A business plan is more than just a document detailing your business concept and strategy. Any individual or group worth their salt needs to create and utilise a business plan if they want to see solid and steady growth. And yes, that’s why business plans are important.
Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be all that complicated. A business development plan is a comprehensive management tool that will help you analyse results, help you make sound and strategic decisions, shows how your business operates, and ultimately grow.
You’ll need to create one in order to have something to pitch your business to prospective investors or placing a loan with banks or financial institutions. With a business plan, you improve your level of succeeding by heaps and bounds by turning your visions into action plans geared towards success.
What Is Business Development?
Before starting a new business, you should create a development plan that will outline how you will creatively achieve your business objectives. It should include and highlight your services or products, your marketing strategies, and how you will handle and source out your finances.
In the simplest of terms, it can be summarised as the ideas, initiatives, and the activities that help your business be better. With a business development plan, you will be able to identify, acquire, and nurture new clients and exploit new business opportunities to drive business growth and profitability.
Also, should be included in that business development plan is a strategy how you will accomplish that goal. The scope of business development is wide-ranging and may vary from business to business.
Consider these three stages of a marketing funnel to get new business:
- Attract Prospects – This step outlines how the organisation attracts potential buyers, influencers and those that comes from other referral sources.
- Build Engagement – This step details your process how you deepen your engagement with your prospects and turn them into educated and qualified opportunities.
- Turn Opportunities into Clients – Make it pain free and easy for your prospects to decide, convert, and buy.
Contributing to business development is anyone who can make or suggest a strategic change to the business that will add value. Here is where you need to inject creative approaches to get the attention of your prospects, reel them in, and ultimately, have them convert into clients.
Why Do Business Owners Need a Business Development Plan in Place to Grow Their Business?
Creating a business plan isn’t just about what’s happening now for your company, but also what you see in the future. A strategic plan outlines what you envision the company to be, what direction you would like it to take, and what its future would look like.
Though it is true that for anyone starting a business can just jump right in and operate, creating a business plan is worth your time and investment. If you are unsure and decide to, skip this vital process will make you miss out on some key benefits that a business plan provides.
A business development plan can beneficially help you with:
Accelerated Business Growth
A business plan helps you establish a solid foundation for any business. When writing your business plan, you are not in the process of predicting the future, but you will be working through the core strategy of your business that will help it grow.
This document is by no means perfect. But it is designed to reviewed, adjusted, and amended when need arises to help you address issues that may prevent you from reaching your goals.
Without this baseline, it will be far more difficult to track how you are doing, make necessary adjustments, have information ready when you need to make challenging decisions. A business plan not only points to where you need to go, but also keeps a record of where you already have been.
Pitching your Business for Funding
Let’s face it, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for you to attract investors or secure a loan from banks or lending institutions if you can’t show that you have a solid understanding of your business trajectory.
Having a business solid business plan will also show investors, bank, and loan institutions to feel confident that they will see a return on their investment. A business plan is your main tool to persuade people concerned that it is a smart decision to be working with you.
This document is vital for you to prove that there is an attainable and sustainable need for your solution, you have a sound strategy, and that you have the potential to be financially lucrative. The business plan can piece all these together and establish a cohesive story about your business.
Making Strategic and Confident Decisions to Reach Milestones
Running a new business would require that you make quick decisions on the fly when you are still in the most volatile period of growth, decline, and external crises.
A business plan that you can review regularly can help you make confident decisions. This will also enable you to plan in the event a certain decision does not turn out in the way you expect. This minimises your risk for failure.
Do note that a business plan does not have to be written like an encyclopaedia where it has all the answers.
Additionally, writing a business plan is not as hard as you think. You can tap in your own creativity in outlining your own path to direct your business on how to make money and grow revenues. As an example, think of it as a living project and not just a static one-time document.
Furthermore, there is no wrong way to write a business plan. Simply pick a format that works for you. The important thing is that your business plan would meet your needs.
To learn more about putting your business plan together, get in touch with us at The Growth Manager, where you can take our self-paced online course on how to create a business plan.
