Business Plan Templates

The first step in planning your business venture, clarify your ideas, aims and objectives is to write a business plan.

This is an essential document to ensure your idea is feasible but also critical for bank loans and may also be requested by new suppliers, large customers and is useful to track progress against.

Writing Your Business Plan - Downloads

We have three templates you can use to do your business plan kindly offered by SCORE and Bank of Scotland. There are two for preparing the narrative of your plan (One for a startup business and the other for an existing business) and a cash flow template.

These free business plan templates can help you quick write a business plan. You can download the templates to your computer as they are adobe pdf files. You can click on each template to open now or right click on your mouse to save for later use.

Business plan template for startup businesses pdf startup template

Business plan template for existing businesses pdf existing business template

Financial plan template for startup businesses Excel financial plan template

Another recommended site for a free business plan template is Teneric Business Plan where they offer a free 7 day business planning course as well.

Basic Outline

A basic business plan outlines the answers to questions about your intentions such as:

• Is there demand for your products
• Defining your customer demographics
• Highlighting your own strengths and weaknesses
• Mitigating threats and exploiting market opportunities
• Assessing your competition
• Assigning key employees to tactical plans
• Developing your financial plans

Structure of a Business Plan

Here is a basic business plan structure in summary from the downloads above:

Executive Summary

It's best to write this last after you have prepared the rest of your plan because this is simply a summary of the whole plan. It should ideally be one page but two pages will be fine.

Business Purpose

This are covers your mission statement, company goals and objectives, business philosophy, the industry you are in and legal ownership and key employees.

Products and Services

Describe your key products and services, pricing and margins.

Marketing Plan

Detail your marketing activities including market research, market trends and size, external market economics, barriers to entry. As your market is made up of customers describe their characteristics.

You also need detailed information about your competitors and why you'll be able to take market share from them. And finally you need information about your promotional activities to reach out and entice your potential customers to purchase your products and services.

Operations Plans

This part describes how you are going to produce your products and any distribution issues to get products to your customers and your key suppliers.

Management and Staff

People are behind all successful businesses so it's important to include the key people and advisors.

Start-up Costs Budget

If you are starting a new business then you should detail the costs you'll incur whilst starting up before day to day operations. For most businesses this is the amount they'll need initial funding for.

Financial Plans

You financial plans should be detailed (ie: monthly) for the first year then quarterly or yearly for the following 2 years. You should include a profit and loss account, a cash flow forecast and Balance Sheet and even a break-even analysis.