Business Plan Help

Help to Write Your Business Plan

Bytestart - the small business portal has dozens of hints and tips to help you when you're writing your plan. While you’re on the site sign-up to the refreshing weekly newsletter for weekly advice with a slice of humour.

8-Part Guide to Writing a Business Plan

Bytestart - the small business portal – gives you a crisp, 8-part guide to Writing a Business Plan. Each section deals with a different aspect of researching and preparing your business plan such as researching your market and competitors, developing your marketing strategy, isolating your success factors and producing the financial analyses (profit & loss, balance sheet and cash-flow projections). A smattering of useful tips help to keep you and your business plan on track.

Quick Guide to Writing and Developing Your Business Plan

Hyndburn Enterprise Trust - a Lancashire-based independent, not-for-profit enterprise agency - provide a quick reference guide that will help you to develop and write a business plan. The guide tells you how to structure a business plan, what to include and how to present the financial forecasts in your finished business plan.

Write a Business Plan That Communicates Your Idea

If you feel that your written business plan doesn’t do justice to your ideas a High-Impact Business Writing course may help you to successfully turn your thoughts into an engaging and persuasive written business plan. The 1-day course is run most months at a central London venue. The cost is £395 and you’ll find full details on their website.

How to write a business plan

The Imperial College of London’s website gives you their take on how to write a business plan. Among the sound advice they give is that your business plan (like any sale) should be targeted at a specific investor, be that a banker, angel investor or venture capitalist.

Dozens of questions your business plan must answer

Fast Link Solutions aims to help you to plan a successful small business. Their website gives you a detailed article on Writing a Business Plan. It lists dozens of questions that your written business plan will need to answer if it is to be successful.

C4's 12-step guide to writing a business plan

The website for Channel 4’s Real Deal has a handy step-by-step guide to writing a business plan. In 12 steps it takes you from the concept, through the market, research, sales forecast and the reality check. There’s also a downloadable, free business plan template but it’s extremely basic and there are better business plan templates you can download free elsewhere.

Online business plan workbook

The Business Gateway website has a comprehensive 9-section Online Business Plan Workbook that guides you, step-by-step, through the whole writing a business plan process. This does require a short registration process but is worth it.

Write a professional business plan

The Pie Business website aims to provide everything you need to write a professional and dynamic business plan. It helps you to understand what a business plan is, why you need to plan (to maximise your chances of success) and how you go about it. There is a mass of practical help for anyone writing a business plan and it’s delivered in a refreshingly honest and no-nonsense style.

Writing a business plan for a small company

The Business Ignition website has a detailed piece on, ‘Writing a Business Plan for Your Small Company’. The guide aims to help you to write a business plan that is meaningful, internally and externally. Good advice offered includes, ‘cut out the flowery stuff – keep it factual and balanced’ and ‘make it an attractive presentation and an interesting read’. There is also a handy guide to a suggested layout and structure for your business plan.

8-Step guide to writing your business plan

Cheshire-based chartered accountants Hanley & Co have an 8-Step guide to help you research, prepare and write your business plan. The guide advises you to closely analyse your business, sales, market and competitors and to summarise with a SWOT analysis in your business plan. They also give useful advice on using the business plan to make sure things get done on time.

Business Link: Preparing a business plan

Business Link, the Government-funded agency, has a handy online guide to Preparing a Business Plan. The guide is full of useful, sensible pointers and will be useful for most small businesses writing a business plan. You can either print the entire guide or just individual sections covering each chapter of the business plan from the Business Link website.