While mistakes can be considered as important life lessons, there are mistakes that can be completely avoided simply by good planning, especially when it comes to #business. Drafting a #business plan is not rocket science, as long as you understand the dos and don’ts, you are good to go.

Googling “writing a business plan” yields approximately 99,600,000 results. There’s an abundance of tips on how to craft executive summaries, marketing plans, and projections. A great business plan needs to absolutely capture the attention of the reader.

When drafting your business plan, it is important you stick with short term projections and modify the plan as your business progresses. Even if you want to include long term projections, ensure that you place reasonable limits on them.

Most times, long term planning becomes meaningless because as time progresses, you discover that the reality of your business is different from your initial concept.

Here are Three Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your Business Plan

1. Avoid Optimism: In order to completely eliminate optimism, be conservative in your predicting capital requirements, timelines, sales and profits. Few business plans correctly anticipate how much money and time will be required. You might think that optimism is an act of faith but you have to embrace realism.

2. Avoid Language or Explanations that are Difficult to Understand, don’t fill up your business plan with jargon and technical terms. The bigger the grammar, the bigger the mistakes that will follow. Be clear, simple and concise in all your explanations. Ambiguities will only complicate things.

3. Don’t completely depend on the uniqueness of your business idea, success only comes to those who start a business with great economics and not necessarily great inventions. Keep this rule in mind when writing your business plan.

 

By Jumoke Alarape

Tags:  business Business plan growth strategy start-up start-up planning Strategy