A Business Plan is just a plan for how your business is going to work, and how you’re going to make it succeed.
A business plan is a vital document for any business that contains information pertaining to its promoters, business model, operations, past, competitor analysis, market analysis and project financial performance.
Every business needs to have a written business plan. Whether it’s to provide direction or attract investors, a business plan is vital for the success for your organization. Business plan is used for investment decision by private equity investors and angel investors
Business plans are used by private equity investors and angel investors to gain an insight into the business for making an investment decision.

Some of the major areas that must be addressed in the business plan are:

• Team – Promoter Information.
• Business- Mission and vision of the business.
• Problem – What is the problem the business is trying to address?
• Solution – What is the proposed solutions or business model?
• Market – How big is the market?
• Competition – How do you plan to compete against existing solutions?
• Financials – What is present and projected financial performance?
• Milestones – What are the proposed milestones the business must achieve?

A business plan consultant consists of the following key factors:

• An Executive summary.
• Business model.
• Marketing strategies.
• Competitive analysis.
• Technology & product plan.
• Operations and management plan.
• Revenue plan.
• Financial projections.
• Business valuation.
• Investment offerings.

Recommends that a business plan include:

• Executive summary - a snapshot of your business.
• Company description - describes what you do
• Market analysis - research on your industry, market and competitors
• Organization and management - your business and management structure
• Service or product - the products or services you’re offering
• Marketing and sales - how you’ll market your business and your sales strategy
• Funding request - how much money you’ll need for next 3 to 5 years
• Financial projections - supply information like balance sheets
• Appendix - an optional section that includes resumes and permits

Advantages of a Business Plan
Drafting a business plan has following benefits:

• See the whole business: An Effective Business Plan planning connects the dots in your business so you get a better picture of the whole. Strategy is supposed to relate to tactics with strategic alignment.
• Strategic Focus: Start-ups and small business need to focus on their special identities, their target markets, and their products or services tailored to match.
• Set priorities: Business planning helps you keep track of the right things, and the most important things. Allocate your time, effort, and resources strategically.
• Manage change: With good planning process you regularly review assumptions, track progress, and catch new developments. This helps to make analysis regarding the actual business and business plan. And in case of any deviation team can work upon to eliminate that deviation
• Develop accountability: Good planning process sets expectations and tracks results. It’s a tool for regular review of what is expected and what happened. Good work as well as Disappointments shows up. A well-run monthly plan review with plan vs. actual included becomes an impromptu review of tasks and accomplishments.
• Strategic alignment: Business planning will bring up the hidden mismatches.
• Milestones: . Good business planning sets milestones you can work towards. These are key goals you want to achieve, like reaching a defined sales level, hiring that sales manager, or opening the new location. We work better when we have visible goals we can work towards.
• Metrics. Put performance indicators and numbers to track into a business plan where you can see them monthly in the plan review meeting. Use your business planning to define and track the key metrics.
• Realistic regular reminders to keep on track. We all want to do everything for our customers, but sometimes we need to push back to maintain quality and strategic focus. It’s hard, during the heat of the everyday routine, to remember the priorities and focus. The business planning process becomes a regular reminder

Creating your new business plan involves a detailed process with a number of stages, some of which can overlap. Whether you are writing your plan from scratch or from a business plan template, or working with an experienced business plan writer or consultant, you will find the following five steps through the process.
The business plan process includes following steps:

Detailed research into the industry, customers, competitors, and costs of the business begins the process. A variety of resources can be used for research, ranging from databases and articles to direct interviews with other entrepreneurs or potential customers. Research should be documented and organized carefully with the information gathered and the source as there is a need to cite sources within the plan.
“To write the perfect plan, you must know your company, your product, your competition and the market intimately.”

Next, the information from the research should inform the strategy you choose for your business. Make adequate analysis of the strategy you created even before your research and dig deeper into decisions on appropriate marketing, operations, and hiring for the first five years of the company’s life. Strategy generally pulls from the best practices of the industry, but uses this only as a foundation on which to add very different activities that create a competitive advantage.
Have a strategic marketing plan in place. A great business plan will always include a strategic and aggressive marketing plan. This typically includes achieving marketing objectives such as:

• Introducing new products
• Extending or regaining market for existing products
• Entering new territories for the company
• Where will this business come from? Be specific.
• Cross-selling (or bundling) one product with another
• Entering into long-term contracts with desirable clients
• Raising prices without cutting into sales figures
• Refining a product
• Having a content marketing strategy
• Enhancing manufacturing/product delivery

All of the activities you choose for your strategy come as some cost and (hopefully) lead to some revenues. Sketch out the financial situation by looking at whether you can expect revenues to cover all costs and leave room for profit in the long run. Begin to insert your financial assumptions and start-up costs into a financial model which can produce a first-year cash flow statement for you, giving you the best sense of the cash, you will need on hand to fund your early operations.

With financials more or less settled and a strategy decided, it is time to draft through the narrative of the plan’s many sections. With the background work you have completed, the drafting itself should be a relatively painless process.

Company profile includes the history of your organization, what products or services you offer, your target market and audience, your resources, how you’re going to solve a problem and what makes your business unique.
Company profiles are often found on the company’s official website and are used to attract possible customers and talent. However, your profile can be used to describe your company in your business plan. It’s not only an essential component of your business plan; it’s also one of the first written parts of the plan.
Having your profile in place makes this step a whole lot easier to compose.

Investors want to make sure that your business is going to make them money. Because of this expectation, investors want to know everything about your business. To help with this process, document everything from your expenses, cash flow and industry projections.

Business Plan is a road map that provides directions so a business can plan its future and helps it avoid bumps in the road. That’s important to keep in mind if you’re self-funding or bootstrapping your business. But, if you want to attract investors, your plan will have a different purpose and you’ll have to write a plan that targets them so it will have to be as clear and concise as possible. When you define your plan, make sure you have defined these goals personally as well.

The potential readers of a business plan are a varied bunch, ranging from bankers and venture capitalists to employees, states Entrepreneur. Although this is a diverse group and each type of reader does have certain typical interests. If you know these interests up-front, you can be sure to take them into account when preparing a plan for that particular audience.
For example, bankers will be more interested in balance sheets and cash-flow statements, while venture capitalists will be looking at the basic business concept and your management team. The manager on your team, however, will be using the plan to “remind themselves of objectives.”
Make sure that your plan can be modified depending on the audience reading your plan. However, keep these alterations limited from one plan to another. This means that when sharing financial projections, you should keep that data the same across the board.