Six Reasons Why You Should Write a Business Plan
Business plans are unfashionable these days but writing one can help you turn your ideas into reality
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Business plans are unfashionable these days. Investors want to be sold on your company quickly and business plans lack the brevity and simplicity and, visual panache of a Pitch-Deck. They are hard to write, and time consuming to read.
None the less there is a case to be made for the business plan. Below are six reasons why you should consider writing one.
1. Clarifying your thinking
Good writing is good thinking. Ideas that seem brilliant and logical in your head can turn out to be prosaic and jumbled when laid out in black and white. Committing yourself to making your case in clear, simple prose is a way of forcing this revelation. If your idea is not so great then its better you know sooner rather than later; if it is jumbled, then writing is a great way of straightening it out and if it is, as you had hoped, brilliant, and logical, then it will do you good to have a version of it on paper.
2. Getting your team on the same page
Your big visionary idea is great for creating a sense of shared purpose, and you have managed to make it so that everybody in the founding team has that warm fuzzy, band of brothers feeling, but you may be surprised at how much you can disagree on when you get into the detail. Big ideas are great, but they can hide a multitude of views, some of which may not be compatible. A good way to air out these differences and make sure that you are on the same page is to write them up. A business plan is a clear and structured way of doing this.
