This template is designed to ensure you’re thinking through all of the important facets of starting a new business. It’s intended to help new entrepreneurs and small business owners consider the full scope of running a business and identify functional areas they may not have considered or where they may need to level up their skills as they grow.
You’re already investing time and energy in planning your small business—there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to formatting your plan. Instead, to help build a complete and effective plan, lean on time-tested structures created by entrepreneurs and startups who have come before you.
Business planning is often used to secure funding, but plenty of business owners 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.
- No blank-page paralysis. A blank page can be intimidating to even the most seasoned writers. Using an established framework and guidelines can help you get past the inertia of starting your business plan, and it allows you to skip the work of building an outline from scratch. You can always adjust a template to suit your needs.
- Guidance on what to include in each section. If you’ve never sat through a business class, you might never have created a SWOT analysis or a balance sheet before. Templates that offer guidance—in plain language—about how to fill in each section can help you navigate sometimes-daunting business jargon and create a complete and effective plan.
- Knowing you’ve considered every section. In some cases, you may not need to complete every section of a startup business plan template, but its initial structure shows you you’re choosing to omit a section as opposed to forgetting to include it in the first place.
Why use 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.
There are some high-level strategic guidelines beyond the advice included in this free business plan template that can help you write an effective, complete plan while minimizing busywork.
Business planning is often used to secure funding, but plenty of business owners 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.
The best part? Venngage' Business Plan Builder is a fraction of the cost of hiring a business plan writer.
Not a designer? No problem. With our easy-to-edit templates and online Business Plan builder, anyone can create a winning business plan for free. Over 40,000 businesses already use and trust Venngage.
No budget for a professional designer? Save 20+ hours of design time and hours of frustration with our easy-to-customize business plan templates.
Create unique charts and graphs for your data, too. Add bar or line charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams, interactive maps and more and edit them with a few clicks.
Brand colors & fonts
Don't like how your brand colors look in a template? Toggle through the options to get a variety of combinations.
Whatever the case, Venngage's drag-and-drop business plan generator lets anyone create a beautiful, professional business plan without any design experience.
Looking to make your your business plan stand out from the pack? Venngage's unique business plan templates add serious style to your ideas.
Below are descriptions of and links to a series of SWOT analyses in a variety of industries to help get you started:
Opening a retail store? A retail store business plan can help you improve your chance for success.
This guide will teach, prepare, and provide you with all the necessary tools to become a SWOT expert. It is complete with SWOT Samples from innovative companies, such as and , a thorough examination of SWOT Analysis' central components and uses, and free SWOT Templates. It is valuable for everyone, including creatives in the startup and entertainment worlds, policy planners in the non-profit and government sectors, and entrepreneurs in the real estate and restaurant industries.
Depending on your goals and needs, there are different business plans to consider.
Sales Forecast
For newcomers to the method, we suggest you read the guide start to finish, in order to familiarize yourself with SWOT's history and applicability.
This guide is easy to read, concise, and driven by examples. More importantly, it is informed by extensive research on SWOT in leading business journals and magazines.
Needing to start a Housekeeping business? A housekeeping business plan can help set you apart from the competition. (Can help you sweep your competition under the rug, and out the door.)
This should include your name, title and contact information
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In this article, you'll learn about executive summaries and how they help to tell your story, pitch an idea, or design collaborative business plans.
Decision makers don’t have the time to read everything, and the average time an online user spends actually reading content is already at a premium. If you’re creating business plans, project proposals, product launch presentations, or making a sales pitch, the executive summary is an opportunity to convey the most important aspects of your content to the reader.
It is difficult to convey everything you want the reader to know about your business, product, or plan in a concise format. Sometimes getting started can be overwhelming.
The following executive summary templates will help you start planning and organizing your reader’s first — and sometime only — impression. There are templates formatted for Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and PDF. The templates are designed to highlight only the important facts typically addressed in communications popular in technology, marketing, finance, and project management professions, as well as in research-heavy sectors like law, academia, and healthcare.
Smartsheet Contributor Kate Eby on Apr 02, 2018
Even if it is the only thing your target audience reads, a well written executive summary creates value if the reader takes action without having to read the rest of your content word for word. If there is a business case for your document, a strong argument to make, or a story to tell, do it in the executive summary first.
Keep all of the project stakeholders in the loop with this project management summary template. You’ll find space to highlight project milestones, monitor new requests, and provide brief status overviews. For more information and resources on how to create a project plan, read “The Top Excel Project Plan Templates.”
The marketing plan is a type of business plan that outlines the strategy and tactics for specific marketing activity. This template emphasizes marketing-specific data and strategy information about product and service development, branding, customer and market data, competitive analysis, and marketing budgets.