Eight Steps to a Winning Business Plan
By Tim Berry

Tim brings his considerable experience in business planning to Business Plan Posting, and has developed a simple and concise planning model to help entrepreneurs create a winning business plan.

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary is the most important of your chapter summaries. It is the doorway to the rest of the plan. Get it right or your target readers will go no further.
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Company Summary

Include the essential details, such as the name of the company, its legal establishment, how long it's been in existence, and what it sells to what markets.
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Products

A complete business plan describes what you sell: either products, services, or both. List and describe the products or services you sell. For each business offering, cover the main points, including what the product or service is, how much it costs, what sorts of customers make purchases, and why. What customer need does each product or service line fill? You might not want or need to include every product or service in the list, but at least consider the main sales lines.
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Market Analysis Summary

A standard business plan should explain the general state of the industry and the nature of the business. Whether you're a service business, manufacturer, retailer, or some other type of business, you should do an industry analysis describing:
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Strategy and Implementation

Strategy is focus. Across the entire business, over the whole range of possibilities involving different products and services, different target customers, different kinds of financing, different levels of growth, what are your choices? What are your priorities?
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Management Summary

The management chapter starts, like the other chapters, with a good summary. You may want to use that summary as part of a summary memo or loan application document, so cover the main points. Consider what you'd say about your management team if you only had one or two paragraphs to say it.
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Financial Plan

You can't describe a plan without both text and tables, both words and numbers. The single most important analysis in a business plan is a cash flow plan, because cash is the most critical element in business. With the way the numbers work, however, you can't do a cash flow plan without looking at the income statement and balance sheets as well.
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Appendix

Your appendix will be used for additional information that explains your idea further. This information should contain some of the following:
Detailed financials
Any diagrams or pictures that help explain your product or service
Additional research or relevant reports
Resumes of key players
More detailed information on competitors when relevant.
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