How To: Building a Business Plan

Is Your Business Idea Feasible?

Making a critical evaluation of your business concept at an early stage will allow you to discover, address and correct any fatal flaws before investing time in preparing your business plan.

Telling Your Story

No matter what type of business you plan to start, when your story is complete it will be an important part of the risk management process and a key to effectively understanding your business and its critical success factors.

Developing Effective Vision and Mission Statements

Vision and mission provide direction for a new or small firm, without which it is difficult to develop a cohesive plan.

Simplified Start-Up Plan Before you do anything else, you need a simple business plan. Here's a checklist to get you going.

Creating Your Business Plan

In a nutshell, here are the areas you'll need to address in a business plan to offer prospective lenders and investors a complete view of your business, as well as provide you with a tool you can use to start and run your company.

The Basics of Business Plans: Sell, Sell, Sell

When viewed as a selling document, your business plan takes on a new meaning. Here, Gumpert provides four compelling reasons for writing a business plan.

The Bulletproof Business Plan

Build a plan that stands up to even the worst economy with these tips.

The Finer Points of a Business Plan

David E. Gumpert, author of How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan, gives a brief overview of what information every business plan should contain.

Filling In Your Plan: What to Say Where Once you understand the skeletal outline of your business plan, you need to know what to say in each section. David E. Gumpert, author of How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan, fills in the details.

Cover All the Bases in Your Business Description

Describing your business in the plan may sound deceptively simple. In reality, a nuanced company explanation is needed, and will serve as a strong foundation for your entire plan.

Executive Summary as a Guiding Light

It's not an abstract, preface, or introduction, but the executive summary is one of the most critical parts of any business plan. David E. Gumpert argues that an effective executive summary should be the entire plan in miniature.

All Summary, No Substance

Through this annotated example, learn what not to write in your executive summary.

How do I research my industry?

Where can you find specic data that applies to your industry and its market? Here are a few places to start.

Hitting the Market

To be successful, you have to know your potential customers inside out. One entrepreneur reflects on the essentials of market research.

Segment the Target Market in Your Business Plan

It's a big market out there, so how can you break it down for your business plan? Learn the simple principles of segmenting your market and drilling down to a more precise view of your target audience.

Write a Marketing Analysis that Will Simply Dazzle

After you've crunched the data and analyzed the market, you need a succinct and clear approach to best communicate that information in your plan. This article will help you decide what to include in your marketing section and offers a step-by-step format for doing so.

Competitive Research on a Shoestring

You can learn a lot by researching online and targeting the right people.

Get a Local Look at Your Competition

You can gather endless information regarding potential competition by immersing yourself into the Internet. However, the best strategy is to stay local and get a firsthand look at them.

Making It All Add Up

Even if you find finances intimidating or tedious, they're critical. The financial section of a business plan is not the time to add creative flourishes; instead, this author advises, stick to a conventional approach.

Persuasive Projections

Predicting the future is hard. But when you're making financial projections, that's exactly what you need to do. You can avoid some of the most common mistakes by following this list of dos and don'ts.

Personnel and Business Plans: Making the Most of Your Management Team

It's not just what you're doing in your business, but who will be doing it. In the management section of your plan, you'll need to describe your organizational structure and put your team in the best possible light.

Tackling Technology in Your Business Plan

A business plan needs to not only explain what you'll be doing; it also needs to explain how you expect to do it, including the technology you'll use. Here, small-business expert Rhonda Abrams explains how to structure a technology plan.

Finding the Perfect Pitch

Take a lesson from these three rookies as they prepare for the presentation of a lifetime.

Elements of a Winning Pitch

A presentation to potential investors in your business -- to family, friends, or angels -- should include most of these elements.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Presenters

Entrepreneurs learn pretty quickly that making a verbal pitch to investors is very different from submitting a written business plan. Here are seven good practices gleaned from a venture-capital boot camp.

Pitches We Love -- Or How Not to Find Capital

Learn from the confusing pitches one investor has received from small businesses looking for capital.

Powerful Presentations

Small-business columnist Rhonda Abrams shares nine strategies for giving powerful presentations.

Don't Bore Your Audience to Death

Guy Kawaski offers some good advice on how to present your business idea to would-be investors.

Getting Money for Good Ideas

Business-plan competitions tend to draw cutthroat b-school students. But entrepreneurs with lofty social goals are also increasingly entering the fray--and winning.

How to Win Big and Get Ahead Fast

Once academic exercises for eggheads, college business-plan contests now offer competitors the chance to win sizeable chunks of cash and launch a business. No surprise: Entrepreneurs have begun to horn in on the action.

What the Judges Look For...

What's going to put your business plan in the winner's circle? Here's what the judges look for when choosing winning business plans.

The Best Business Plan on the Planet

Go behind the scenes with one of the judges at Moot Corp., a world-renowned business-plan contest hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.