The benefits of having a business plan include:
- Helping you to clarify your vision and deciding whether or not to forge ahead with the idea.
- Determining if your product and/or service has a sufficient market to support it and whether or not it will be profitable.
- Providing an estimate of your start-up costs and how much you’ll need to invest or finance.
- Convincing investors and lenders to fund your business.
- Defining your target market (who your customers are or will be) and how to best reach them through strategic marketing actions or expanding market coverage or reach.
- Establishing or reevaluating your competitive position within the marketplace, by conducting a thorough analysis of the competition (finding out where your competitor’s weaknesses are and how you can take advantage of them).
- Defining corporate objectives and programs to achieve those objectives.
- Helping your business make money from the start by developing effective operational strategies.
- Understanding the risks involved and anticipating potential problems so you that can solve them before they become disasters.
- Setting a value on a business for sale or for legal purposes.
[Source: Wikipedia]
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For more resources, see our Library topic Business Planning.
Rolfe Larson provides consulting and training in areas such as strategic planning, market research, feasibility analysis, business planning, marketing, and implementation strategies.
Your post does a great job of delineating the benefits of business planning.
Yet it’s still so surprising that so many nonprofit entrepreneurs loathe the responsibility to do a business plan when required by funders. We get calls with these complaints all the time.
In the nonprofit world, funders are starting to ask for program plans. Those plans resemble business plans, e.g., the include description of the program, verification that the program’s services indeed are even needed, verification of what outcomes will meet those needs, who the collaborators are, (sometimes even mention of who the competitors are), fee structure, etc.
I suspect that part of the problem is that we still present “business planning” as something that is totally separate from what they’re doing already.
Your post helps to remind us that the major benefactor of business planning is us!
You might also consider this website a great resource, its called Budget Business Plan, they have business plan software providers chart where you can compare prices and reviews for you to choose the best business packages for your needs!