Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook

5.

Writing Your Business Plan

A business plan is a document that explains a business opportunity, identifies the market to be served, and provides details about how the entrepreneurial organization plans to pursue it. To be effective, a good plan also describes the unique qualifications that you and your management team bring to the effort. It explains the resources you’ll need and forecasts financial results over a reasonable time horizon.

For many years, anyone starting a business was encouraged to write a business plan, and most entrepreneurs took that advice. Those who didn’t quickly learned that obtaining outside funding was almost impossible ...