3. Business Plans

A business plan is a short document that companies use to outline their strategies for growth and development. They are useful documents for any management team and are usually the main basis on which outside agencies, such as banks and venture capitalists, will consider funding. Writing or editing business plans can provide another occasional source of copywriting work although you need to be aware that the most critical element of any business plan is not the words it contains, but the figures.

If you are going to do this kind of work, it can help to have written a business plan yourself, perhaps for your own business, and to have presented it to potential partners or backers. If you lack this kind of experience, I would advise talking to your bank manager or someone similar to find out what they like and do not like to see in the business plans they receive. This basic feedback can be very useful in advising clients in start-up businesses or those who have not written a plan before.

If a company is willing to pay for external help in putting together its business plan, it almost always means the document will be used to secure funding, either for a new launch or for business expansion. This means it will be seen exclusively by people who may be in a position to hand over large amounts of cash. These people will be looking, first and foremost, for evidence that they, too, can make money on the deal.

Hence the importance of the figures. An investor is usually looking for a decent return on their money after about three years. In many cases, this return will be by way of a trade sale or public listing. They will therefore want to see tangible evidence that their investment will help the business grow in value, and that it will be secure in the first place.

While the figures should always be put together, or at least checked, by a qualified professional such as an accountant, there is scope for a copywriter to add value elsewhere. If the numbers add up, the potential investor will next look to see whether the business strategy makes sense and is backed by a capable management team. A well-written document can help create an image of professionalism that the investor will feel comfortable about buying into.

If you are helping write a plan from scratch, you will need to sit down with the management team and understand their business in detail. You will need to pin down what opportunities it faces, and how the team expects to capitalise on them.

You will also need to find out what threats it faces, and what steps it has taken or will take to avoid them. Additional desk research may be needed into the market in general and into how the business is perceived in the marketplace by its customers.

Finally, you need to assemble detailed biographies of the main members of the management team. It can also be helpful to carry out a SWOT analysis of the business, if the management team has not done so already. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – four headings that can be used to summarise a business’s market position (for more on this and on other useful techniques for business and career development, see www.mindtools.com). A SWOT analysis of your own business might look something like this:

The business plan itself needs to include the following sections:

• An executive summary of no more than three pages (and preferably one), which can act as a stand-alone document and sells the business to potential investors, and with a brief summary of the company’s market position, prospects, plan for growth and management team.
• An account of the company’s market positioning and the trends it hopes to exploit.
• A summary of the company’s competitive environment, with its plans to cope with competition.
• A description of the business processes the company uses, plus notes on how they will be used or modified for competitive advantage.
• Any other factors, such as marketing or promotion, relevant to the business’s plans for growth.
• Details of the management team and, in particular, their track record in running and growing businesses in the past.
• Detailed revenue, cash-flow and profit-and-loss projections spanning at least three years. These can be included as appendices.

In total, the document should not be more than about ten pages, plus appendices.