Business plan templates, and when to stop using one
A template solves the blank page, which is a real problem. It also produces a document that reads like a filled-in form, which is a different real problem — and in some settings it is the one that gets you declined.
2 min readUpdated
What a template is good for
Structure. The section list in a business plan is genuinely conventional, and inventing your own ordering helps nobody — a reader who has seen two hundred of these navigates by habit, and a document that puts the market analysis where the operations section should be costs them effort for no gain.
Coverage, too. A template is a checklist of the things you forgot: the regulatory section, the risk section, the use of funds. Those omissions are common and cheap to fix, and a template fixes them for free.
What it costs you
Three things, in rising order of seriousness:
- Prompted prose. A heading that says “Describe your competitive advantage” produces a paragraph describing a competitive advantage, whether or not you have one.
- Placeholder numbers. Templates ship with example figures, and example figures have a way of surviving into the version that gets sent.
- Recognisability. Where credibility is itself a requirement — immigration filings most obviously — a document a reader has seen the shape of before is a problem the content cannot fully rescue.
The section structure worth keeping
Thirteen sections cover essentially every plan. Three of them are usually missing.
- Executive summary
- One page. Written last. The only section some readers finish.
- Company description
- What it is, where, who owns it, what stage it is at.
- Products and services
- What you sell and what it costs you to deliver one of them.
- Market analysis
- Built bottom-up, with the arithmetic visible and the sources dated.
- Competitive landscape
- At least three named competitors with links and dated evidence, not adjectives.
- Marketing and sales
- How a stranger becomes a customer, and what that costs.
- Operations
- How the thing actually gets made or delivered, including capacity limits.
- Team and management
- Who does what, and the headcount that matches the payroll exactly.
- Applicable regulations
- Frequently missing. Licences, inspections and filings belong in the use of funds, not a footnote.
- Risks and mitigations
- Risks that would change the outcome. A generic list reads as box-ticking.
- Resilience to automation
- New, and increasingly asked for on longer-term lending. What of this is automatable, and what is not.
- Financial plan
- Three linked statements, monthly for year one, with the assumptions stated.
- Suggested next steps
- What happens in the ninety days after the money arrives.
When to stop using one
The moment the template starts telling you what your business is rather than the other way round. In practice that is when you find yourself writing a section because it is there, or keeping a number because it came with the file.
The structure is worth keeping forever. The prose and the numbers have to be derived from your business, every time, or the document is describing a generic company that happens to share your name.
Every rule here is enforced by the product.
The checks this article describes are the checks that run before a plan can be exported. Free to generate and read.