Business plan for 2021 template

Business plan for 2021 template

2021 is a peculiar year for businesses and many are yet to recover from the effect of the global pandemic, Corona Virus or Covid-19, which broke out early last year 2020. Entrepreneurs are beginning to appreciate the importance of business plans and why running your business from a plan is actually a sensible thing.

In this powerful, insightful but simple guide, I will be showing you an easy-to-follow, step-by-step way to writing a business plan that is useful in the year 2021. This is going to be a template that you can use at any time. A business plan template is a tool that makes it easy for you to complete your business plan without having to start from scratch, all over. It gives you the outline to follow and you can even be fortunate to have some of the information provided match your actual business, in which case a larger part of the information or text in the template becomes useful for you and this means the amount of work you need to do to complete a business plan for your business would have been significantly reduced.

 

Write your business plan following this simple format:

A business plan is usually structured to contain the following major topics and subheadings, you can use them as a guide to writing your award-winning business plan. The following is the generic and simple outline of a business plan:

 

1.0 Executive summary

 

2.0 Background:

• Introduction
• Vision and mission statements
• Ownership
• Legal status
• Location and facilities,
• Production/services
• Production plan
• Business strategy
• Key success factors

 

3.0 Market

• Nature and size
• Target market
• Key competitors and players
• Service delivery
• Quality assurance
• Demand/supply analysis

 

4.0 Marketing Plan

• Promotion and distribution strategy
• Alliances
• Market positioning
• Competition
• Pricing strategy

 

5.0 Organizational structure

• Shareholders and directors
• Management team
• External support
• Personnel plan
• Value and norms of the company.

 

6.0 Legal, regulatory, social, and environmental issues

• Legal issues
• Regulatory issues
• Social issues
• Environmental issues

 

7.0 Financial Plan

• Initial
• Forecast of sales
• Estimate of costs
• Working capital projection
• Startup capital required
• Proposed financial structure
• Depreciation
• Loan repayment and interest payment schedule
• Projected profit and loss account
• Cash ow projection
• Projected balance sheet
• Financial analysis

 

8.0 Risk Analysis, Contingency Plan and Exit Strategy

• Risk analysis and mitigants
• Contingency plan

 

Appendix

• Photocopy of certificate of incorporation
• Approvals
• Licenses
• Organogram
• Assumptions behind the figures

 

What I have presented above is more of a generic outline, depending on your type of business, some of the elements may need to be changed or stated in a slightly different way to suit your purpose and your business type. Some of them may not apply to your business and so may have to be removed. Using this template, you can complete a robust plan for your business or startup.

 

Read Also: How to write a page business plan

 

Explanation on each of the outlines

1. Executive Summary

The purpose of an executive summary is to provide a quick and concise overview of the business plan (in one or two pages).  Although this section appears first, it should be written last.

 

2. Background

In some documents or business plans, you will find this part written as “Business Description” instead of “Background”. Whichever one is used, the purpose of this section is to give background information on your company and its activities. This is where you would usually talk about your vision and mission, your goals, and generally what your company is all about. Meanwhile, you are also expected to give your readers a glimpse into the entire industry within the space in which your business is situated and how your current performance (or projected performance) compares with that of the industry, overall.

In addition, you should describe your most important company strengths and core competencies as well as the legal structure your business runs.

 

3. Market

This aspect of your business plan requires a bit of research. This is where you will describe who your customers are, or will be. It is important for you to know who exactly the customers your business will serve are. This is quite important because no matter how good your product or service is, you certainly cannot serve everybody – not everyone in the world will buy your product. So, it is important to find out, who are the people who need your product and can afford it, where they live, what’s their social status and what media would be best used to reach out to them. What is the historical data about how they buy and use products, especially those similar to yours. These and more, are the important information you must gather to ensure you know and understand your customers very well.

 

4. Marketing Plan

No matter how good your product and your service, the venture cannot succeed without effective marketing. And this begins with careful, systematic research. It is very dangerous to assume that you already know about your intended market. You need to do market research to make sure you’re on track. This section of the business plan is where you provide a detailed description of the industry in which your business is situated, a brief description of those who are doing something similar to yours, especially if they are serving the same set of customers you plan to serve. These are referred to as your competitors. Then you need to talk about how you will “attract” your own set of customers, what you will do differently from your competitors in other to make these set of customers prefer your offerings or services over that of your competitors.

 

5. Organizational structure

The complexities involved in writing the organization structure part of your business plan will be directly proportional to the level of functions that are required within the business and the future roles you might have anticipated. In this section you will talk about the people in your organization, who they are, what are the roles you want them to function in, and the competencies they possess that might enable them to perform in those roles. Then it is important to specify how various personalities, functions, and roles are related. The rules governing these relationships must be very clear and the information about “Who is responsible for what?” and “Who is accountable to who?” should not be ambiguous.

 

6. Legal, regulatory, social, and environmental issues

Depending on the kind of business you are into and the activities involved, the legal structure in your business can be anything from Sole Proprietorship to a Public Corporation. These various legal structures have various rules guiding their operations and you should know about them in other to correctly determine where your business will be well fitted.

 

7. Financial Plan

Here is the section where most investors are interested first and foremost. This is where you give the history of your business’s financial performance if yours is an existing business, and or, it will be “Financial projections” if you are just starting the venture. No allowance for guesswork here. Your homework must be well done and your presentation must be top-notch as well. The following financial statements are expected to be included, among other things:

• Your income statement
• Your cashflow projection
• Your balance sheet, and
• A statement of shareholders’ equity (if applicable)

 

8. Risk Analysis

Risk analysis helps you as an entrepreneur identify ahead of time, the potential issues that can pose threats to the business, and profer solutions to these possible challenges before they ever surfaced.

 

9. The Appendices

The appendices include documents that contain supplementary information to what is already included in the body of your business plan.  These might be contracts, leases, purchase orders, intellectual property, key managers’ resumes, market research data, or anything that supports assumptions or statements made in the body of your business plan.

 

 

 

If you need a service of a Professional Business plan writer, then Dayo Adetiloye Business Hub is the place to go Call or WhatsApp us now on 081 0563 6015, 080 7635 9735, 08113205312 or send an email to dayohub@gmail.com  and we will solve any of your business plan problems.

 

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