pricing is commonly seen at gas stations.
• Freemium services –  Commonly used for software, where there is a free plan, then purchase options for more functionality.

HubSpot has a great calculator and blog on pricing strategies.

Beyond explaining what strategy your business plans to use, you should include references for how you came to this pricing strategy and how it will impact your cash flow.

Distribution Plan

This part of a business plan is focused on how the product or service is going to go through the supply chain. These may include multiple divisions or multiple companies. Make sure to include any parts of the workflow that are automated so investors can see where cost savings are expected and when.

Supply Chain Examples

For instance, lawn care companies  would need to cover aspects such as:

• Suppliers for lawn care equipment and tools
• Any chemicals or treatments needed
• Repair parts for sprinkler systems
• Vehicles to transport equipment and employees
• Insurance to protect the company vehicles and people.

Examples of Supply Chains

These are fairly flat supply chains compared to something like a clothing designer where the clothes would go through multiple vendors. A clothing company might have the following supply chain:

• Raw materials
• Shipping of raw materials
• Converting of raw materials to thread
• Shipping thread to produce garments
• Garment producer
• Shipping to company
• Company storage
• Shipping to retail stores

There have been advances such as print on demand that eliminate many of these steps. If you are designing completely custom clothing, all of this would need to be planned to keep from having business disruptions.

The main thing to include in the business plan is the list of suppliers, the path the supply chain follows, the time from order to the customer’s home, and the costs associated with each step of the process.

According to BizPlanReview , a business plan without this information is likely to get rejected because they have failed to research the key elements necessary to make sales to the customer.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 7. Company Organization and Operational Plan

This part of the business plan is focused on how the business model will function while serving customers.  The business plan should provide an overview of  how the team will manage the following aspects:

Quality Control

• Legal environment

Let’s look at each for some insight.

Production has already been discussed in previous sections so I won’t go into it much. When writing a business plan for investors, try to avoid repetition as it creates a more simple business plan.

If the organizational plan will be used by the team as an overview of how to perform the best services for the customer, then redundancy makes more sense as it communicates what is important to the business.

Quality control policies help to keep the team focused on how to verify that the company adheres to the business plan and meets or exceeds customer expectations.

Quality control can be anything from a standard that says “all labels on shirts can be no more than 1/16″ off center” to a defined checklist of steps that should be performed and filled out for every customer.

There are a variety of organizations that help define quality control including:

• International Organization for Standardization – Quality standards for energy, technology, food, production environments, and cybersecurity
• AICPA – Standard defined for accounting.
• The Joint Commission – Healthcare
• ASHRAE – HVAC best practices

You can find lists of the organizations that contribute most to the government regulation of industries on Open Secrets . Research what the leaders in your field are doing. Follow their example and implement it in your quality control plan.

For location, you should use information from the market research to establish where the location will be. Make sure to include the following in the location documentation.

• The size of your location
• The type of building (retail, industrial, commercial, etc.)
• Zoning restrictions – Urban Wire has a good map on how zoning works in each state
• Accessibility – Does it meet ADA requirements?
• Costs including rent, maintenance, utilities, insurance and any buildout or remodeling costs
• Utilities – b.e.f. has a good energy calculator .

Legal Environment

The legal requirement section is focused on defining how to meet the legal requirements for your industry. A good business plan should include all of the following:

• Any licenses and/or permits that are needed and whether you’ve obtained them
• Any trademarks, copyrights, or patents that you have or are in the process of applying for
• The insurance coverage your business requires and how much it costs
• Any environmental, health, or workplace regulations affecting your business
• Any special regulations affecting your industry
• Bonding requirements, if applicable

Your local SBA office can help you establish requirements in your area. I strongly recommend using them. They are a great resource.

Your business plan should include a plan for company organization and hiring. While you may be the only person with the company right now, down the road you’ll need more people. Make sure to consider and document the answers to the following questions:

• What is the current leadership structure and what will it look like in the future?
• What types of employees will you have? Are there any licensing or educational requirements?
• How many employees will you need?
• Will you ever hire freelancers or independent contractors?
• What is each position’s job description?
• What is the pay structure (hourly, salaried, base plus commission, etc.)?
• How do you plan to find qualified employees and contractors?

One of the most crucial parts of a business plan is the organizational chart. This simply shows the positions the company will need, who is in charge of them and the relationship of each of them. It will look similar to this:

Our small business plan template has a much more in-depth organizational chart you can edit to include when you include the organizational chart in your business plan.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 8. Financial Statements 

No business plan is complete without financial statements or financial projections. The business plan format will be different based on whether you are writing a business plan to expand a business or a startup business plan. Let’s dig deeper into each.

Provide All Financial Income from an Existing Business

An existing business should use their past financial documents including the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement to find trends to estimate the next 3-5 years.

You can create easy trendlines in excel to predict future revenue, profit and loss, cash flow, and other changes in year-over-year performance. This will show your expected performance assuming business continues as normal.

If you are seeking an investment, then the business is probably not going to continue as normal. Depending on the financial plan and the purpose of getting financing, adjustments may be needed to the following:

• Higher Revenue if expanding business
• Lower Cost of Goods Sold if purchasing inventory with bulk discounts
• Adding interest if utilizing financing (not equity deal)
• Changes in expenses
• Addition of financing information to the cash flow statement
• Changes in Earnings per Share on the balance sheet

Financial modeling is a challenging subject, but there are plenty of low-cost courses on the subject. If you need help planning your business financial documentation take some time to watch some of them.

Make it a point to document how you calculated all the changes to the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement in your business plan so that key team members or investors can verify your research.

Financial Projections For A Startup Business Plan

Unlike an existing business, a startup doesn’t have previous success to model its future performance. In this scenario, you need to focus on how to make a business plan realistic through the use of industry research and averages.

Mike gave the following advice in his interview:

Financial Forecasting Mistakes

One of the things a lot of inexperienced people use is the argument, “If I get one percent of the market, it is worth $100 million.” If you use this, investors are likely to file the document under bad business plan examples.

Let’s use custom t-shirts as an example.

Credence Research estimated in 2018 there were 11,334,800,000 custom t-shirts sold for a total of $206.12 Billion, with a 6% compound annual growth rate.

With that data,  you can calculate that the industry will grow to $270 Billion in 2023 and that the average shirt sold creates $18.18 in revenue.

Combine that with an IBIS World estimate of 11,094 custom screen printers and that means even if you become an average seller, you’ll get .009% of the market.

Here’s a table for easier viewing of that information.

The point here is to make sure your business proposal examples make sense.

You’ll need to know industry averages such as cost of customer acquisition, revenue per customer, the average cost of goods sold, and admin costs to be able to create accurate estimates.

Our simple business plan templates walk you through most of these processes. If you follow them you’ll have a good idea of how to write a business proposal.

How to Write a Business Plan Step 9. Business Plan Example of Funding Requests

What is a business plan without a plan on how to obtain funding?

The Small Business Administration has an example for a pizza restaurant that theoretically needed nearly $20k to make it through their first month.

In our video, How to Start a $500K/Year T-Shirt Business (Pt. 1 ), Sanford Booth told us he needed about $200,000 to start his franchise and broke even after 4 months.

Freshbooks estimates it takes on average 2-3 years for a business to be profitable, which means the fictitious pizza company from the SBA could need up to $330k to make it through that time and still pay their bills for their home and pizza shop.

Not every business needs that much to start, but realistically it’s a good idea to assume that you need a fairly large cushion.

Ways to get funding for a small business

There are a variety of ways to cover this. the most common are:

• Bootstrapping – Using your savings without external funding.
• Taking out debt – loans, credit cards
• Equity, Seed Funding – Ownership of a percentage of the company in exchange for current funds
• Crowdsourcing – Promising a good for funding to create the product

Keep reading for more tips on how to write a business plan.

How funding will be used

When asking for business financing make sure to include:

• How much to get started?
• What is the minimum viable product and how soon can you make money?
• How will the money be spent?

Mike emphasized two aspects that should be included in every plan, 

How to Write a Business Plan Resources

Here are some links to a business plan sample and business plan outline. 

• Sample plan

It’s also helpful to follow some of the leading influencers in the business plan writing community. Here’s a list:

• Wise Plans –  Shares a lot of information on starting businesses and is a business plan writing company.
• Optimus Business Plans –  Another business plan writing company.
• Venture Capital – A venture capital thread that can help give you ideas.

How to Write a Business Plan: What’s Next?

We hope this guide about how to write a simple business plan step by step has been helpful. We’ve covered:

• The definition of a business plan
• Coming up with a business idea
• Performing market research
• The critical components of a business plan
• An example business plan

In addition, we provided you with a simple business plan template to assist you in the process of writing your startup business plan. The startup business plan template also includes a business model template that will be the key to your success.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our business hub .

Have you written a business plan before? How did it impact your ability to achieve your goals?

Brandon Boushy

Brandon Boushy lives to improve people’s lives by helping them become successful entrepreneurs. His journey started nearly 30 years ago. He consistently excelled at everything he did, but preferred to make the rules rather than follow him. His exploration of self and knowledge has helped him to get an engineering degree, MBA, and countless certifications. When freelancing and rideshare came onto the scene, he recognized the opportunity to play by his own rules. Since 2017, he has helped businesses across all industries achieve more with his research, writing, and marketing strategies. Since 2021, he has been the Lead Writer for UpFlip where he has published over 170 articles on small business success.

Related posts

• September 27, 2023

How to Start a Business: The Ultimate Guide (2024)

• August 3, 2022

Free Business Plan Template (With Examples)

• May 3, 2022

How to Get a Business License (In 3 Steps)

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

Published: February 06, 2024

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.

Free Business Plan Template

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

• 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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)

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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• Building Your Business

6 Ways to Improve Your Small Business

Take your business to the next level

• Improving Your Business—How Often?
• Organize Your Processes & Workspace
• Revisit Your Finances
• Connect With Your Community
• Connect With Your Employees
• Consider Acquisitions
• Know When You Need Support

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There were more than 32 million small to medium-sized businesses in the U.S. as reported by the U.S. Small Business Administration in 2021 alone. Yet 20% of these businesses close by year one and nearly 50% by year five. The reasons for lower survival rates in small businesses are numerous, but a major component of business failure is stagnation.

Imagine an entrepreneur who found success in launching a business . Their operations and growing customer base have kept them busy through the early phases, but they notice a plateau around year two. To make it as part of the 50% still operating by year five, the entrepreneur needs to be dedicated to persistent improvement efforts.

Small business owners who get their business in motion need to think a few steps ahead to avoid an elongated plateau. With the right tactics in mind, any entrepreneur, including you, can improve business and tackle times of slower growth. You just need to know where to begin.

Key Takeaways

• Small business owners have a likelier chance of failing when they don’t actively work on improving business operations.
• Tapping into the current market and people associated with your business can support efforts to revitalize.
• Getting organized with paperwork, finances, and different buyout opportunities provides a further place for expansion.

How Often Should You Look for Ways to Improve Your Business?

Every entrepreneur has a goal of sustainable growth in mind. Moreover, it takes dedication to consistent research and improvements. That means having a good awareness of where you currently stand, to identify where you need to go, including:

• Knowing your cash flow and areas where you could curb spending
• Being connected to your customer base and the social platforms they’re on
• Understanding your weakest areas and where to ask for support

Sustainable growth means constant improvement efforts and being open to trying new things. Quarterly, thorough reviews are a great starting place if you feel out of your element with this startup-like mindset.

1. Organize Your Processes and Workspace

The deeper you get into your business, the more cluttered it can become–literally. You may have things such as paperwork spread across your deck, an unsorted Google Drive, and subscription services with old payment details. Your goal to improve business becomes easier when you implement more organization and efficiency.

A great starting point is reviewing your technology and streamlining it with simple digital services. Get rid of applications you don’t use, convert paper files into digital ones, and add relevant team members to platforms.

Every business owner can benefit from the power of automation, and you don’t need to be a computer whiz. Start simply by sending a welcome message to a new subscriber or saving attachments to a drive.

Prioritize taking stock of your progress and learning from your mistakes. You’ve probably tried a lot of strategies to get your business off the ground, but doing what got you to Point A won’t necessarily get you to Point B. Review past processes, identify what didn’t work, and update your business strategy to avoid the same mistakes.

2. Revisit Your Finances

To improve business, you need to know financial numbers like the back of your hand. This includes everything from cash flow to your business’s credit score. Cash flow is a key indicator of growth or early failure, with 46% of small businesses exiting with irregular cash flows.

By revisiting your finances, pay close attention to the accuracy of numbers and determine where you may be spending egregiously. Where are you spending where you should be saving? The only way you can identify financial improvements is by knowing your numbers.

3. Connect With Your Community

Do you remember how you vigorously hunted for customers in the early days? Chances are that spark has dimmed over time, and you may have lost contact with customers to focus on other aspects of the business.

Reengaging with your community is a necessary and fulfilling method to enhance business. In fact, 86% of loyal customers will refer others to a business, furthering the community around brands. You can tap into this method by finding new ways to connect with customers, including:

• Virtual meetups with loyal customers
• Farmer’s-market tables for attracting local consumers
• Live social media videos, sharing tips or fun content
• Monthly emails to customers with updates

To build a community for your brand means building relationships with customers. When you focus on them as people, you find ways to connect in a way that feels more personal.

Engage your local business community and find fellow entrepreneurs. These relationships could be professional, sending referrals your way, and personal, acting as a sounding board for new ideas.

4. Connect With Your Employees

Your employees are also influential on your path to improving business. Creating a positive work environment for your team encourages motivation, productivity, and fresh ideas.

Employees seek out workplaces where they feel valued and respected, and you can implement strategies to create spaces for intentional conversation and celebration. This could be anything from an open-door policy between you and employees to quarterly team feedback meetings and birthday or holiday greetings.

To attract the best talent means offering attractive benefits, and the hottest one at the moment is remote or hybrid workplaces. Offering even one work-from-home day per week allows for a diverse team, attracting those seeking flexible work arrangements.

5. Consider Acquisitions and New Development

A great way to focus on business development is by looking around. Your market is full of inspiration and insightful data, such as a new niche, a trend, or a competitor. You may pinpoint a struggling business that could be open for a buyout, a potential opportunity to break into a new clientele.

You should also aim to diversify your product lines based on the results of your research. The social world has made it easy to stay aware of trends, especially on TikTok, with its 1 billion users. This is a great way to keep your business fresh and in the social conversation. And remember, staying on trend could simply mean marketing or branding a classic product in a new way.

6. Know When You Need Support

The final method to improve business may be a hard lesson for some headstrong business owners. But you need to get comfortable knowing when you’re out of your league and ask for guidance.

The SBA offers specific mentoring programs for small business owners. You can also find business owner support groups on LinkedIn or at local business development or innovation centers.

As you build out the business, strive to put together an advisory board , formally or informally. Identify individuals whom you feel comfortable with and who know the business and industry. Having a trusted group to go to for advice makes a difference.

But at the end of the day, the key activity you can do to strengthen your business is taking a break. Hitting a plateau offers a time to reflect on your business’s progress and where you see its future.

How Do I Improve My Business Credit Score?

A business credit score functions similarly to your credit score, meaning you already have experience in maintaining this. A few ways to improve your score would be to limit credit usage, pay bills on time, and avoid closing accounts. Get into the habit of reviewing your business credit report regularly and reporting any inaccuracies.

How Do I Improve Google Search Results for My Business?

Improving your Google search results means getting familiar with search engine optimization. SEO is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting a business higher on a search page when using select keywords. Getting better placement means selecting pertinent keywords, creating content with those on your site, and optimizing said content for more relevancy.

U.S. Small Business Administration.” 2021 Small Business Profile ,” Page 1.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. “ Longevity .”

JPMorgan Chase & Co. “​​ A Cash Flow Perspective on the Small Business Sector .”

KPMG. “ The Truth About Customer Loyalty .”

Statista. “ Number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) of TikTok Worldwide From January 2018 to September 2021 .”

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Resources for Your Growing Business

7 proven and budget-friendly ideas to improve your small business.

Make 2020 the best year yet for your small business with our seven tips to improve sales volume, focus your marketing efforts, find new sources of revenue and build even stronger relationships with your existing customers.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Measure Your Marketing
• Upgrade Your Sales Funnel
• Boost Your Online Presence
• Invest in Customer Relationships
• Get a Better Picture of Your Finances
• Stay On Trend
• Motivate Employees

1. Measure Your Marketing

You don’t need to measure all your marketing efforts, just those you’re putting the more time and money into. You need to know what’s helping your sales and what isn’t.

For example, Forbes recommends tracking how people are finding your website. Is it through a referral program , advertisements or a blog post you wrote for another site? Be sure you know so you can redouble your efforts in whatever area’s working. Google Analytics is a free and easy to use tool to track your website traffic. And you can use Hootsuite to evaluate your social media presence and what content is working and what isn’t.

2. Upgrade Your Sales Funnel

It’s time to make sure those top-of-funnel prospects are really converting into leads and then paying customers. You might have a lot of prospects but what is your small business doing to turn them into leads?

Your website is one place you can focus on increasing leads, says Forbes . To get a visitor’s contact information, offer them something of value in return. This could be a guided demo or a free trial, for example. Once you have their email address, you can offer them more perks like exclusive upgrades and insider tips to help their business.

In short, you need to offer something so the potential customer comes back to your site again and again. A first-time visitor isn’t going to buy what you’re offering. You need a reason for them to come back to your website, to learn to trust you and eventually buy your service or product. That’s the path to success.

3. Boost Your Online Presence

Simple updates to your website can make a big difference. Make sure your contact information is clearly visible on each page. And when a prospect calls or emails you, offer excellent customer service. Respond to them right away and resolve their concern.

Local SEO (search engine optimization) is another hot marketing trend and one of the best advertising tactics for small businesses. This article gives you all the tips you need to quickly get started on optimizing your small business for local search.

4. Invest in Customer Relationships

Improving your customer relationships isn’t a trendy or new strategy, but it works. Building customer relationships means really listening to what they need and making every effort to satisfy those needs. Try to customize your products or service based on those needs, too.

Investing in customer relationships means dedicating lots of time and resources. Be prepared for this to really reap the benefits of loyal repeat customers.

Offering excellent customer service is another must, says Entrepreneur . Forget what’s right and focus on serving the customer. Give the customer what they want. Do whatever is in your power to make them happy.

5. Get a Better Picture of Your Finances

Here’s another way to grow your small business: really commit to understanding your finances. Some small business owners are allergic to bookkeeping but unless you have a grip on your numbers, none of our other business ideas to boost sales and increase efficiency are going to work.

Commit to understanding your monthly, weekly and even daily numbers. Get a sense of the financial trends happening in your business. Don’t rely on the accountant you hire to do your taxes to help you keep your small business financially healthy—that’s not their job.

Here’s a tip: get small business owner-friendly cloud accounting software like FreshBooks. Discover how easy it is make reports that put your financials in crystal-clear perspective.

6. Stay On Trend

Understand what’s happening not only in your industry but also in your local community. How will they affect you and what can you do to capitalize on them? In the end, though, always focus on providing value to your customers, says Entrepreneur . Every new product or offering must offer significant value to the lives of your clients or customers. It must also be the highest quality possible. Otherwise, all your hard work will be for nothing.

7. Motivate Employees

Improving the efficiency of your small business and your company operations all boils down to your employees. You need to understand what motivates your employees to work smarter and more productively. Our article on improving the efficiency of employees has plenty of actionable tips to help you get started today.

Here are four low-cost ideas:

• Make work more fun . Allow employees to bring their dogs to work or organize more social events. Get employee input so the fun doesn’t feel forced.
• Recognize good work . A small bonus, paid day off or personalized gift is nice, but recognition during a meeting or one on one can be just as effective.
• Offer flexibility . Let employees determine their own hours or offer work-from-home days. Be understanding about child care emergencies and medical appointments.
• Encourage professional development . Offer to mentor an employee or look into paying for low-cost training online or in-person seminars.

People also ask:

How Can I Make My Small Business Grow Faster?

How can i make my business better, how can a business improve its performance.

Here are seven tips to increase your small business’s growth:

• Create webinars . Webinars are a great way to improve business sales. Teach something related to your product or service and then include an irresistible offer at the end. This is also a great way to collect email addresses to boost your mailing list. Advertise the webinar on Facebook or Instagram.
• Get serious about your mailing list . This doesn’t just mean sending a monthly newsletter. You need to develop a sales funnel to help turn the merely interested into customers. Thankfully, services like Drip , GetResponse and ConvertKit make this task a lot less painful.
• Create a customer loyalty program . According to LinkedIn , it costs three times more to get a new customer than to sell something to an existing customer. Invest in a loyalty program to help retain existing customers
• Figure out what the competition is doing . New tools like AdBeat and Similar Web help you discover your competitors’ online advertising strategies. You should be putting out similar ads to their longest running campaigns, advises Entrepreneur .
• Track transactions . Harness the power of programs like SalesForce to track your sales transactions and manage your customers. This is essential to help your business scale quickly.
• Work together . A strategic partnership could really boost your business. Find another company that’s complimentary to yours and work together to increase your customer bases.
• Explore passive income . Passive income will help supplement your small business’s cash flow during the lean times. Examples include affiliate marketing , passive stock ownership and producing digital products like eBooks.

Here are five tips to make your small business better:

• Drop the dead weight . Take a hard look at your business. What products aren’t selling? Which employees aren’t performing? What products or services should you really be selling? Make the necessary changes to get rid of what slows you down and add what will really rev your business up.
• Analyze your overhead . What can you cut down on to save money? Perhaps you can have certain employees work remotely, or the entire team even. Or some roles can become contracts instead of full time. You could even take on contractors in other countries.
• Study your competition . Do this not to emulate your competition but to figure out what no one else is offering. What opportunities exist that no one else is taking advantage of?
• Study trends in your industry . Perhaps the buying habits of your customers are changing. A simple survey of your customers can help you identify these changes. Or maybe there are global trends that no one’s applied to your industry yet.
• Find a way to stand out . For example, you could offer a guarantee, commit to better customer service or embrace corporate responsibility and give back to your community.

Read our seven small business improvement ideas above to find actionable ideas to help your business improve its performance. You might also find our article on improving efficiency in the workplace helpful.

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7 of the most effective business process improvement techniques.

October 26, 2023

Ever feel like your organization is a mess of tangled processes that seem to have a life of their own? You’re not alone. It can be frustrating to feel like you’re treading water. Or worse, trying new systems and processes that don’t seem to move the needle.

Sometimes the simplest way to effect a change in your business comes down to the most upstream thing: creating and optimizing business processes that you can build upon.

Business process improvement is about much more than numbers and spreadsheets. It’s about creating a peaceful, fulfilling experience not only for you but for everyone involved in your organization.

So if you’re ready to see how you can take your company to greater levels of efficiency and ease, keep reading to up your business process management game!

• What Is Business Process Improvement?

Why Is Business Process Improvement Important?

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What Is Business Process Improvement ?

Business process improvement, or BPI, may sound self-explanatory. Still, it’s a bit more complex and nuanced than it might initially sound. Business process improvement is a systematic approach to optimizing an organization’s current process and workflow management .

It intends to help an organization see what can be improved upon and reach its business goals more efficiently. 🌻

Think of your organization as an orchestra. There’s the strings section, the woodwinds, brass, percussion, and so on—they all need to play in harmony to sound beautiful. Experimenting with business process improvement is like ensuring every section is well-rehearsed and ready to take the stage.

Anything off in a section can throw the entire performance off, either by a little or a lot. 

With business process mapping and improvement, you can catch things before they have the chance to derail a performance while refining so you can eliminate inefficiencies, improve employee and customer satisfaction, and overall streamline an organization’s entire process for the better.

Much of why business process improvement is essential overlaps with the goals of most organizations already, things like:

• Cost efficiency: How can you get the most value out of your tools and resources? Think of this as doing more with less, all without compromising quality, like eliminating time-consuming, repetitive tasks with the appropriate automation and continuous improvement tools 🛠
• Improved quality: Finding a way to improve the quality of a good or service can mean elevating the entire experience someone has interacting with your organization, whether that’s a high-quality item or onboarding the latest client
• Customer satisfaction : A better customer experience, whether through faster shipping and delivery times, higher quality products, or better customer service, can all lead to increased profitability
• Employee satisfaction: Improving existing processes and implementing changes can make a huge difference for team members. It can reduce frustration, provide a better work-life balance, improve communication, and increase productivity
• Staying competitive: BPI can help you adapt to changes in the marketplace. A more flexible business environment enables you to see where your company is in real-time so you can respond when customer preferences shift, become more efficient, and pivot when you need to
• Scalability: Continuous improvement can help your business grow and handle increasing complexity without compromising performance or revenue. When your current processes are as streamlined as possible, your organization can seamlessly maintain quality and efficiency across the board, optimize resources, make fewer errors, and attract investment  🙌
• Risk mitigation: Process re-engineering can help you identify pain points and find the root cause of bottlenecks affecting your business, whether it’s the rollout of new products or onboarding new clients. You can also see where process automation could eliminate human error, reduce legal issues and fines, and set up contingency plans for “what if” scenarios
• Increased productivity and efficiency: BPI can help you develop more efficient project management strategies and identify where to implement processes like workflow automation, which can help team members complete their work more efficiently. It can also assist with better resource allocation, saving time that can be used for more strategic activities like brainstorming further improvement initiatives and innovation

Remember, all of these aspects fall under continuous process efficiencies and improvements. Data-driven decision-making makes it easier to make adjustments as needed in your organization.

Benefits & Challenges of Business Process Improvement

Like most things, there are two sides of the coin with business process improvement. While there are most certainly demonstrated benefits, there are also some challenges that come along with doing things differently. 

Exploring a new approach to process management can make all the difference in increasing business efficiency and finding time- and cost-effective solutions to pain points and bottlenecks, as we’ve discussed earlier. 

Creating organizational flexibility that can adapt and change in the marketplace when necessary is invaluable, as is creating an excellent customer and employee experience. Data and metrics give you the edge and allow insightful and well-informed decisions that can further innovation and scalability.

All of these benefits are potential results of business process improvement. ✨

As rosy as the outlook can be with business process improvement, some potential challenges are essential to consider:

• Initial cost: Whether your organization invests in new software and business process improvement tools or hires a consultant, the early stages of business process improvement may be costly
• Resistance to change: There’s always a possibility that team members and stakeholders won’t be receptive to process efficiency changes, and without their buy-in, any newly implemented changes could be hindered
• Complexity: Complicated systems and processes may require a specialist or outside consulting if your team needs to gain the skillset to implement changes
• Maintaining new process improvement: Once you’ve implemented process changes, consider what it will require to support and sustain those changes over the short and long term
• Technical challenges: With new software comes new challenges, whether that’s a learning curve for various team members or potential cybersecurity and privacy vulnerabilities
• Market fluctuations: A newly implemented system may be the perfect fit for your organization today, and it could need adjusting and changing tomorrow. Staying vigilant can help you ride the wave of changes internally within your organization and externally in the business marketplace

7 Most Effective Business Process Improvement Techniques  

You can choose from several business process improvement methodologies to streamline your organization. Instead of dedicating time and resources to putting out fires, you could prevent those from happening in the first place by implementing the appropriate technique for your business. 📚

So, if you’re ready to shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive improvement, check out this list of the seven most effective techniques you can employ in your organization.

Total quality management, or TQM, is a comprehensive and detailed approach to business process improvement focusing on improving the quality of goods and services. It achieves this through continual refinement in response to feedback and instilling a sense of quality into every aspect of an organization.

Another essential aspect of TQM is total employee involvement at every level of an organization. From the lowest ranking employee to the management and leadership level, work together to create a quality experience where the ultimate goal is customer satisfaction.

By improving processes, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks can be identified so an organization can eliminate waste and optimize its operations. 

Check out how you can use ClickUp for time blocking . Plan, monitor, and manage your work capacity, set clear timeframes for projects, and see every task team members are working on with Dashboard view.

TQM also uses tools like Six Sigma and Lean production (more on those soon).

A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement, and unlike total quality management, Kaizen has less emphasis on quality and focuses more on continuous change and improvement through eliminating waste and refining processes.

Think of Kaizen as an approach considering the small changes that can be made now to provide the biggest impact later. 👀

Kaizen may be most famous for its association with Toyota, where it’s created a profoundly self-reflective culture that is more a way of being and doing than a specific approach.

Developed by engineer Bill Smith at Motorola in the 1980s, Six Sigma is a business process improvement technique focused on improving quality by removing what causes errors and minimizing variability. Through a combination of management and statistical methods, the Six Sigma framework helps team members in an organization become experts in the methodology. 

Borrowing terminology from martial arts, these experts are referred to as “green belts,” “black belts,” and “master black belts.”

Another business process strategy associated with Toyota, lean manufacturing (also referred to as lean) is an approach that aims for ultimate efficiency while minimizing waste, all without sacrificing productivity.

The ultimate goal is customer satisfaction.

By identifying value, the appropriate adjustments can be made, like eliminating any wasteful steps getting in the way of this value and creating the flow necessary for efficiency in carrying this out.

Using ClickUp’s Mind Maps feature can help you plan and organize your ideas, projects, and tasks. Easily map out workflows and draw connections between ideas that help you and your organization be as efficient as possible.

The theory of constraints approach is a business process improvement technique that focuses on finding a bottleneck or constraint in an organization and maximizing the efficiency of that pain point. So whether there’s an issue in a production line or an inefficient software tool, an organization can adapt for maximum efficiency.

Once an organization has identified and corrected a constraint, whatever hindered efficiency is no longer a limiting factor.

Similar to other business process improvement techniques on our list, agile learning and methodology emphasizes making smaller, more incremental changes instead of completely overhauling a system.

Each change is considered a “sprint,” where at the end of each sprint, the impact of a change is evaluated. Because things are assessed each step of the way, it’s easy for an organization to make adjustments and realign on the fly.

Another element of agile is working with team members across an organization and considering how different perspectives can help find the most effective solution to the pain points an organization is facing. If you gravitate toward the agile approach, try ClickUp’s agile teams features .

Easily manage product roadmaps, backlogs, sprints, UX design, and more with this all-in-one platform.

Kanban, another approach that originated in Japan, is an effective way of optimizing business processes by making it easy to visualize workflow, incrementally improving processes, and seeing where bottlenecks exist in an organization.

Like a flowchart, Kanban methodology makes it easy to see where an organization is in real-time and how it moves through the process of improvement. By limiting the number of tasks connected to improving a specific business process, team members focus on completing tasks associated with that objective before moving on to new ones, which creates even more efficiency in an organization. 🌻

And because Kanban operates on a pull system, new tasks connected to optimization are only created when there’s a need for it, making it a BPI approach that’s aligned with the requirements of an organization.

Try the Kanban layout with ClickUp’s Board view , in addition to 15+ other views, to help you customize everything to suit your organization’s needs and visualize your workflow and process improvement your way.

5 Templates to Help You With Business Process Improvement

There are plenty of process documentation software options to help with your organization’s business process improvement. One exceptionally versatile tool for everything from SWOT analysis to project management, habit tracking, and business process improvement is ClickUp .

Create clear timelines, measurable goals, and automatic progress tracking with ClickUp’s Goals feature . Even more, ClickUp’s Automations make automating repetitive tasks easy. 

And with templates perfectly tailored to business process improvement, you can develop your strategy and execute it all with one tool. Here are five templates you and your organization can use to structure your organization’s business process improvements.

Performance reviews are an essential aspect of supporting team members by helping them receive valuable feedback, whether offering perspective on improvement areas or recognizing employees who exceed expectations.

However, performance reviews can feel cumbersome to organize and compile. With ClickUp’s Performance Review Template , you can easily track employee performance over time and ensure team members meet goals and objectives with Custom Fields and statuses adapted to your organization.

Evaluating your current processes’ effectiveness with ClickUp’s Process Audit and Improvement Template helps you see what your organization is working with. From there, you can identify what business processes could be improved and have clear next steps for implementing the appropriate changes at the proper time.

By regularly checking in with the state of your business processes, you can readily spot areas for realignment early and often and maintain the quality of those newly implemented processes over time.

Another option for quickly identifying gaps in processes and gaining the necessary clarity to address them as efficiently is ClickUp’s Process FMEA Lean Six Sigma Template . This comprehensive template makes it easy to clarify areas for continuous improvement across business processes while creating an action plan with team alignment to make the necessary changes.

By improving new and existing processes for safety and efficiency, an organization can minimize customer dissatisfaction and enhance the quality of products with ease.

A DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analysis, Improve, and Control and assists with process improvement. 

ClickUp’s DMAIC Template defines project scope with clearly defined and easy-to-understand goals. Measure key performance indicators against targets, determine root causes, and straightforwardly improve your business process management operations. You can even track ongoing results, too.

Efficiency is the name of the game with business improvement processes and this template helps you do just that. Quickly identify and prioritize your organization’s business objectives, develop a systematic approach to increase efficiency, gain insights for well-informed and data-driven decisions, and view measurable results over time. 

The right Kanban template strikes the ideal balance of structure and flexibility. With ClickUp’s Kanban Template , you can do precisely that.

Easily break projects down into manageable pieces and set your team up for success, all while creating clear communication channels so everyone can be on the same page at the same time. With improved communication, increased visibility into team capacity and progress, and more efficient resource utilization, you have a recipe for success in implementing new business improvement processes.

Improve Your Tools for Continuous Process Improvement

Business process improvement can be essential to helping your organization find its way to sustained growth while staying competitive in the marketplace. 

The ability to continually optimize processes and adapt to changes in the business landscape directly impacts cost efficiency. Improving business processes allows an organization to offer better value to customers, all while being as streamlined and efficient as possible. 🙌

Ready to get started on business process improvement? ClickUp has everything you need. Our all-in-one platform simplifies your work by giving your team a space to brainstorm ideas, track Goals, organize Tasks, create Docs, and communicate with one another in real-time.

With 1,000+ integrations, you can centralize all the other tools that keep your team running. A better, easier workflow can start today when you sign up for ClickUp—it’s Free Forever .

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5 Tips for Improving Your Business Continuity Plan

• Written by: Ryan Mosher
• January 9, 2024

For nearly all of us, the spring of 2020 changed almost everything. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted how the world operated in many ways, beginning as a public health crisis before rapidly evolving to encompass nearly every organizational layer on the planet.  

Organizational leaders quickly realized they needed to prepare for a disruption of that scale. In fact, only 21% of board members and CEOs believed their business was prepared for such an incident.  

The pandemic catapulted the need for Business Continuity (BC) plans into the forefront of many company decision-makers' minds. While the number of organizations that have BC plans has risen, there are 43% that still do not .   

This article is not for those 43%.   

This article is for the other 57% that do have a BC plan.   

Just like you’d do with your Business Impact Analysis , it is wise to revisit, revise, and regularly optimize your BC plan. It is a crucial part of your organization’s resilience .  

How to Improve Business Continuity: Overarching Tips to Optimize Your Plan  

Before we get into the 5 main recommendations, there are a few key tips to keep in mind as you get started. These three ideals should apply to every step of your process to improve your BC plan (by the way, these three tips apply to every aspect of your resilience structure: Business Impact Analysis, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery):  

• Stakeholder Involvement: A successful BC plan demands involvement from various organizational levels. Engaging different departments ensures a comprehensive understanding of potential impacts and recovery needs. This collaborative approach fosters a sense of shared responsibility and enhances the plan’s applicability across diverse business areas.  

It is also extremely important to train your staff . 3 out of 5 companies fail to properly train their staff on Business Continuity situations . 

• Documentation: Effective documentation is pivotal in enhancing your Business Continuity plan. This involves thoroughly documenting and justifying the data collection process , incorporating a broad spectrum of data sources, from big data to IoT.  

Comprehensive documentation ensures transparency and consistency. It's crucial to clearly document and communicate critical processes and their significance across the organization. 

• Review and Adapt: Business environments constantly evolve, influenced by technological advancement s , market shifts, unforeseen crises, and a changing workforce . A BC plan that was effective a year ago might not cut it today. Regular reviews and updates are critical in ensuring your plan aligns with current business objectives and emerging threats.  

Now, let’s explore 5 tips for improving your Business Continuity Plan.  

Key Takeaways

Data-driven decision making  .

Use diverse data sources for a thorough risk assessment, ensuring your plan is based on accurate and current information.  

Impact Analysis  

Combine quantitative and qualitative methods to understand the full breadth of potential disruptions.  

Recovery Strategy Alignment  

Ensure that your recovery plans align with business goals for effective resource allocation and swift crisis response.  

Continuous Training and Testing  

Regular drills and training sessions are essential tips to improve your business continuity plan, helping identify gaps and ensuring team readiness.

Plan Accessibility  

Maintain an easy-to-understand and accessible plan for all relevant personnel.  

1. Comprehensive Data Analysis: The Backbone of Effective BC Planning  

The effectiveness of your BC plan relies heavily on comprehensive and high-quality data analysis. Using diverse data sources, including advanced technologies like big data and IoT, is crucial for conducting an in-depth risk assessment. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of potential threats.  

Equally important is continuously updating your Business Continuity Plan BCP with the latest data to accurately reflect the ever-evolving business landscape and emerging risks, ensuring your plan remains current and effective.  

• Diverse Data Integration: Integrate data from various sources, including internal systems, customer feedback, market trends, and external risk assessments. Big data and IoT provide valuable insights into potential risks and operational vulnerabilities.
• Regular Data Review and Update: Ensure your data is current. Regularly update your BCP with new data to reflect changing business environments, technological advancements, and emerging threats.
• Data Analysis for Risk Assessment: Utilize advanced data analytics tools to interpret the data. This step helps identify potential risks, assess their impact, and prioritize them based on their severity and likelihood.
• Scenario Planning Based on Data: Develop various disruption scenarios based on your data analysis. This helps in understanding the potential impact of each scenario and planning accordingly.  

2. Impact Analysis: Quantitative and Qualitative Dimensions  

This tip goes hand-in-hand with your Business Impact Analysis . This process involves evaluating both quantitative and qualitative impacts of potential disruptions on your business.  

By considering both the measurable financial aspects and the less tangible elements like organizational reputation and employee morale, this approach provides a comprehensive understanding of the different effects of disruptions, guiding effective mitigation and response strategies.  

• Quantitative Impact Assessment: Evaluate financial metrics such as potential revenue loss, cost implications of downtime, and the impact on service-level agreements. Use data analysis tools to quantify these impacts accurately.  
• Qualitative Impact Evaluation: Consider non-financial impacts like customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and employee morale. Conduct surveys or focus groups to gauge these effects.
• Scenario-Based Analysis: Create realistic disruption scenarios and assess their quantitative and qualitative impact. This helps in understanding the full range of potential consequences.
• Prioritization Based on Impact: Use the findings from your impact analysis to prioritize recovery efforts, focusing first on the areas with the most significant potential impact.

3. Recovery Strategy Prioritization: Aligning of Recovery Goals and Business Goals  

Effective alignment of your Business Continuity Plan's recovery strategies with your overarching business objectives is vital. By strategically aligning, you prioritize critical operations, ensuring they receive immediate attention and resources during disruptions.  

Moreover, developing recovery plans that are both flexible and scalable enables your business to handle various scenarios adeptly, bolstering your organization’s resilience in the face of challenges.  

• Identify Critical Operations: Assess and identify business functions and processes crucial to your organization's survival. These should be your primary focus in the event of a disruption.
• Align Recovery with Business Goals: Ensure that your recovery strategies support and are aligned with your organization's overarching goals and objectives. This alignment helps in effective and efficient resource utilization during recovery.
• Develop Scalable and Flexible Plans: Create recovery plans adaptable to various scenarios, allowing scalability and flexibility. This approach ensures that your business can respond effectively to different disruptions.  

4. Training and Testing: Ensuring Plan Effectiveness  

An often-overlooked aspect of BC plan optimization is regular training and testing. These exercises familiarize your team with the plan and reveal potential weaknesses and areas for improvement. Regular drills ensure your team is ready to act swiftly and efficiently in a crisis.    

• Regular Training Sessions: Schedule frequent training sessions for all employees to familiarize them with the BC plan. This helps ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities.
• Scenario-Based Drills: Conduct drills based on various disruption scenarios. This practice tests the plan's effectiveness and team readiness for different emergencies.
• Feedback and Improvement: After each training or drill, gather feedback from participants to identify areas for improvement. Use this feedback to refine the BC plan.
• Update Training Material: Keep the training materials updated to reflect any BC plan changes or business environment changes.  

5. Keeping It Accessible and Understandable  

Accessibility of the BC plan is crucial. All relevant personnel should know where to find the plan and understand their roles in it. A strategy that is too complex or difficult to access in an emergency is useless.  

• Centralized Storage: Store the BC plan in a centralized, easily accessible location, both digitally and physically.  
• Clear Communication: Regularly communicate the plan's location and access procedures to all relevant personnel.
• Simplicity and Clarity: Ensure the plan is written in simple language. Avoid jargon to make it understandable for all employees.
• Regular Updates and Notifications: Update the BC plan as needed and notify employees of changes and where to find the latest version.  

An Ongoing Commitment to Resilience  

Optimizing your BC plan is not a one-time task. It’s an ongoing commitment. It requires continuous evaluation, adaptation, and enhancement. By embracing these strategies for improving your Business Continuity Plan, you can ensure your organization remains resilient, responsive, and prepared for any disruption.  

HBS Can Assist in All Aspects of Organizational Resilience  

You don’t have to optimize (or build from scratch) your Business Continuity Plan all by yourself. Contact HBS today for expert guidance and tailored solutions. Our team is dedicated to helping you optimize your BC plan, ensuring it aligns perfectly with your unique business needs and goals.  

Reach out to HBS now and take the first step towards a more robust, insightful, and adaptive approach to your Business Continuity .  

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Small Business Trends

4 tips for growing your business in a sustainable way.

A couple of years ago, it was just you and your computer science pals from college crowding around the communal Keurig. Your business has come a long way from that co-working space in a sketchy part of town.

You used to worry about the tires getting stolen off your 10-speed before the workday was over. Now you have a Tesla and a parking space with your name on and three very important-sounding letters after it.

Still, it’s not all sunshine and roses in the startup C-suite. You’ve got investors to impress, so you must keep going full steam ahead. You can’t lose momentum, but you can’t afford to take huge risks. Here’s how to scale your growing business in smart, sustainable ways.

1. Hire a Remote, Global Workforce

Hiring employees can be a slow, clunky process that saps resources from your team. From conducting multiple rounds of interviews to lengthy onboarding and training processes, you’re losing time and resources at every stage.

Onboarding costs can be astronomical, too. Stats vary, but according to Indeed.com, hiring a new employee can cost between $4,000 and $20,000. And that obviously does not include their salary and benefits, which could be sky-high depending on where your company is based.

From there, you’re looking at all sorts of overhead costs, like renting enough office space to accommodate your team. And if an employee leaves, you have to start the hiring process again from square one.

Hiring remotely — especially sourcing international employees — can cut a lot of these costs. Workers from lower-cost locations can help you limit salary expenses, while their remoteness means you won’t have to allot them office space. Be aware, however, that global hiring comes with all sorts of compliance and administrative hurdles. You can get around them by working with an employer of record . An EOR can take care of the onboarding, payroll, and legal pieces, saving your HR team the headache.

2. Prioritize Customer Concerns

Results can be disastrous when leadership deprioritizes the customer by solving low-priority problems first or imprudently cutting short-term costs. Many big-name companies have gone out of business simply because they thought about their numbers at the expense of their shoppers.

Take the case of Circuit City, which prioritized reducing expenses by firing experienced employees and replacing them with cheaper newcomers. The result was more frustration for customers at a time when many were already switching to more convenient rival stores.

Keeping the customer happy is practically the first rule of business, but it means actually listening to the customer. Businesses that want to scale sustainably should survey their customer base and make decisions based on real customer data. Ask what kinds of changes they would like to see or what kinds of products and promotions they’re craving.

Customer acquisition is necessary for scaling, but customer retention is just as important — not to mention cheaper and more effective. Word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied fans are the best kind of marketing.

3. Streamline Your Tech Stack

Too many growing businesses waste their money on clunky enterprise software suites designed for scaling they haven’t even achieved yet. They spend thousands and lock themselves into using programs that might not fit their business best.

The cost of a bad software choice isn’t just the purchase price or the price of buying a replacement program. There are hidden costs like consulting vet new software and retraining your employees every time you implement new tech.

Growing businesses, especially startups on the smaller side, should look to alternatives like SaaS solutions or free, open-source programs. They can mix and match more affordable options that meet the company’s needs better.

That said, it’s important to keep integration in mind when choosing tech. As you scale, your tech will likely need to integrate with larger platforms like Salesforce or Shopify. Most startups know this is a priority, so it shouldn’t be hard to find programs designed for compatibility.

4. Be Smart About How You Spread the Word

You don’t need an enormous marketing budget to see your company gain traction. And you don’t need to spend a ton of cash taking out expensive ads. Instead, focus on more affordable, effective strategies that put your brand name in the mouths of all the right people.

Nowadays, most consumers say they don’t really trust what brands say. They don’t believe advertising exists for their benefit or to provide useful information. They want to hear from their friends, online reviewers, or influencers. They trust real people who’ve used your product and can speak honestly to its pros and cons.

To earn credibility with your audience, grow your social media following organically or enlist the help of affordable, niche influencers. They can reach your target customers by appealing to them emotionally. Get your current loyalists to provide testimonials or write product reviews in order to build consumer trust and interest in your brand.

And don’t forget about email marketing as a tactic for growing your business and winning sales. It may seem old-fashioned, but email is customers’ preferred way of hearing from the brands they love. A few weekly emails — three to four max — can keep your customers’ brand awareness high without seeming annoying or intrusive.

Approach Expansion Cautiously and Efficiently

The name of the game in expanding sustainably is making incremental changes. Use data to see what’s working and what’s not and implement one new strategy at a time. You’re better off deploying new products or policies that can easily be recalled, reversed, or readjusted. When in doubt, partner with experts who’ve helped other companies succeed.

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Embracing Business Practices That Actually Improve the World

• Caitlin McElroy,
• Roberta Roesler,

What organizations need to know about adopting “regenerative” practices that actively help ecosystems and communities — not just minimize harm to them.

The science is clear that the track we’re on is not good enough to prevent further catastrophic effects from climate change. We’re beyond a point where we can merely aim to do less bad; we need to actively regenerate the areas that have experienced significant degradation. Regenerative businesses aim to improve ecosystems and communities, rather than simply minimize harm to them. But in this rapidly expanding, philosophically attractive, and still unsettled space of regenerative business, those who want to take action on regeneration are working from many definitions and approaches. The authors unpack some of the competing definitions of regeneration and show how certifications can help organizations ensure their regeneration strategies and practices support a truly regenerative future.

At the COP28 conference late last year, regeneration emerged as a focus for business leaders. Regenerative businesses aim to improve ecosystems and communities, rather than simply minimize harm to them. It’s no wonder it’s a hot topic — the science is screaming at us that the track we’re on is not good enough to prevent further catastrophic effects from climate change. According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we’ve already crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries , “ processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of [the] Earth system as a whole.”

• Char Love is global director of advocacy at Natura &Co and executive in residence at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
• CM Caitlin McElroy , PhD, is a departmental research lecturer at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.
• RR Roberta Roesler , PhD, is head of make-up development, process, and formula sustainability at Avon International and was previously global R&D director for regeneration and circularity at Natura &Co.
• EF Eve Fraser is a climate policy analyst at the NewClimate Institute and was previously a research assistant at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.

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Firstenergy settles grid modernization plan, will deploy smart meters statewide.

FirstEnergy Corp.’s Ohio electric companies - Ohio Edison, The Illuminating Co. and Toledo Edison - will expand the deployment of smart meters to an additional 1.4 million Ohio customers.

The deployment is part of a multi-party agreement on FirstEnergy’s proposed Grid Modernization Plan, also known as Grid Mod II.

Signatories to the agreement, announced Monday, April 15, are FirstEnergy; Citizens Utility Board of Ohio; Environmental Law & Policy Center; Interstate Gas Supply; The Kroger Co.; Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council; Ohio Energy Group; Ohio Energy Leadership Council; Ohio Environmental Council; The Ohio Manufacturers' Association Energy Group; Retail Energy Supply Association; and Walmart.

The settlement could clear the way for the big electricity provider to continue grid investments from 2019. Some of its subsequent plans came under fire from consumer and environmental groups, including for the costs that would be passed on to ratepayers.

FirstEnergy said in announcing the settlement that it hopes to build upon its previous work without significantly increasing costs for customers, while modernizing its metering system.

“If approved by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), the four-year, $421 million (Grid Mod II) plan will build upon system upgrades completed as part of the companies' Grid Mod I plan approved in 2019, including installation of approximately 706,000 smart meters across Ohio along with the necessary supporting communications infrastructure and data management system,” the company said in a statement.

The typical FirstEnergy residential customer using 750 kilowatt-hours of power per month would see an increase of about $1.50 a month on their bill during the implantation of Grid Mod II, the company stated.

However, customers would get savings on things such as smart thermostats as part of the plan. FirstEnergy said its plan includes $3 million per year for a smart-thermostat rebate program that would give most customers $100 per qualified thermostat. Low-income customers would get larger rebates, the company said.

As for the smart meters, FirstEnergy said it will give consumers more control over their energy and, in the future, will help detect and locate outages. However, it did not say that the meters will enable people with solar power or other renewables to sell power back to the grid.

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