Templates, Outlines, and Models

This section contains some of the resources we've found useful with our clients.  Grab them and work with them on your own, or give us a call for help. Email us with any comments, feedback or questions.  We hope they serve as starters for both thought and action.

Business Plan Outlines

Few topics inspire such dread as business plans.  They sound like such work to assemble.  They are however very important: they serve to demonstrate to others your sincerity and commitment - both to doing the hard work and to thinking your business through.  A few hours' work tackling the fundamental challenges of defining an early marketing budget and slogging through appropriate media choices will serve you as well as considering early on when and how you will outsource/offshore.  You can anticipate gotchas while you synch yourself up with the realities of what the next year will require.  Be forgiving, make guesses when you must, fill in all the blanks possible while trying to come up with answers that generate math that will, at the very least, roughly add up.  The plan should be no more than 16 pages, and is something you should plan to revisit about every 3 months.

Our favorite business plan outline is a rigorous one. Focusing first on marketing, it covers product concept, market overview, and sales strategy. Then it extends to legal, operational, and administrative areas.  It looks lengthy, but is best dealtand it is very bi-modal in that it requires both left and right brain work.  It's huge advantage, however, is in this rigor: it requires consideration and planning around each functional area.  With our clients, we've found thinking through all the activities required tremendously valuable, and that discover both what must be done now, and what can be delayed.  With this model, we deliberately shift focus away from the entrepreneur's core skill areas to shed light on all functional areas. In so doing, we identify the functions where outside assistance is helpful.
Download this file here (RTF format - 40KB).

Our second place entry is a more marketing-focused business plan.  It was inspired by material created by Nathan Beckford of VentureArchetypes.  For those who aren't keen on writing a business plan, this outline might provide a more friendly start.  The style of this outline is more streamlined, such as might work well in a venture presentation once distilled further.  

Activity planning

From your business plan, you have the necessary material to begin building an aggregate view of your business.  Now that you know where you want to go, you can lay out a plan for how to get there.

Your business plan serves as a framework to identify what you need to be successful.  It necessarily throws light upon gaps in your current business -- positions not yet filled, data not yet gathered, and operational details not yet resolved.  Not knowing the answers to these questions is perfectly fine, especially in the beginning.  What is important is to get clear about what you don't know, and then plan for getting the information you need.

Activity planning comes to the rescue at this point because it serves as a way to orchestrate work in the face of ambiguity, rapid change, and a high degree of task interdependence.  The format we embrace lends itself well creating both a high level management understanding and mechanism to keep track of details.

The idea is simple - plot out your next 18 months' activities on parallel paths, segmented by function, as shown in the accompanying figure.  This gives you a build up from individual teams to the enterprise level, and helps get a handle on conditional and contingency planning.

We've made a rough version of our planning worksheet available here for download as an Adobe Acrobat file.  You can use this worksheet to map your business activities and help coordinate activities among your team.