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Start from the very beginning understanding that your business plan ought to be specific to your business needs and objectives. There are many reasons why every company should have a business plan, but not every business needs a full formal plan with carefully crafted summaries and descriptions.

If you don’t have a specific immediate need to show a formal business plan to a banker or investor, then you are probably better off doing just a lean business plan, for your internal use only.

To make the best impression on banks and investors, your business plan should be presented in the standard business plan format and contain the necessary business plan elements.

Your business plan should present what a banker or venture capitalist expects to see, in the order they expect to see it in. Following a standard business plan outline will keep you on track, and save you from botching your best chance at getting your business funded.

Want to just skip ahead and download our free business plan template? Just click here.

Build your plan, then organize it.

I don’t recommend writing the plan in the same order you present it as a finished document.

For example, although the executive summary comes as the first business plan section, I recommend writing it after everything else is done, so you know exactly what appears in the rest of your business plan.

Likewise, although the management summary is usually presented toward the end of a finished business plan, it might be an easy place to start writing.  And some people prefer to start with a mission statement, or strategy summary. Others like to focus on the numbers first, so they start with a sales forecast or spending budget. Start where you like, and get going. A healthy business planning process will always involve circling back often to check results and revise as necessary.

Is the order important?

If you have the main business plan components, the order doesn’t matter that much, but what’s presented here is the sequence of business plan elements that I suggest for a standard business plan.

In this article, I will cover the following:

Simple business plan outline

Detailed business plan outline

Standard tables and charts

You can click each of the above links to jump directly to that business plan section. See an example of a completed business plan here, and learn even more about writing a business plan here.

Simple business plan outline:

1. Executive summary

Write this last. It’s just a page or two that highlights the points you’ve made elsewhere in your business plan.

It’s also the doorway to your plan—after looking over your executive summary, your target reader is either going to throw your business plan away or keep reading, so you’d better get it just right.

Summarize the problem you are solving for customers, your solution, the target market, the founding team, and financial forecast highlights. Keep things as brief as possible and entice your audience to learn more about your company.

2. Opportunity

Describe the problem that you solve for your customers and the solution that you are selling.

It is always a good idea to think in terms of customer needs and customer benefits as you define your product offerings, rather than thinking of your side of the equation (how much the product or service costs, and how you deliver it to the customer).

Sometimes this part of the plan will include tables that provide more details, such as a bill of materials or detailed price lists, but more often than not this section just describes what you are selling and how your products and services fill a need for your customers.