The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.
Use your powerful business plan to get funding or bring on new business partners. Show investors how you expect to develop and grow your company - and ensure they get a healthy return on their investment.
For startups in particular, investors want to learn why the founders are the right people to do the job, and what money is needed to get the business off the ground. The business plan will also walk through the planned steps to move from startup to scaleup - and on to solid profitability.
Open a Wise international business account to get your own local bank details for the US, UK, Eurozone, Hungary, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore - making it easy to get paid by investors from these key regions.
Add your forecasts or financial statements from Excel to your business plan.For simple tables, you can just copy from Excel and paste your data into Word. You should find you have a formatted and editable table in Word, although any formulas used will no longer work. To avoid accidentally editing your data once it is in the business plan, paste your table using Paste Special to paste as a picture - or by choosing the Picture option when you right-click to paste.
Download our balance sheet template to give a comprehensive overview of how your business is doing. Investors use financial statements like these to compare investment options - so a smart and simple balance sheet is a great appendix to your business plan.
Use our handy template to create your profit and loss statement. Whether you know it as an income statement, P&L, or statement of operations, this is the document you need to add to your business plan to show profitability and predict future performance.
This template is ideal for developing a 90-day action plan to create and implement your business plan in manageable, 30-day chunks. Use the document to outline your main goals and deliverables, and then assign key business activities and deadlines to ensure your plan stays on track.
This template provides a standard outline for a traditional business plan, which you can use to guide your research and develop your plan. Easily modify the provided information to include information that is relevant to your business.
This template utilizes a Lean approach to help you showcase the core concepts of your business idea in a scannable format. Provide a brief overview of your company and industry, the unique benefits your product or service possesses, distribution strategy, key objectives and success metrics, and a financial plan. Use the visual timeline at the bottom to display dates and milestones.
A 30-60-90-day template is useful for developing an actionable plan. Simply add your main goals and the activities required to achieve them in 30-day increments. Update the status of each goal regularly to ensure your plan stays on track.
This fill-in-the-blank template is useful for small business owners that need some guidance adding details to the various elements of their business plan. Each section of this standard business plan comes with pre-filled content that you can expand on and customize to reflect the specific needs and details of your business.
Small businesses can use this template to articulate business ideas in a succinct, easily digestible manner. There is space to include a business overview, key team members, a market analysis, marketing and sales plans, objectives and success metrics, and a financial plan.
Use this startup business plan template to create a strong and detailed roadmap of your concept and related goals. The template includes space for an executive summary, business description, summary of product or service offerings, pricing structure, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, startup expenses, funding sources, and more to ensure you have a thorough plan in place.
Entrepreneurs offering professional services can use this document to outline the main goals and objectives associated with their business, as well as how they plan to achieve them. This template comes with a built-in table of contents and includes all the components of a traditional business plan, including the company background, market and industry analysis, competitive analysis, service offering details, promotional plan, sales forecasts, financial statements, and more.
This business plan template is ideal for a service-type business owner who needs a basic plan to jot down core business concepts. This single-page template has room to include the business mission and vision, service provided, target market, competitive advantage, marketing and sales plan, and key objectives. There is also a visual timeline of milestones included at the bottom of the template for tracking progress.
Use this one-page business plan to outline the key details related to your product-focused idea. Articulate the purpose and vision of your business, the problem your product solves, potential customers, how you will get your product to buyers, pricing strategy, main objectives, and success metrics. The timeline of milestones at the bottom of the template automatically creates a visual display of noteworthy activities.
This fill-in-the-blank template features a traditional business plan layout, and includes pre-filled content in each section. Outline the key components of a well-rounded business plan, and add a company overview, market analysis, marketing and sales plan, operations plan, financial statements, supporting documentation, and more.
This Lean business plan has all the necessary parts to articulate your business vision and strategy. Add information about the problem you aim to solve, your product or service offering, unique value proposition, target customers, cost structure, revenue streams, and a timeline of milestones.
One of the reasons that so many small businesses fail is that they don't do the necessary up front work to create an accurate and realistic business plan. Creating a business plan doesn't guarantee success, but the process of writing a plan is critical for any successful new business. It isn't our goal to try to tell you everything you need to know about creating a business plan. Instead, our goal is to make the process easier by providing a professionally designed business plan template that you can edit easily using Word and Excel.
This template provides a business plan outline with sample questions, tables, and a working table of contents. It was created for newer versions of Word and Excel (Office 2007 or later) so that you can easily change the fonts and color scheme and the file will be compatible with the mobile and web-based Word & Excel apps.
Important: When you paste a chart object into your business plan, make sure to "Paste as a Picture" because pasting the chart as an embedded object means that the entire spreadsheet becomes embedded in your Word document (even though what you see is only the chart).
If you want to insert a table into Word as a "Linked Object" so that when you edit Excel, the table in Word will update automatically, you may have a more difficult time preserving the formatting of the original. However, at the least the entire spreadsheet won't be embedded within your business plan Word document.
Two months ago, I used this column to suggest that we need to find a better term for business planning that doesn't conjure up fear and dread like the mention of a high-school paper or graduate thesis. Business planning is supposed to be about managing and steering a company. In the comments readers posted below that column, I saw several valiant efforts to suggest new phrases (road map and business blueprint, for example). But I ended up agreeing with several people who disagreed with my basic thesis. They essentially said business planning is too important to mess with changing the words.
1. Business plan: An organized collection of milestones, tasks, assumptions and basic business numbers. It covers strategy and details what's supposed to happen when, who's in charge of what, how progress is measured, when money is to be spent and from where, and when money is expected to come in. It isn't a document; it's a plan. If it isn't reviewed and revised monthly, then it won't be very useful. So it has to be practical and just big enough to serve the business need.
Related: To Make Business Planning Less Daunting, Let's Call It Something Else
2. Business planning: Steering a company using a cyclical process. Plan, review and revise as necessary to optimize. Business planning is management.
3. Business strategy: A combination of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, target market, business offering and product-market fit. Focus is vital. Who isn't in your market and what you're not offering can be more useful information than who is and what you are offering. All of this can be expressed in bullets, slides, a few key paragraphs or any other way that keeps strategy and focus top of mind.
a. A document created as output from a business plan, formatted for easy reading and highlighting past financial performance and current financial position. Bankers look for payment history and assets backing the loan.
b. When used to describe a canned boilerplate document somebody is selling, as in turnkey or ready-made, it is just sleazy sales hype for a bad product. Buyer beware: A ready-made business plan is always a waste of money.
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