Business Plan Template: A Practical Framework for Creating Your Business Plan, buy business plan.

This free business plan template includes the following sections:

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• Evaluate your business ideas. Whether you’ve got one business idea or many, a business plan can make an idea more tangible, helping you see if it’s truly viable.
• Plan for your next phase. Whether your goal is to start a new business or scale an existing business to the next level, a business plan can help you understand what needs to happen and identify gaps to address.
• Clarify marketing strategy, goals, and tactics. Writing a business plan can show you the actionable next steps to take on a big, abstract idea. It can also help you narrow your strategy and identify clear-cut tactics that will support it.
• Scope the necessary work. Without a concrete plan, cost overruns and delays are all but certain. A business plan can help you see the full scope of work to be done and adjust your investment of time and money accordingly.
• Hire and build partnerships. When you need buy-in from potential employees and partners, especially in the early stages of your business, a clearly written business plan is one of the best tools at your disposal. A business plan provides a refined look at your goals for the business, letting partners judge for themselves whether or not they agree with your vision.
• Secure funds. Securing funding for your business, whether from venture capital or a bank, is one of the most common reasons to create a business plan.

That said, it may not include the specific details or structure preferred by a potential investor or lender. If your goal with a business plan is to secure funding, check with your target organizations—typically banks or investors—to see if they have a template you can follow to maximize your chances of success.

Free: Business Plan Template

The easiest way to simplify the work of writing a business plan is to start with a business plan template.

Our fictional business creates custom greeting cards with your pet’s paw prints on them, and the founder of the business is writing a plan to help understand the market, as well as the logistics and costs involved, to give themselves the best chance of success before they launch.

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Business plans often are used to secure funding, but plenty of businesses find writing a plan valuable, even if they never work with an investor. That’s why we put together a free business plan template to help you get started.

Writing the financial portion of a business plan can be tricky, especially if you are starting your business. As a general rule, a financial plan will include the income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet for a business. A financial plan should also include short and long-term goals regarding the profits and losses of a company. Together, this information will help make business decisions, raise capital, and report on business performance.

This section of a business plan should answer all of the “what if” questions a potential lender, employee, or client might have. What if a property remains on the market for longer than expected? What if a seller backs out before closing? What if a property has a higher than average vacancy rate? These questions (and many more) are worth thinking through as you create your business plan.

The first step is to define your mission and vision. In a nutshell, your executive summary is a snapshot of your business as a whole, and it will generally include a mission statement, company description, growth data, products and services, financial strategy, and future aspirations. This is the “why” of your business plan, and it should be clearly defined.

Do Homework On The Competition: Many real estate business plans fail to fully analyze the competition. This may be partly because, unlike a business with tangible products, it can be difficult to see what your competitors are doing. While you won’t get a tour of a competitor’s company, you can play prospect and see what they offer. Subscribe to their newsletter, check out their website, or visit their open house. Getting a first-hand look at what others are doing in your market can greatly help create a business plan.

Marketing Plan

Success in the real estate investing industry won’t happen overnight, and it definitely won’t happen without proper planning or implementation. For entrepreneurs, a real estate development business plan can serve as a road map to all of your business operations. Simply put, a real estate business plan will serve an essential role in forming your investing career.

What are you selling? How will it benefit your customers? This is the part of your real estate business plan where you provide information on your product or service, including its benefits over competitors. In essence, it will offer a description of your product/service, details on its life cycle, information on intellectual property, as well as research and development activities, which could include future R&D activities and efforts. Since real estate investment is more of a service, beginner investors must identify why their service is better than others in the industry. It could include experience.

Outline the intended marketing strategy for each aspect of your business.

Question the assumptions. At every point that you possibly can, compare the seller’s plan for the business with its past financial information, market data from objective sources, and whatever other reality checks you can find.

Question the information sources: copies of tax forms, if they are real, show what the sellers have told the government. Do they match the financial statements coming from the accounting? How reliable are the financial statements? Have they been audited by outside accountants? Is the seller willing to allow an audit?

However, sometimes sellers have good reasons—needing capital, aging, divorce, for example—so don’t automatically assume that all growth projections are false. Try to understand why owners are selling a business, and how this affects their willingness to produce real numbers, and how it affects your own possibilities to make this purchased business work for you.

As you plan for the business you purchase, you start by making an important choice: business plans can be either for startup new businesses or for already-existing and ongoing business. When you buy a business from somebody else, either option is acceptable. This is a choice you make.

Use this financial information as a basis of comparison

Are you considering purchasing an existing business? You’ll want to go in well-informed and well-prepared.

Don’t rely on second-hand information. Where possible, spend time at the business in question, talk to customers, eat at the counter, use the service. For retail locations, for example, you can spend some time outside the store, count the customers, see how many go in empty-handed and how many come out with bags.

Compare projected growth to past results. If the seller shows a future much more rosy than the past, ask why? What assumptions justify the change? Why was this business for sale if projections are optimistic?

There are some benefits to buying an existing business if you’re not as interested in starting from scratch.

First, you and the owner will have to agree on a fair purchase price. A good way to do this is to hire an experienced appraiser who can estimate the company’s fair market value.

Finally, there are business brokers—people who earn a commission from business owners who need help finding buyers. It’s fine to use a broker to help locate a business opportunity, but it’s foolish to rely on a broker—who doesn’t make a commission unless he makes a sale—for advice about the quality of a business or the fairness of its selling price. You’ll need to do your own due diligence.

When you find a company you’re interested in, you’re going to want to find out as much as you can about it well before you make an offer.

Decide what type of business you want to buy

If you’re newer to negotiating business deals, read up a bit on how to be an effective negotiator — “Negotiating for Advantage” by Richard Shell is a good place to start. It’s also a good idea to brush up on the key elements of business valuation , so you’re in a better negotiating position. Price and value points will certainly be different based on whether you’re looking to purchase an underperforming business , or one that’s already demonstrated a steep growth trajectory.

If you’ve never run a business before, this is a great time to use your network. Talk to people you know who work in similar industries. If you don’t know anyone in your prospective industry , look for networking opportunities through trade associations, or even a business mentor through an organization like SCORE .

Or, ask business associates and friends for leads on similar businesses that may be on the market. Many of the best business opportunities surface by word of mouth—and are snapped up before their owners ever list them for sale. Other avenues to explore include newspaper ads, trade associations, real estate brokers, and business suppliers.

If you know what to look for and how to buy a small business, buying an existing operation can be a great opportunity to step into the company without having to start from scratch. If you buy a turnkey operation, you can skip the startup phase entirely and begin operations as soon as the sale is complete

Just as when you buy a car, you need to see if you can truly afford the business you want to buy. If you don't have the cash in your pocket, this is the time to see who's interested in financing the business you're buying and how much that financing help will cost. The usual small business financing sources are friends, family and traditional lending institutions (such as banks and credit unions).

Find out what you should actually pay for the business. When you're buying a used car, this is a simple matter of comparison shopping, but business valuation is considerably more complicated. It's common to use a few different methods of business valuation to arrive at a price. This provides a way to come at the value from different angles and typically results in a range of value, rather than one set figure.

Don't like what you're seeing or just not seeing enough of it? Ask the seller for permission to see more detailed business records that support the data in the financial statements, and get your own audit done.

Businesses are like used cars

You may find that said traditional lending institutions are friendlier than usual, as financing an established business is generally considered to be less risky than financing a startup.

Before you buy a business, get an inside perspective by asking the seller's permission to sit in on the business for several days. If he or she is agreeable, this can be a great way to find out how the business you want to buy truly operates.

When preparing the asset list (spec sheet), for instance, the seller could have used: