Business Plan Format: How to Structure Your Plan

The key point to understand when structuring your business plan is the fact that no one really wants to spend a lot of time reading your plan. The goal of your plan is to get readers to take action and most likely that action is to meet with you so that you can convince them that you have a great venture and that they should fund your venture.

As such, the best structure of your plan is always to want to get the reader to want to learn more. So for example, your plan should start with the Executive Summary and the goal of the Executive Summary is to get the reader excited and preview what’s to come so they start turning the pages.

That’s the key with structuring your plan…you need to get the reader to want to keep turning pages because once they stop then it’s game over, meaning you’re not going to get funded by the reader of your business plan. So the Executive Summary starts by getting the reader excited and then the other sections of the plan need to continue to get the reader jazzed to learn more.

One technique for doing this is to cross pollinate or reference other sections of your plan. For example, early on in your plan you’ll have the customer analysis section and in that section you’ll discuss the target customers that you want to serve.

In creating that section you can say, “As you will learn later in the Marketing Plan section we’re going to show you how we’re going to promote our product and services to this select customer group.” So you want to tie your different sections together when you structure your plan.

But the main structure of your plan is going to be your Executive Summary followed by your Company Analysis, then your Industry Analysis, your Customer Analysis, your Competitive Analysis, your Marketing Plan, your Operations Plan, your Financial Plan, your Management Team, and finally your Appendix.

So that’s the structure of your plan. Once again, to reiterate your job in writing your plan is to get the reader to turn pages, to go from the Executive Summary to the Company Analysis and then be excited to read the next section, which is the Industry Analysis, and so on.

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