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When you are creating a business plan for your new startup company, there are a lot of things that you need to include. If you miss anything out, then you will end up struggling to run your company as you will not have a plan in place. With that in mind, here are the important things that you need to remember to include in your business plan.
Business Outline
One of the first things that you want to include in your business plan, is what your business is going to be doing. You want to have a brief outline and then go into more depth afterwards. This will help your investors immediately understand what your company is and help you to see any potential flaws or pitfalls in your business idea. You need to make sure to cover every aspect from the basic to the complicated. For example, if you are a new tech startup, then you need to cover what your tech idea is, why people will pay money for it and how it is going to be produced. If it is software, you need to outline how it is going to be distributed and how you are going to manage things like patches. As you work your way through your business outline, you will start to fully understand all of the different elements of your business. This is important to do first because it can help to inform later stages of your business plan. Make sure to do a more compact outline that is aimed towards your investors and that you can give when asked what your company will be doing.
Aims and Goals
All businesses need aims and goals. Aims are your overarching targets such as reach a certain profit threshold. Whereas, goals are the stages you need to go through in order to achieve your aims. These are smaller achievements for your company to complete. This might be having X number of customers by a certain date and this will work towards your profit aim. It might also be goals around diversifying or opening new areas to your business. Once you have your main aim, you need to work out all of the goals you need in place in order to reach it. Doing this will help you have a plan and figure out what your business needs to do in order to be successful.
Marketing
Marketing is an important part of any business and business plan. You need to understand how you are going to market your company. It is important to create your brand and start trying to grow it as early as possible. It is important to get your brand right the first time, as rebranding can be a difficult situation to put a new company in as it can easily alienate your customers and cause a lot of confusion. As for your actual marketing, it important to come up with a marketing campaign and how it is going to help your company. You want to make sure that you have a social media presence and a website even if you are going to be selling face to face in the real world. This is because these are the first point of call for people visiting your company.
Business Operations
Your business operations are the background parts of your company that help support the rest of it to run effectively. They are things like HR, IT support and legal. If you need to have any of these departments are teams within your company, then you need to outline what they will be doing and how many people you need to hire for each. This is where a lot of your business is run and it needs the same amount of attention as planning your marketing. If you are setting up with a company with only a few people, then you still need to address these areas. You need to work out who is going to take the HR responsibilities in the company. Where you are going to outsource your IT support to or which computers you are going to use. You should also outline where you are going to recruit and get employees from if you need them. Do not forget about your business operations.
Finance
Finance is important. You need to forecast your business for the next few years and fully understand where you are going to be getting your money from. You need to understand your expenses and revenue. You will want to have an extremely in depth-first year forecast that goes into detail about all of your company’s finances. A lot of companies do not break even in their first year, so you need to see what the situation will be like for you.