While a business plan is a necessary tool for attracting angel investors, venture capital, and bank financing, the business planning process has so much more value to offer than just as a tool to raise money.
Our experience has taught us that the benefits of the business planning process include:
Providing you a 360 degree view of your company, allowing you to examine its viability and potential for growth and success.
A business plan is powerful tool for ensuring that the founders and management team are committed to a common set of goals by forcing individuals to reconcile any differences they may have into a unified plan of attack.
A business plan is an excellent method of communicating your vision, mission, values and goals to the stakeholders that will help you launch and grow your business – suppliers, partners, customers, employees and board members.
Helps companies gain a more thorough understanding of the opportunities and challenges in their market and industry, and craft strategies and tactics that will directly respond to customer needs.
Your company has competition, and ultimately your success will be determined by how you set your company apart from that of your competitors. A business plan empowers you with valuable competitive insight and enables you determine how to differentiate your products, services and value proposition.
The better you understand your business the more effective you will be in creating the right management team for your company. The landscape is littered with companies with great products and huge markets that either didn’t make it or didn’t reach their potential because the management team lacked the appropriate skills, talent or experience to capitalize upon its opportunity.
A well thought through business plan will lay out a comprehensive strategy and time-line for implementation and operations of the company in the early and emerging stages of growth.
Allows you to examine “what-if” scenarios and create back-up plans should your Plan A turn out differently than you originally expected – a situation which happens quite frequently.