Business Plan

First is your mission. Does the plan reflect your mission and is it clear in the plan? This mission should be communicated within all portions of the plan. It should start in the executive summary and should be pointed at in all the other areas. This is important because it is the framework of the entire business plan. The plan really shows the mechanics of how your mission will be accomplished.

Second are the opportunities and threats to your success. Examine your plan to assure you have addressed the opportunities that you see and how they will used to your advantage. As important as the opportunities, the threats must also be identified and mitigated. Does your plan do both? Investors and others grading your chances to succeed in accomplishing your mission need to be shown a realistic and complete picture of the environment that the threats and opportunities present. How it is addressed in the business plan demonstrates that you have a realistic picture and understand where the potentials and hindrances will fit.

Next are the customers and competitors. Customers ultimately generate the revenue required to continue, grow, and stabilize a business. Does the plan identify consumers, their needs, and how you will fill them? Customers are important, but so is the competition. Does your plan demonstrate an understanding of the competition for customer spending? Do you show where your offerings fit into the business environment? How about pricing? Are you priced above, below or on par with competing products? Have you considered how the competition will react to your entry into their environment? These are challenging questions but they also present an opportunity to show your thoroughness and mastery of the complex atmosphere.

Fourth, what are your strengths and weaknesses? Strengths should match the needs of the business environment. What resources does your business bring to the table? Have you identified additional resources that will be acquired to meet the challenges ahead? Have you demonstrated a reasonable solution to the weaknesses you have identified? Are there other strengths or weaknesses that haven't been addressed? Are they important and would people familiar with the environment expect them to be addressed? These questions relate to thoroughness and demonstrate business environment mastery.

Finally, have you clearly demonstrated your strategy and supported it with business plan procedures and financial planning? The strategy should be clearly stated and all parts of the plan should explicitly or implicitly meld with the strategy. Each of the business plan pieces add a layer of preparedness and demonstrate deliberations to develop the procedures along with financial acquisition. The budgets demonstrate how the financing power will be leveraged to accomplish the mission.

How well the business plan addresses the above five areas will have many impacts on the business. It demonstrates concrete thought and forms the basis for all insiders and outsiders to access the business on a continuing basis. After that it is all execution, feedback, reassessment, and adjustment.