2008 Business Plan Competition
Tips for a Winning Business Plan
Key Questions Your Plan Should Answer
1. Why this product or service?
For-Profit Plans:
a. What problem are you solving?
b. Is yours a “nice to have” or a “need to have” product?
c. How does your product or service offer real benefits?
Non-Profit Plans:
a. What need are you meeting or problem are you solving?
b. What has created the need?
c. Is yours a “nice to have” or a “need to have” service/product?
d. How does your product or service offer real benefits?
e. Is the community interested in seeing the need met or problem solved?
f. Will this organization be seen as a “duplication of services” because another organization is already meeting the need?
2. Who is your customer? Do you have a clear profile?
a. Have you defined a target audience?
b. What do they buy, acquire, or receive and why?
c. How do they buy and when?
d. Where are they?
e. How many potential customers are there in the defined geography?
3. Why you?
a. What distinguishes or differentiates you from competitors?
b. How is this difference important to your customers?
c. Why can’t they copy it? Why aren’t they doing it?
4. Why this management team?
a. What do you (as an individual or team) bring to this business?
b. What are your strengths? How will you compensate for your weaknesses?
c. What outside resources do you have: attorney, accountant, etc.
5. How will you make money or break-even?
a. Are your financials complete, do they make sense?
b. What is your business model? Volume, margin, etc.?
c. What are the risks in your business; what could make you fail? Be honest but not pessimistic.
6. What are the key and other financial elements?
a. Include an opening day balance sheet.
b. Include three years’ worth of financial statements.
c. Remember to account for depreciation, employee benefits, other insurances and warranties, research and development, interest on loans, credit card transactions, etc.
d. Ensure all information calculates and is consistent.
e. Follow standard accounting principles.
7. Tell me what I want to know.
a. Know your audience, who are you writing to?
b. For the plan competition your audience is investors, people who will fund the start-up of your business or non-profit.
c. Focus on what is important to them, not what is important to you.
Important “Mechanical” Issues
1. Does your final plan look like it’s worth the investment you are seeking? Would someone pay you for it?
a. Sharp professional appearance, from cover page to back page.
b. No typographical errors.
c. White paper, sharp clean black type.
d. Is it spiral bound not stapled?
2. Is information easy to find?
a. Table of contents
b. Everything is paginated, including any appendices.
c. Tabs to separate major sections.
3. Is it easy to read?
a. Minimum of 1” margins, 12pt Times New Roman font
b. Text broken by tables, graphs, bullet points.
c. Is there color but used sparingly, to emphasize, and draw attention to key elements?
d. Written in short, concise paragraphs.
e. Conversational in tone, but thorough in substance.
4. Is the information in agreement?
a. Do facts, numbers, etc., in the body agree with what you present in your spreadsheets?
b. Do your spreadsheets calculate correctly?
Understanding Target Market and Differentiation Guidelines by Jack Barry '62
1. A business plan is the key vehicle to organize and test the validity of your company’s or proposed company’s plan, and it is a critical tool in obtaining financing.
2. Experienced investors want to know the following:
a. What is the opportunity?
b. Why is your company going to be able to take advantage of this opportunity?
3. For this reason the “Target Market” and “Differentiation” sections of Business Plan are two of the most important.
a. Target Market
i. The customer is every company’s greatest asset.
ii. It is, therefore, essential for success to understand the customer.
iii. This understanding is demonstrated in the “Target Market” section of the business plan.
iv. The following are examples of the type of information this section should contain.
a) Who specifically is the customer?
b) How big is the market in terms of dollar volume and number of customers?
c) What customer problem does your product or service solve?
d) Why is this problem important to the customer?
e) How is the customer addressing the problem now?
f) Why is the customer unhappy with their current options?
g) What is the customer’s annual expenditure to solve this problem?
h) Is this a growing market?
i) How much of the market is already captured by competition?
j) How much of the market do you believe you can capture and in what timeframe?
b. Differentiation
i. Differentiation can be in one or both of two areas.
a) product (service) or how the company does business.
ii. Differentiation is commonly described as the uniqueness of the company’s product (service) or operation that cannot be duplicated by competition within a 10-year period.
iii. It is both what attracts customers to the company and it is the barrier to entry for the competition.
a) For example, at the time Dell Computer was founded all of the other personal computer companies were selling through retailers and resellers. Dell’s direct sales model became their differentiation and their competitive advantage. The other computer companies have not been able to adopt it to this day.
iv. Being a Christian-oriented company is not a differentiator.
v. Having a uniqueness that cannot be easily duplicated is a differentiator.
a) For example, if all of the companies competing in your market sector were Christian-oriented, what would differentiate your company?