A business plan is more than a document. It’s a guide that helps you outline and achieve your goals. It’s also a management tool that allows you to analyze results, make strategic decisions, and showcase how your business will operate, and grow. In short, if you’re thinking of starting a business or plan to pitch your business to investors, writing a business plan can improve your chances of success.

Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be complicated. In this comprehensive guide, I’ll show you how to quickly and easily write a business plan that will get the results you want. Don’t worry, you don’t have to have a business or accounting degree to put together a great business plan. This guide will show you how to get your plan done step-by-step without any of the complexity or frustration.

You can download our free business plan template to start writing your own business plan as you work through this guide. And if you want a visual version of this guide to reference when writing your plan, download our free business planning ebook.

Why write a business plan?
Are you still unsure whether a business plan is worth the time and investment? Can’t you just jump right into starting and running your business? You could, but you’ll be missing out on some key benefits that a business plan provides. Having a business plan will help you in the following ways.

Grow your business faster
Writing a business plan is about establishing a foundation for your business. You’re not predicting the future, you’re working through the core strategy of your business that will help you grow. This initial document isn’t meant to be perfect but is designed to be reviewed and adjusted to help you identify and reach your goals.

Without a business plan as a baseline, it will be far more difficult to track your progress, make adjustments, and have historical information readily available to reference when making difficult decisions. Creating a business plan ensures that you have a roadmap that doesn’t just outline where you plan to go, but where you’ve already been.

Pitch and get funding
Investors and loan providers need to know that you have a solid understanding of the trajectory of your business. You need to prove that there is an attainable and sustainable need for your solution, that you have a strong business strategy, and that your business can be financially stable. This means having the right financial statements, forecasts, and a digestible explanation of your business model available for potential investors.

Writing your business plan helps you put all of those pieces together and create connections between them to tell a cohesive story about your business.

Make confident strategic decisions
Often the biggest decisions you’ll make for your business are amidst volatile periods of growth, decline, or even external crises. This requires you to make highly consequential decisions far more quickly than you may like. Without up-to-date planning and forecast information, these decisions may be less certain or strategic than they need to be.

By having a written business plan that you’re regularly reviewing, you can make confident decisions. You’ll have all the information necessary to know when you can hire new employees, launch a new product line or make a major purchase. At the same time, you can also plan ahead in case a decision doesn’t work out as expected, minimizing your potential risk.

5 tips to write a great business plan quickly and easily
Before you get started with your business plan, let’s talk about some “rules” that will make the whole business planning process easier. The goal is to get your business plan done so you can focus on building your business.
1. Keep it short
2. Know your audience
3. Test your business idea
4. Establish goals and objectives
5. Don’t be intimidated

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