A good business plan can help you secure finance, define the direction of your business and create strategies to achieve your goals. A business plan is a written description of your business’s future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you’ve written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan.
Business planning will assist you in understanding how to effectively market your business, how to understand and plan for financial stability both now and in the future, how to carry out your daily operations with a necessary level of routine, and so forth.
It is your business and therefore your business plan; so, you should take the lead in writing it. However, don’t hesitate to seek outside assistance from your management team, consultants, accountants, bookkeepers, copy editors and/or other experienced people.
As you can see, this is, in large part, the information you should have gathered if you completed my 10 Steps Before You Start a Home Business If you completed that exercise and collected some notes, you may already have a fair amount of information needed that you can plug in when you or someone else write your business plan.
We recognise Scottish Enterprise has an important role to play in promoting Scotland’s Business Pledge through our engagement with companies and our work in international markets – encouraging companies to adopt the living wage, get involved in their local communities, and investing in youth training and employment.