How to Put Together a Professional Business Plan for Your Small Business

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Resources

• Best Business Planning Software: LivePlan 
• Free Business Planning Tool: TRUiC’s Business Plan Generator
• The Story Brand framework was first introduced by Donald Miller in his book "Building a Story Brand". We encourage you to read the book to explore his ideas further.

Articles

• How to Write a Business Plan

Crafting a Professional Business Plan: A Comprehensive Guide

This section offers an in-depth guide to crafting a professional business plan that reflects your business's goals and strategies. We'll walk you through the essential components, from the executive summary to financial projections, providing you with templates, examples, and insights to create a compelling business plan that impresses stakeholders and guides your business to success.

How to Put Together a Professional Business Plan for Your Small Business – Transcript

When you position a business idea in front of a potential business partner or someone that you need a loan for your business from, you want to make sure that your pitch is organized, clearly outlines what it is that you're attempting to accomplish, provides well-thought-out information about the possible financial future of the company, and that it provides information about why you believe the business will be successful. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting their business. That sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

We've made it through an entire section of our small business course — 30 videos helping you get your arms completely around your business idea, detailing all of the information that you would need to confidently pitch your business to a potential investor or bank to get a loan. 

In this video, we're going to organize everything that we've learned and discussed so far in the course, and we'll consolidate it into a quick pitch deck and formal business plan that you can use to position your business with potential banks and investors. And we do it as efficiently as possible using the template at LivePlan.com.

At TRUiC our mission is to offer all our resources and information for free - but we support our work by using affiliate links, meaning we earn a commission on many of the amazing deals we’ve negotiated for you. Full transparency, LivePlan.com is one such affiliate partner. Link in description below. 

I think that you’ll find, as we put this information together, everything we've discussed so far in the course will make this a very simple process. 

Let's start by opening LivePlan.com and putting together a quick pitch deck that we could use to introduce someone to our business idea and quickly get them interested to hear more about our plans for our business. We’ll click on the “Pitch” tab and then “Edit.” Here we can update our company information like our name and our logo. If you don't have a logo yet, not to worry — we'll be showing you how to optimize the logo design for your business later in the course. 

Next, click the “Headline” tab. Here you should place just one sentence that describes why you believe your company will be successful. Consider this your only chance to get a potential investor interested in investing in your business. 

Be sure to describe your products and services and identify the market that your business will operate in and your ability to penetrate that market. Then give them enough information to make them lean in and take the opportunity seriously. This is most successfully accomplished by identifying the unfair advantage that you've found for your business during your market research. 

Next, click on the “Problem worth solving” tab and provide information concerning the problem you identified when moving through the story brand for your business. Hopefully, you've considered this in depth by now, but remember that just because the problem exists doesn't mean that people will be willing to pay to have it fixed.

In the “Our solution” section, you want to completely describe your company's product offerings and describe how they provide superior solutions to other potential solutions in the market. In the “Target market” section, identify the segments of your geographical population that you identify would-be customers worth targeting your marketing efforts towards during your research. 

Be sure to name each of these segments, identify how big of a population you believe them to be, and how much money you believe the population would spend to have the problem that your business solves solved. LivePlan will put together a chart that illustrates your findings for you. 

Next, you'll want to fill in your funding needs. Get this information from the financial projections that you put together for your business earlier and describe what the funds will be allocated for. In the “Sales channels” tab, describe how your products will be sold. Will you have a physical space? Will your products be sold online? Will there be a sales team? And which products will be sold through which of these channels? 

In the “Marketing” section, you'll want to describe any activities that your company will undertake to grow an audience who is aware of your brand and convert them to customers. 

Marketing is a pretty expansive topic that we'll be covering later in the course. If you're following along in this course as you attempt to give your own business ideas some legs, you can put as detailed of a marketing plan down now as you can, but be sure to revisit this question after completing the marketing section of this course. 

LivePlan will fill in the forecast information from the forecast that we put together earlier in the section in the “Forecast” tab. 

And in the “Milestones” section, you want to consider and list key moments and executables that you have planned for your business. 

Choose major events or achievements that need to happen to keep your plan on track. Good examples might include launching a new product, entering a new market, adding a key hire to your management team, or finding the right location for your new store. 

And finally, close out the pitch deck by making note of key members of your team that will be operationally important for your success and describe their roles and describe any partners or relationships that will be strategically important for your business and describe their roles. 

After completing your pitch, you can publish it and share it to a webpage that is not password protected, or you can export it as a PowerPoint presentation. 

After completing the pitch, you want to go ahead and complete the business plan section as well. The business plan will allow you to organize your pitch into a printable PDF and will include expanded financial information, which is a great leap behind it at any investor or bank loan meeting. 

LivePlan provides you the option to search through over 500 business plans to benchmark against the industry you're considering entering, so it may be helpful to check those out as you go to fill out your plan as well to get inspiration for how to write for your industry. 

Most of what you wrote in the pitch will copy and paste well into the business plan. Although as you fill out the business plan section, there will be opportunities for you to fill out a wider array of information. Not to worry, though LivePlan gives detailed instructions for what to write in each section. 

If you've been following along with us in the course so far, hopefully, at this point, you feel confident that you can professionally plan out any business idea that you'd like to bring to fruition — even to the point that you could confidently walk into any investor or loan meeting to get funding that you need to get started. 

When you're ready to turn that idea into a reality, though, you're going to need to jump through a few hoops to form a legal business entity and get access to a business bank account, which is what we're going to be showing you how to do in the next section of the course. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that provides business owners all of the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link for you to get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in the course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next section of the course, and if you have any questions, let us know.