Business Plan content priority
A business plan is a business plan. To be effective, the underlying work of investigation needs to face multiple topics and management areas, namely market analysis, benchmark study, strategy plan, operations guide, financial forecasting. The holistic approach is necessary for the quality of the assessment, because the insights coming from all areas of the analysis are interconnected: for instance, the market analysis is essential to building the assumptions for the sales plan, so to begin with the financial forecasting job. However, even if the analysis has been through and we positively collected a lot of data, we should prevent ourselves from "showing off" how much work has been carried out reporting all data and sources into the presentation. The final document must be essential and easy to read (see the Tip "Business Plan, the style beyond the substance"), so summarizing the insights in relatively few slides and transform information into infographics is a task enhancing the effectiveness of the document itself. Moreover, at the beginning, while the general structure of the business plan has been drafted, it is important to understand what part of the analysis our targeted reader might be interested most: is the audience focused on understanding the projected financial return of the investment? is instead interested more in understanding how we set up the marketing strategy and the subsequent promotional activities, as a demonstration of the market potential of our product?
These examples show that, while we should give space to all areas of the business plan analysis, we should altogether increase the room to the topics our reader is interested most. At the end, we build a business plan to reach a goal, not to show we are wonderful business planners!