Get focussed and organised with our business plan template that includes some helpful hints as well as details of what to include in it. Tim Berry, the well-known business plan expert and author of Lean Business Planning, distinguishes one more benefit of it: a business plan will help you to plan and manage cash flow and tie together educated guesses on sales, costs, assets, expenses, and debts.

In addition to the main document, you should provide an appendix containing resumes, personal financial statements, credit reports, lease copies, and reference letters for every major player in your startup, as well as copies of contracts, other legal documents and any other pertinent documents, at the end of your business plan.

For most customers, this is their biggest problem; unless they have a strong management team to challenge the norm and provide good support for the ups and downs, innovation and ambition will be constrained, and the organization will quickly revert to silos of activities and accountability, regardless of the flow on effect.

If there is a technically correct definition of ‘business planning’, then perhaps we can best say that ‘business planning’ refers to the plan of the overall organization, or to a unit or division within an organization with responsibility for a trade or profit.

It contains important information including its registered name, address of any physical locations, names of key people in the business, history of the company, nature of the business and more details about products or services that it offers or will offer.