Thoughts on Business Plans

In the last post we talked about the views of Donald Trump and Paul Grants on business plans. In this follow up post I will be talking about my thoughts on their opinions as well as what we can learn from them.

Based on what Donald Trump had said, we need business plans for direction and focus and Mr. Trump is correct. Through business plans we learn things that we may not have considered if we tried to start a business without any plan whatsoever.

You can’t just say, “We are going to start a clothing business,” and end it there. In a business you have to think about the necessary expenses that it will take to start that business. For example, you need to consider how much trademarks for your clothing line will cost, the cost of salary for yourself and your workers, marketing costs, how much you will charge and so many other things. Without planning ahead you will run into money issues that you didn’t expect and even possibly legal problems.

With this kind of information from Mr. Trump, I know that when I am working on my business plan to take it seriously and to try to be as accurate as possible. The more accurate you are the more prepared you can be to start a business plan.

Now we can find out what to take from Paul Grants words. We see that Mr. Grant values business plans a bit less than Trump did. However he emphasizes their need nonetheless but in a different light.

 To Mr. Grant, business plans are a sort of trust builder between you and possible investors. He also states that the good news is that since he finds a fair deal of investors merely skim through the business plan; you don’t have to necessarily do a 100-page business plan.

With this information I know that I actually need to attempt to keep the business plan relatively short, while keeping the needed information in it. Staying accurate and including information that investors want, while keeping the business plan as short as possible, we can give investors all the information they need without overwhelming them with info that they don’t need.

With all of this info in mind there are 2 sections of a business plan that I feel is necessary to push more focus to, the executive summary and the business financials.


Sources:
http://www.businessplaninfo.org/popularlinks.html
http://www.biography.com/articles/Donald-Trump-9511238
http://thefundinggame.co.uk/aboutus.aspx
http://www.sba.gov/content/business-plan-executive-summary
http://sbinfocanada.about.com/cs/businessplans/a/bizplanfinanc.htm