Originally written by Dan Matthews on Small Business
A business plan is an essential tool for start-ups and established organisations alike. It helps you make sense of your offering, the market in which you operate and other essential factors such as costs, revenue and projected profit.
But most businesses have no formal plan, perhaps because most entrepreneurs see little value in creating a rigid strategy that becomes obsolete within a few weeks of its completion.
They have a point, but those who reject the idea of planning wholesale risk missing out on a golden opportunity to isolate needless spending, spot opportunities and expand into new markets.
Jonathan Dowden, Product Marketing Manager at Sage, argues for a new approach to business plans, one in which bulky, static documents are eschewed in favour of practical information that changes as fast as the markets they describe.
“For start-ups it can actually be quite dangerous to write a business plan,” he says. “Unless you have data then you can’t know what will happen. If you go down the route of traditional business planning methodology then the template becomes, not an objective document that helps your business, but something that falsely convinces you that the idea is going to work.
“It’s

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