How to Write a Business Plan – Part 1 Overview: Business Podcast
Summary
How to Write a Business Plan in quick and easy 13 Slides.
I used to plan to start, grow and sell two companies. It’s been used to raise money from angel investors and venture capitalists. Used in sales meetings, to recruit team members, Board members and…
As importantly it’s dynamic and easy to update, so you can use it as a roadmap to grow your business.
It’s designed just like a story which is vitally important as you pitch your company.
Follow along, you’ll build your business plan quickly!
A full transcript of the 13 Slides to Build Your Business Plan podcast episode is below
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Build a Business Success Secrets.I’m Your host, Brandon C. White. And today we are on our first day of how to build a business plan in 13 slides. I am going to break it down for you in easy to consume short episodes so that you can get your business plan written.
Before we get started today, did you know that Build a Business has a newsletter called Build a Business Success Secrets, and it’s a monthly newsletter that is delivered to your house, written by me, that covers the inner game of business.
And it is a must read for entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs and or if you’re listening and have an idea that you want to turn into a business, this is a must read for you. Take out the special offer on the Web at B Success secrets dot com that’s B as in business, success secrets dot com. It is a must reading for you if you want to get 100% out of your time, your talent that I know you have and your ideas.
Now let’s get started with Day one of how to build a business plan in 13 easy to build slides.
Hey, everyone, welcome to day one on how to build a business plan in 13 slides. This is a formula that I put together over my 21 years of being an entrepreneur.
Everybody asks me, ‘how many companies have you done?’ And I think that’s a tricky question, because sometimes a business idea is just a “project”.
And the way that companies really get formed is you have this idea and then you create a project, and then you take that project and you test it to see if the idea has enough oomf. Whether that’s a product or a service or whatever it is that people will actually pay you. And once people start paying you, that’s when you’ve transitioned into a business.
So if you do that, I don’t know. I’ve had tons and tons of projects that I’ve done over the years, and I’ve had probably 10 plus companies that I’ve tried, and luckily enough, it had two exits so far.
So I needed a shortcut from the very beginning when I did my first business of how I was gonna build a business plan that was a true roadmap that I could use. And what I mean by that is the old school business plans were very long and you would write them and they were 50 pages and it had all this stuff.
The problem wasn’t very hard to update. Very hard to use for a roadmap very hard to communicate your idea to someone who probably isn’t going to read 50 pages.
So I took a whole bunch of ideas and approaches and turned it into 13 slides. Now, is it true that some of the versions of your business plan will be longer than 13 slides? Yes, but the’s air, the core elements that will build a business plan for you and provide a roadmap and then they’ll be supporting documents.
Of course you will have your financials and they will not be one slide. Your financials will appear in your Excel worksheet or Google sheets. If you if you want to use Google and from there you will have to be able to provide the supporting documents that will go very deep into each one of those areas.
But this framework 1000 students plus have used to build their business plans and Many of them have used this plan and gotten funding if they chose that.
So today we are just going to go over the 13 slides and then each day from here on in, we will cover one of those slides. I will give you the framework so that you can fill in the blanks, so to speak and get to the slide. And then once you have the slides, when you have this plan, you can go out and test your idea and see if people will be willing to pay you money for your idea.
Your first slide is your very basic. It’s your name, logo and contact information. And importantly, this is where you give your elevator pitch. This is where you introduce your company. This is a less than one minute business pitch, and tomorrow I’ll show you the framework of how you can plug in some blanks and get to your elevator pitch.
And slide two is your problem slide, so we will go over a very simple formula that I came up with, and you, when you hear it, you’re going to say, Oh, that’s so simple. Took me a lot of years to figure out how to make it simple. It’s really hard to make things simple, so we’ll go over your problems solution.
What is the solution to the problem that you’re solving? What is your product? What is your market?
And I will give you an approach on how to do that, because I would say at least 75% of the people that I have seen get it wrong. And even when we teach it, even when I teach a student exactly what they should have, they still come back with it wrong, because this can be a little daunting.
But it also with the framework and this formula that you can just fill in. And then I will go over also where to point you so that you can get some of this market research. A lot of people get stuck on that. What is your business model will go over business models and what you should put in this slide.
What traction do you have will talk about what that means?
What is your competition? There’s a few key things that you have got to do on this slide, and when you’re pitching a lot of people make mistakes on this.
What are your barriers to entry or your moat? And we’re gonna go into depth on this one because a lot of entrepreneurs will come back, or founders and or founders will come back and say, Oh, well, I have a patent. Well, that’s just not enough anymore. You wanna have other barriers and we’ll we’ll talk about what they are, what they can be and how you can develop them.
Your financials. This scares the living daylights out of a lot of people because they feel like they can’t do excel or they can’t do Google sheets. They can’t do the numbers, but you have absolutely got to understand your numbers.
In fact, if there if I could only have one thing from a person when I was asked to evaluate and help them in their business, I would just ask for their financials because from time that financials, I can start to understand everything. Your sales, your marketing, your margins, your operations costs to run it.
Everything is in this financial model and in fact, the financial model in drives, your sales and marketing strategy, because this is where you come up with your customer acquisition costs. This is where you model your average revenue per user. This is all of those things. Why are wrapped up into your financials?
So we will go over your financials and you can get started with an easy template. It just gets you started, and that’s the important thing.
And then from there you’re gonna really learn a lot about your business, your team, who is your team? How to pick members of your team. In fact, I had an article in the Build a Business Success Secrets newsletter. If you tune into that, if you don’t, you should grab that. I’m looking at them right now. I know I had one on how to choose the right partner for your business.
So these are your co founders? Thes Are your team members? How do you choose those team members Really important and important how you present it, depending if you’re using this business plan as a presentation to raise money from investors, if you are using it as a sales presentation, if you’re using it as an internal document for your team, as you move your business forward, so we’ll go over each of the ways that you would present that data in the team slide funds.
How much funding do you need? Even if you’re not raising money, you’re still gonna need funding if you have products. If you have inventory that affect your cash flow, you are gonna have to have some source of funding.
And that could be yourself. That’s totally okay.
But you are gonna want to figure that out, and you are gonna want to understand how much you need. The last thing you want to dio is get caught on the 30th of the month and find yourself with an invoice that you didn’t expect or that you thought you would have revenue for. You have no funding for it now. You have no product to sell, and now you’re in this lurch and you’re sort of in no man’s land.
And you I don’t want you to be in that place. And here’s the cool thing is that the funding and the funds that you need will be driven by your financial.
So in many ways, this will already have been done for you. So if we do our your financials, we should be able to get how much funding and fill this in right away and in the financial, just going to describe what we need that funding for.
Maybe we need it for operating capital. Maybe we need it for inventory. Maybe we need it for sales and marketing.
So you want to define what that is so that it’s very clear to who you’re presenting and internally so your team understands what that’s like and can help manage the cash flow.
And then the summary slide took me a really long time. And when you see what in here, what we do on this summary, So I just say, Oh, well, that just makes sense. Bringing, yeah, but nobody gets it right. In fact, I got it wrong for a really long time.
And just from having giving hundreds and hundreds of pitches for my businesses and seeing them back when I was in venture capital, and I still see him to this day as an angel investor people don’t get that summary slide right, and it’s really important because if you miss this, you really miss a key opportunity to grab that audience and get him where you want, and then that’s it.
So that will be.
You’re 13 slides that we go over in the next sessions so that you can build your business plan easy enough. Day one of how to write a business plan in 13 slides.
Tomorrow we will go over your elevator pitch, and I will give you the framework so that you can write an engaging, powerful elevator pitch that’s going to catch people’s attention and get them interested in your product.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review. Let me know what you like and what you like me to cover in the future. If you’re short on time, just leave me some stars. Give me an idea of how are doing until the next episode. Remember, you’re just one business plan away. I’m rooting for your success. We’ll see you soon.
