Business Plans

Your business plan is an essentially part of your small business success strategy. A business plan should contain details of the organisation’s objectives, and these objectives should follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timed) framework, to ensure that the company is capable of realistically achieving them.

If your planning has been in progress for a while then you might want to update the reader on what stage you are at. If you are considering purchasing an existing laundromat then you will want to outline the history of the business in this section too.

Since the scope of the business plan is to describe not only the business logic behind the commercialisation plans, but also the assets and resources that will make the business successful, the definition of a strong intellectual property (IP) protection and management policy and the business planning exercise are strongly interconnected.

This plan’s components must include company profile; the types of products or services offered; the target market; the market forecasts; detailed illustration of the business strategy to be used; delineation of implementation milestones; revelation of names for the management team; and sound financial analysis.

Business plans are necessary but only if you want to avoid the consequences of failing to do so. Jesus continued his lesson in the next verses, “Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.” In other words, if you neglect planning, you will ultimately fail.