Successful Business Writers Suggests Why Should SME's Write A Business Plan

Various business plan writing services in India have started on the premise of ‘If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.’ As businesses are stepping in the new financial year of 2017, creating a start-up business plan is the first step towards success in the business venture. From obtaining funding to hiring employees, to planning for expansion, a business plan can play a guide to the SME to keep the business on track.

A professional business plan can keep the company focused on goals and keep moving it forward when faced with obstacles. But at the same time, they are difficult and time-consuming documents, spread over 50 odd pages and takes over a month to complete. Usually, it is advisable to take business plan consultancy services. To an average business owner, it sounds like a heinous task.

Likewise, it is argued that business is inherently tumultuous by design and as soon as founders finish writing the business plan, the business is likely to have changed its execution strategy, making the business plan outdated. However, as Sir Winston Churchill rightly said, ‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’.

For an SME it is crucial to creating a business plan which is a road map projecting 3 – 5 years ahead. It outlines the route that a company plans to take, product lines, customer reach, and revenues. A well-written start-up business plan is a good tool for analysis and helping SME owners to understand if they are meeting their projected goals and make alternative decisions and necessary changes. Apart from using it as a tool to raise investments, a business plan offers various other benefits to SME founders which are outlined below.

1. Professional Business Plan Provides Clarity 

Writing a business plan allows a business founder to think clearly about their execution plan and direction that they are taking. A business plan works like a road map for a business and it should be updated frequently to keep it more relevant and up-to-date. While writing a business plan an entrepreneur discovers many issues that he/she hadn’t thought about or planned towards.

2. Gain Deep Understanding Of Markets 

f the tasks while writing a business plan is to calculate the market size of the opportunity. This is one of the most challenging areas since it is based on external research or educated guesstimates. However, while writing the business plan, an entrepreneur gains more insights into the business. Business plans help to understand the brand-new industry in an extremely deep way before entering it and forces to deeply examine how the business would fit into the market and its probability of success.

3. Stay Organized

The biggest reason to write business plans is that it often helps entrepreneurs to become more organized and disciplined. Businesses without a plan can often get off-track and as a result, the revenue of a company suffer. Creating a business plan with financial projections like revenue and expenses forecast can help a business remain committed to its long-term goals. While using services of business plan consultants ensure that the activity is on track and being executed diligently.

4. Confirm The Math

Many ideas sound great on paper or in personal discussions, however, simple math can make or break a business idea. The financial projections which are a part of the key elements of a business plan can help in studying various planning scenarios and create a financial model to project returns on investments from several realistic cases. This helps in saving time and effort for thinking through numbers and making sure that it’s possible to achieve the revenue and profit targets. In fact, there is various business plan writing software that makes this task easier.

5. Iron Out Possible Kinks 

Writing a business plan allows an entrepreneur to think through all possible risks and challenges that they face in a business. The plan provides an opportunity to question the validity of the business idea, the product or service on offer, target markets etc. It allows an entrepreneur to conduct a due diligence on their own and pre-address all possible issues that a business can encounter. Hiring best business plan writers also allow receiving professional inputs and expert advice.

6. Holding Oneself Accountable 

A business plan becomes a great tool for entrepreneurs to articulate their vision and future plans for their business idea. The format of any standard business plan forces an entrepreneur to think and create a long-term vision and strategies to achieve the same. Once all these ideas are out on paper, they serve as a guide to track the progress of the business and hold the entrepreneur accountable for the future.

7. Establish Benchmarks

A business plan is valuable, iterative, a document that can serve as a successful benchmark tool for the entrepreneur. It is important to identify areas where the business exceeded the entrepreneur’s expectations or experienced a shortfall. This helps the entrepreneurs to pivot their business plans as they execute the business strategies and puts an onus on them, to be honest about their company’s performance.

Source

8. Marketing Documents

Business plans work as a great marketing document to display to all the stakeholders involved, regarding the future scope and to show the excitement of the company. They are incredibly useful in describing what an entrepreneur can do, understand the business competitors and craft a realistic future plan. A business plan communicates a successful story and provides reasons why an investor should park their investments with the company.

9. Attract Right Kind Of Talent & Investors 

Business plan is a document which are used to successfully attract investors or talent to an enterprise. A company built by a right set of people, investors supporting the venture, and a business plan help to describe the exciting journey of the business and its future scope to the readers. It is necessary that the most desirable managers who are most likely to feel they can and should demand to see details of the business plan before they cast their lot with the entrepreneur.

10. Set Tone For Negotiating Ownership 

Inviting a financial investor to become a partner is one of the most important decisions that an entrepreneur makes and a business plan helps an entrepreneur to make that decision wisely. A business plan also helps in setting the tone of negotiating ownership that an entrepreneur will trade with an investor. A business plan focuses on key details like the amount of total investment required for the business, finalize ownership percentage and draw up necessary agreements. The document also outlines division of profits that the business is going to earn in future.

Writing a business plan is  an ideal way to make sure that each member of the founding team is aligned with the current and future plans for the business. It is imperative for the founding team members to be on the same page as to how they will move forward to great success. By getting it all on paper, a founding team can avoid all sorts of mis-communications.

Usually, entrepreneurs don’t have time to write a business plan from scratch and outsource the task to various business plan writing company in India. However, it is recommended to business owners to draft their business plans along with such business plan writers since no one can explain their business better than the entrepreneurs since they understand the intricacies of the daily business.

Having a business plan in place to address the opportunities as well as the challenges is a great place to start for SME’s. As the company starts growing, there are real opportunities for SMEs to be at the forefront of the trends and to benefit from that growth.

Infographic Source