Creating your business plan

Creating a business plan is more than just a formality—it’s your roadmap for success. Whether you’re launching a startup, seeking funding from a bank or angel investor, or planning for growth, a well-structured business plan is essential for turning your vision into reality. Gathering data, defining strategies, and forecasting finances can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re new to business planning.

That’s where LivePlan comes in. Designed to simplify and streamline the planning process, LivePlan provides the tools, templates, and guidance you need to build an engaging and professional business plan with confidence. With its intuitive interface and powerful features like the LivePlan Assistant, you’ll have everything you need to articulate your goals and chart your course for success—all without the stress.

This guide aims to simplify the writing portion of your business planning by breaking down the essential components into manageable steps. With the help of LivePlan, even those without prior experience can create a professional business plan. By the end of this guide, you'll know how to craft a business plan that communicates your vision to stakeholders.

The Plan vs. The Pitch

Modern business plans have evolved. With the rise of startups and lean business models, the need for lengthy, rigid documents has shifted towards more dynamic, flexible presentations. Investors and stakeholders now prefer concise, actionable plans that convey the essence of a business idea.

LivePlan breaks this process with two key components: The Plan and The Pitch, which we'll cover in this guide.

• The Plan: This section tells the story of your business, including your executive summary, market opportunity and analysis, strategy, team details, and financial projections. It provides a detailed narrative of your business's past, present, and future. The focus is on storytelling, context, and clarity, allowing readers to grasp your value proposition and strategic direction.
• The Pitch: The Pitch section aims to capture the interest of potential investors or partners in a concise format. It lets you present your business idea in a few powerful slides or pages, focusing on high-impact information.

It might be helpful to break down the two sections like this:

First Steps to Get Started in LivePlan

Finding where to start can be a struggle if you’re new to LivePlan or business planning in general. To help you get off to a strong start, here is a suggested sequence to follow to get your planning journey underway:

1. Create Your Company Profile: Begin by filling out basic information about your company in the Company Overview section. Include details like your business name, structure, and industry. This foundational information will help guide the rest of your plan.
2. Skip the Executive Summary (for now): While it appears first in the plan, save the Executive Summary for last. Completing it at the end ensures that it reflects all the key points of your business, as it draws on details from other sections.

By starting with these clear initial steps, you can build momentum and gain confidence as you develop your plan. With its structured approach and helpful prompts, LivePlan will guide you through each phase of your business plan journey.

LivePlan Assistant

LivePlan Assistant is an AI-powered tool designed to elevate your business plan writing experience. Available to Standard and Premium account users, it offers personalized grammar, tone, and formatting suggestions, helping you create polished, professional business plans. You can find LivePlan Assistant throughout the Plan and Pitch.

LivePlan Assistant integrates with the text editor found in the Plan and Pitch.  While working on a topic, you can use the Assistant’s Help Me Write feature to generate content based on your inputs. If you’ve already written content, the Rewrite feature offers options to auto-improve, shorten, expand, or adjust the tone to academic, professional, or persuasive styles. This ensures your writing aligns with your desired communication style and audience and lets you focus on moving your plan forward.

If you're struggling to answer a Plan topic, Custom Instructions can help clear up confusion by analyzing your plan as it develops and suggesting appropriate responses.

Writing Each Chapter of the Plan

The Plan section of your business plan includes detailed narratives that give a comprehensive view of your business. This section helps investors and stakeholders understand your business model, market opportunity, strategic direction, and financial projections. Writing an effective plan in LivePlan involves several key elements, each designed to provide a complete picture of your business.

1. Executive Summary

The Executive Summary is a crucial snapshot of your entire business plan, offering a concise overview that captures the essence of your business. Although it’s the first section, it’s best to write it last after you’ve developed all other parts of your plan. While that sounds counterintuitive, there are a couple of reasons for this. First off, don't forget the summary part of Executive Summary. This is the space to briefly summarize key elements such as your business concept, financial features, financial requirements, current business position, and major achievements. Think of it as your elevator pitch—concise, impactful, and designed to grab immediate interest.

The second reason to wait until later is that LivePlan can take care of writing your entire Executive Summary with LivePlan Assistant, our AI-powered suite of tools and utilities to help ensure that you aren’t missing crucial details as your plan comes together. The LivePlan Assistant can help you generate the Executive Summary or any other plan topic based on the information you’ve already entered in other sections. This ensures consistency and allows you to create a polished draft without having to start from scratch, saving time and making the process more manageable.

If you chose to write your own Executive Summary, LivePlan's prompts can help you develop each part, ensuring consistency and making sure your reader’s first impression is memorable. The LivePlan Assistant is especially helpful here, as it can pull together information from other sections to create a polished draft, saving you time and reducing redundancy. Your Executive Summary is your reader’s first impression; we want to help make it count.

2. Opportunity

Here's where you describe to the reader the business opportunity that your plan addresses. You want to think of this opportunity in the broader context of the market by considering the Problem Worth Solving and Our solution topics. No matter if your business is local, international, or entirely virtual, every successful business identifies a need (or creates one, but let's save those ideas for the next section where we get into marketing.) 

Now that we have the problem and solution identified it's time to look at the broader market. Who are your ideal customers? You might build customer personas here; maybe one market segment for a bike shop is the urban commuter looking for transportation, another is the parent looking for leisure bikes for the family, and a third might be young professionals trying out the local biking trails. Each customer is looking for different things and has a different amount of money to spend.

3. Execution

The Execution chapter is where you explain how your business will achieve the goals outlined in the earlier sections of your plan. This chapter explores the practical details of how you will implement your strategy. It includes three main sections: Marketing & Sales, Operations, and Milestones & Metrics, each with specific topics to guide your planning. Together, they paint a clear picture of how you intend to bring your business concept to life.

In the Marketing & Sales section, you’ll outline your strategies for reaching and converting your target audience. Topics like Market, Market Trends, Marketing Plan, and Sales Plan allow you to cover everything from your market analysis to your tactics for engaging customers and driving sales. This is where you describe your branding, advertising, and promotional efforts, as well as your sales process and revenue model. Be specific: include details about pricing, distribution channels, and the unique value proposition that differentiates you from competitors.

The Operations section focuses on the internal workings of your business. Topics such as Locations & Facilities, Technology, Staffing, and Equipment & Tools let you detail the resources and processes necessary to run your business. This is where you describe your day-to-day activities, outline any planned expansions, and highlight how your operations support your broader strategy. Finally, the Milestones & Metrics section helps you set tangible goals and track your progress. Define key milestones, such as product launches or market entry points, and identify the metrics you’ll use to measure success, like customer acquisition rates or profit margins. This chapter turns your vision into actionable steps, demonstrating to stakeholders that you have a clear, achievable path to success.

4. Company

The Company chapter is your opportunity to introduce the core identity of your business. It includes two key sections: Overview and Team, each designed to provide important context about your organization. Together, these sections help investors, lenders, or other stakeholders understand your company’s purpose, structure, and leadership.

In the Overview section, you’ll start with your Mission Statement, a concise declaration of your business’s purpose and values. This statement should articulate why your company exists and what it aims to achieve. Next, the Ownership & Structure topic allows you to describe your company’s legal structure—whether it’s an LLC, partnership, or corporation—and outline ownership stakes. This is crucial for transparency, especially if you have multiple owners or shareholders. Finally, the Company History topic offers a chance to share the story of how your business came to be. Whether your company has a long-established presence or is a new venture, this narrative helps readers connect with your journey.

The Team section highlights the people who will drive your business forward. In the Management Team topic, provide details about your organization's key leaders, roles, and qualifications. This helps show that your business is in capable hands. The Advisory Board topic, if applicable, is where you can showcase the expertise and connections your advisors bring to the table. Together, these elements build confidence in your leadership and governance, showing that you have the right team in place to execute your business plan.

5. Financial Plan

The Financial Plan chapter is a critical component of your business plan, providing a detailed view of your company’s financial health and projections. This chapter includes three main sections: Forecast, Financing, and Statements, each offering specific insights into your financial strategy and expected performance. A well-developed Financial Plan reassures stakeholders that your business is financially viable and capable of meeting its objectives.

The Forecast section lays out the assumptions and projections that form the basis of your financial plan. Start with Key Assumptions, where you outline the factors influencing your projections, such as market growth rates, pricing strategies, or expected operating costs. Use this as a foundation to explain the detailed financial forecasts that follow, including Revenue by Month, Personnel Table, Expenses by Month, and Net Profit (or Loss) by Year. These tables and charts help visualize your expected financial performance and provide a clear roadmap for achieving profitability.

The Financing section focuses on your funding strategy. In Use of Funds, explain how you intend to allocate the capital you raise, whether for operational costs, marketing, or expansion. The Sources of Funds topic outlines where your funding will come from—such as investors, loans, or internal revenue—giving stakeholders a clear understanding of how you’ll finance your business. Lastly, the Statements section provides standard financial reports, including Projected Profit and Loss, Projected Balance Sheet, and Projected Cash Flow Statement. These essential documents demonstrate your business’s long-term financial health and sustainability, since they back up your plan with realistic and data-driven projections.

6. Appendix

The Appendix is optional but can be valuable for adding extra depth to your business plan. Unlike the other chapters of the LivePlan outline, it is configured on the Download & Print page. The Appendix, like other automatically generated charts and statements in your plan, updates itself based on the information you’ve entered into your forecast and past financial data, if you’ve entered any. 

Crafting a Compelling Business Pitch

The first step to engaging investors and stakeholders is creating an interesting pitch highlighting your business's value. Whether you aim to capture interest for funding, build strategic partnerships, or convey your vision, the pitch is your opportunity to make a solid initial impression. This section outlines how to build an effective pitch using LivePlan, ensuring you cover all the essentials in a captivating manner.

In the Marketing & Sales section, you’ll outline your strategies for reaching and converting your target audience. Topics such as market analysis, market trends, marketing plans, and sales plans allow you to comprehensively address everything from your market research to your tactics for engaging customers and driving sales. This is where you describe your branding, advertising, and promotional efforts, as well as your sales process and revenue model. Be specific: include details about pricing, distribution channels, and the unique value proposition that differentiates you from competitors.

Tell a Customer-Focused Story

A great pitch starts with a relatable story. Paint a vivid picture of your target customers and the problems they face. Use a real example if you have one, or craft a persona representing the customer your business serves. For instance, imagine you are launching a new sustainable gardening service. You could start with, "Meet Sarah, a busy professional who loves the idea of gardening but struggles to find the time or expertise to create the lush, sustainable garden she dreams of."

By framing the challenge in a way that connects, you immediately create empathy and interest. This narrative sets the stage for explaining how your business provides a solution.

Demonstrate Your Solution

Now, explain how your product or service tackles the issue. This section should be simple, clear, and impactful. To clearly show your value proposition, use visuals or concise descriptions. Illustrate how your product or service meets customer demands by presenting its benefits and focusing on what makes your solution unique. 

Highlight Your Target Market

LivePlan's Pitch section emphasizes the importance of clearly defining your target market. Investors want to understand who your ideal customers are and how well you know them.

• Target Market Summary: Describe your primary customer segments. Who are they? What are their needs, demographics, and behaviors?
• Market Problem: Explain the core problem faced by your target market that your business addresses.

Use LivePlan's prompts to create a thorough yet concise description of your target audience, which will help investors understand the market demand for your solution.

Show How You’re Better Than the Competition

Position your business against the competition, but be specific. Highlight where your competitors fall short and how your solution effectively fills that gap. It’s essential to show you’re aware of the competition and have a clear advantage.

For example, "Unlike other gardening services, we provide customized, low-maintenance designs using exclusively native plants, ensuring beauty and sustainability with minimal effort from our clients."

Outline Your Revenue Streams

LivePlan users can outline their revenue streams by choosing one of the four models in the forecast section. These models include:

• Unit Sales:  Ideal for those selling products with clear unit quantities.
• Billable Hours:  For businesses that generate revenue based on hours worked.
• Subscription Sales:  For businesses relying on recurring revenue from subscriptions
• Revenue Only:  A simple model for projecting revenue without detailed breakdowns.

These models allow users to forecast their revenue accurately based on their business type. Use the Pitch section to summarize how your business makes money and highlight the revenue model you selected.

Introduce Your Team

People invest in people as much as they do in ideas. Highlight your team’s expertise and accomplishments. Showcase any relevant industry experience, previous successes, or specialized skills that make your team the perfect fit for executing your vision.

The Pitch section should include short bios of key team members and their relevant expertise, demonstrating that you have the talent necessary to make your business successful.

Specify What You Need and Why

Finally, clearly communicate the amount of funding you’re seeking and how it will be used. Be as specific as possible, breaking down how each part of the investment will contribute to growth. For instance, "We are seeking $250,000 in funding. 40% will go toward expanding our marketing efforts, 30% toward product development, and 30% toward scaling our operations."

LivePlan encourages clarity in your ask, ensuring that investors understand not only the funding amount but also the strategy behind it.

Presentation Tips

• Keep It Short and Impactful: The pitch should be concise. Aim for a few minutes of presentation, focusing on the essentials.
• Use High-Quality Visuals: Avoid clutter. Use readable fonts and a consistent color scheme to maintain professionalism.
• Practice Makes Perfect: Rehearse your pitch multiple times. Confidence in delivery can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your presentation.
• Engage Your Audience: Make eye contact, ask rhetorical questions, and use gestures to keep your audience interested.
• Include a Video: LivePlan allows you to include videos in your Pitch, which can be an excellent way to demonstrate your product or service and add a dynamic element to your presentation.
• Tailor Your Pitch: Customize your pitch based on your audience. Investors may want different details compared to potential partners or customers.
• Be Ready for Questions: Anticipate questions your audience may ask and prepare concise responses. This will show your confidence and deep understanding of your business.