Most successful people have worked to a plan. So with a company, a Business Plan gives a general direction to the efforts to achieve the business objectives. It also helps the top management to focus on the different elements of the business that have an impact on the chances of success of the company. However, a business plan is not an end all exercise in itself. A successful business is based on a good workable idea, meticulous planning and implementation. With any one of these elements missing, the business can flounder.

But a business plan should not be considered a blue print for the company to be followed religiously and make corrections to the business every time there is a small deviations from the plan. It is supposed to give general guidelines for the business for the future and helps a lender or investor assess the management team as business managers and the feasibility of the business idea.

A business plan need not be considered a necessary but an unpleasant task. If you have all the information and are comfortable with numbers, you can make a business plan in a day. And to help you, a guide to making business plan is given below that will take you through the paces.

Not surprisingly, one can use different styles for making his or her business plan projecting their ideas in a way they consider best. Even so, the elements covered remain more or less the same. For our purposes though, we will invite the business plans in the format given in this guide for the sake of standardization. It may also be noted that in an effort to make this guide comprehensive, one may find some sections that may be unnecessary for some business ideas. These may be left out from the plan.

The periods covered by business plans also vary from three to five years, but for our purposes we will restrict this to a three year plan.

The business plan structure explained in this section gives the physical build of the plan. It divides the business plan into 4 sections and explains them briefly.

2.1 Cover sheet.
A cover sheet is used to give basic details about the project. It mentions the date, title of the project and the names of the team members at the bottom right corner. (look at the cover sheet of this guide to get an idea).

2.2 Content
Contents page helps locate the desired sections quickly. It should have a well structured section numbering system and page numbers for each section and subsection. A good system is to number the main sections from 1 onwards. A subsection of a main section should again be numbered from 1 onwards while maintaining the number of the main section in the beginning. For example, if you wish to number subsection no. 5 of main section no. 2, you could number it 2.5. The same system can be extended for sub-subsections etc. (look at the contents page of this guide as an example).

2.3 Body
After the contents page comes the body of the plan in the sequence given in the contents page. Maintain the same numbering and name of all sections and subsections as given in the contents.

2.4 Annexures
This section of the plan is reserved for any detailed working that you may want to attach. Usually these are detailed workings or lists that can not be given in the main body of the plan. They can consist of detailed working of the financial plan, a list of customers or competitors etc.

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