Business Plan Index

For example, a book in MLA style would be cited as follows: Ferguson, Niall. Evangeline Marzec is a management consultant to small high-tech companies, and has been in the video games industry since 2004.

But there are some generally accepted conventions about what a full-blown business plan should include and how it should be presented. This is where you discuss the industry, your business structure, your particular product or service, and how you plan to make your business a success.2. Here's your chance to dazzle the readers with good, solid information about your products or services and why customers will want to purchase your products and services and not those of your competitors.4. Having information about key personnel is an important but often misrepresented portion of a business plan.

A plan should cover all the important matters that will contribute to making your business a success. Your strategy and the specific actions you plan to take to implement it. It’s not a long and detailed biography of each person involved but an accurate account of what they've done and what they bring to the table for this specific business opportunity.6. These will be based on your projected financial statements.

This is why the executive summary is often called the most important part of the business plan.

If it doesn’t capture the reader's attention, the plan will be set aside unread - a disaster if you've written your business plan as part of an attempt to get money to start your new business.

Facts—checkable, demonstrable facts—will invest your plan with the most important component of all: credibility.

A useful business plan can be any length, from that scrawl on the back of an envelope to more than 100 pages for an especially detailed plan describing a complex enterprise. Miniplans of five to 10 pages are the popular concise models that may stand on their own for smaller businesses.

A typical executive summary for a startup company includes the following sections: Having trouble getting started?

The easiest way of writing the executive summary is to review your business plan and take a summary sentence or two from each of the business plan sections you’ve already written.

APA style tends to be preferred for technical and scientific presentations, MLA for less technical subjects and various specific legal citation styles for law or government practices. Which style you choose is a matter of preference rather than a specific prescription, but once you’ve chosen it be sure to maintain it throughout your business plan.

Each style you choose will require that you list the author, title, copyright date, publisher and city, issue number, volume, page number and URL if applicable, so be sure to keep track of this information during your research. Place citations in the bibliography section of your business plan and be sure to format them consistently. If possible, maintain it for all the documentation that you’ll be presenting to your lender or investor.