How to Write a Simple Business Plan That Works

Many online as well as offline entrepreneurs have difficulties setting up their business successfully and even harder time planning everything accordingly. While creating an extensive business plan that will cover every little detail is a good idea, writing a simple business plan that is designed with the sole intention to help you start up your business and guide to you to the end is sometimes even better.

Following tips will assist you in creating a simple plan that will shoot your business straight from the ground up to the skies.

Table of Content

Know Your Resources

Before you even begin writing a simple business plan, you should know which resources are available to you and in what quantities. This is an important step as your entire progress will depend solely on your available resources. Following are the ones you should keep an eye on:

1. Time

How much time do you have to work on your business each day? Be honest and let yourself some air to breath. Write down how much time can you actually spend each day beside all your other activities and do not exaggerate. Don’t assume that you will have more time all of the sudden and complete all other activities faster than you used to.

Simple business plan is simple and effective only when it is based on the actual resources and not on a false assumption that they will be available tomorrow.

2. Money

Money is part of every business and it is the main driving force beside time. If used wisely, money can make you a lot more money and enable you to hire staff and outsource a lot of work that should otherwise be done by you.

Time and money need to be coordinated very effectively to get the most out of each. Use money when you are short on time, and use time when you are short on money. Ideally you will use time and money at the same time just as much as they need to be used.

3. Equipment

Simple business plan should clearly outline what equipment will be required to start your business and what equipment will need to be obtained in the future. You should make sure that you know what is already available to you and what needs to be purchased.

Knowing how much money you have on disposal now and how much you will have in the future will allow you to make smart decisions on equipment purchases.

4. Endurance

You don’t hear about this one very often, if ever at all, but knowing your own limitations is actually more important than you might think in order to have your simple business plan work for you. Many start-up entrepreneurs fail simply because they overestimate their own abilities and power of will to endure all the work that needs to be done. Soon they find themselves overstocked with work and cannot find enough strength to continue.

You should be very honest with yourself and know how much work you can actually endure on a consistent basis without feeling exhausted. It is best to leave some air to breathe and use effectively only 80% of your available time. 20% will serve as a backup if things won’t always go according to your plan.

5. Skills

Speaking of endurance and limitations, do you have all required skills to complete all tasks at hand or do you need to hire additional staff to do certain things for you? You will most definitely get better at certain tasks and complete them with better results, but you shouldn’t count on that from the beginning. When writing a simple business plan, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Use your money to outsource work that you don’t quite find your way around and use your time to complete the tasks you are good at with outstanding outcome. As time progresses, you can educate and learn to do everything by yourself, or if money allows, have everything completed by hired staff.

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Writing a Simple Business Plan

1. Vision

Vision is always number one on the list because you first need to have a vision of what you want to create before you can actually go and create it. You should see what you are trying to build and see what your business will look like in six months, one year, and two years and so on. Outline your vision on a piece of paper.

2. Mission

Every vision requires a mission to fuel it up and send it to realization. What is your mission with your business? What are you trying to achieve with it? Answer these questions and any additional ones that that might come up. Write them down below your vision.

3. Objectives

Moreover, a simple business plan without any objectives is like running in the circles. In order to achieve something, you need to have clear objectives written down and know if they are the smart ones or you are trying to achieve something you absolutely don’t have resources for or even necessary skills to achieve them. Outline realistic objectives that are 100% achievable given the resources available to you.

4. Strategies

As you have your first three points written down, you need to design some good strategies. Nothing will ever work if you don’t have the strategy for it to work. How do you intend to build your business? What exactly will you be selling or offering to your customers? How will you sell it? How will you make your business stand out from the competition?

Design good strategies for achievement of these goals. Ask yourself as many questions as you can and design a strategy for realization of each one of them.

5. Start-up Resources

In order to write a simple business plan that will work for you in practice, know how much money you will need to start up your business. If you have completed our first part, which is to find out what resources are available to you, you shouldn’t have much problem completing this step. Knowing how much money and time you will need and how much you can use is essential to bring your business to success.

6. Monthly Expenses

This includes thinking in the future and meddling with ideas based on the facts of the present and the past. Realize how much money you will need to spend during your first months of operation as well as later in the process.

7. Monthly Income

The same applies to income. Know how much you can make given your own realistic expectations (which is a very relative term), and write down your findings.

8. Action Plan

The final step is to create an action plan. Action plan involves writing down specific tasks you will need to complete now and in the future in order to meet your objectives. Create a good plan based on your available resources and outline specific tasks that will need to be completed at specific time at specific quantities.

What are your thoughts about making a simple business plan? I would love to hear your advice, so share your tips with us in the comment section below.

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