Short Form Business PlanWhen you want to get in front of a potential investor or lender, you need to write a short form business plan. The point is not to send your whole business plan, but to win the opportunity to present a more comprehensive plan, to an individual or a group of people. In a way, you can treat this as a sales letter. This means, first of all, working out your desired action from the reader. Usually you want them to pick up the phone, and invite you to join them so they can learn all about your fantastic opportunity. But you may have a different objective, which is fine, so long as you work out what it is you want them to do before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Like a good ad, your short form business plan needs to grab the readers attention, and hold it just for long enough so they’re compelled to telephone you (but we said that already – right?) and like a good ad you’ll be wanting to open with a catchy headline. Well yes and no. This is where, as with most things in the business world, there is a certain way of doing things. And its a double edged sword, because on the one hand you’re in danger of disappearing into that vast pile of seemingly similar opportunities, but on the other the reader is expecting certain information in certain places, and will perform a checklist operation if not on paper, in their head, to measure whether the plan merits more consideration or not.
Unlike you, the vast majority of people don’t take the time to educate themselves about what investors look for, and therefore unwittingly omit essential items, or stretch the boundaries of reasonableness too far, and rule themselves out at the first hurdle. Building a winning short form business plan titleLets for example say we want to open a coffee shop. The title: Short form business plan for a coffee shop, isn’t going to get you a second glance.My recommendation is that you incorporate your unique selling proposition (USP) into the title. Just to recap, the USP is what is unique about your business, and a really great USP also incorporates the main benefit to the customer. Try to build it up like this (using our example): What is the most unique thing about your business? (if you’re stuck for ideas, try using superlatives e.g. biggest, fastest, longest, highest etc.) In our case, we’ve an amazing one of a kind experience. What is the main customer benefit? This might not be what you think it is, so ask your existing or potential customers! For our cafe we have something that every customer would like to see at least once in their life, and love to talk about to their friends What’s your business called? ours - Porpoise Cafe
So our working title becomes: Porpoise Café
Now your reader has turned over the cover you need an aboslute maximum of 3 sides of power packed copy. Short form Business plan essential contentsYour format has got to cover the normal and essential business sections which should aim to answer these questions as concisely as possible.
Use the executive summary of your more comprehensive business plan as a guide to what to include. If you haven’t prepared a full business plan, and you were hoping to get away without one, by just writing a short form business plan, then think again. The main reason not to do this is that you will inevitably get caught out with a question about your business. Without a comprehensive business plan you will have not done sufficient research to have all bases covered. This may cause you to look foolish at the worst, and unprepared at the least.
The last thing you want to do is to look unprofessional, as this will undermine your chances of raising finance.
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