Fatal Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Business Plan
Business plan is the most crucial document for your business enterprise. While writing a business plan, you can often make mistakes. If you are a startup business and seeking funds, these mistakes can be very costly. Following are few of the key mistakes commonly committed by entrepreneurs when they write a business plan:
Inadequate Research: Proper research is very important when writing a business plan. Most business plan writers start writing business plan without proper research that will not help them to gain investment and will lead their business towards failure. Make sure to research properly into market trends, potential market, market growth, financials and other areas, so that your business plan may not fail and it will be up-to-date and accurate.
Unrealistic financial projections: Financial projections are the most important section of a business plan, which reflect financial health and returns of the business on which investors take decisions. If financial projections are overly aggressive and unrealistic, then investor may reject your business plan. So, it is necessary that financial projections must be realistic. Define and explain all necessary assumptions related to your projections.
Too much information: You write business plan to impress potential investors and lenders and to know more about your business in detail. Your purpose or aim is to focus on essential elements of the business plan; avoid adding irrelevant material. If you have some information and you think that you can’t ignore that, then put them at the end and reference the information; this way, the reader has the option to review that information or not.
Insufficient Marketing Plan: If you fail to define your target market or will not clearly identify it, then it’s hard to gain investment. It is necessary to clearly define about your target market, information about your potential customers, their needs and desires and what attracts them to your products or services. Marketing plan is one of the most primary features of the overall business plan.
Over-hype: Avoid using too much superlatives and hype; it may affect your credibility. Don’t try to present a rosy picture, which may never exist.
