Live Plan

Finance:

Key assumptions

Describe how you came up with the values in your financial forecast. Did you project your revenue based on past results, market research, your best guess at how many people who visit your store and what percentage of them might buy, or some other method? What kind of growth are you assuming? What are your key hires and notable expenses? What level of profit do you expect to generate?

Your readers can see the full forecast detail in your plan. Use this space to craft the story behind the numbers. How do your financial projections reinforce your sense that this is a strong business opportunity and one worthy of your time and investment?

Use of Funds

If your forecast includes loans, investments, or other financing, use this space to explain what you plan do with that money. Will it help to cover operating costs as your new business scales up? Will it finance capital expenditures, such as the purchase of expensive equipment? Will it enable you to add personnel or expand your marketing to increase revenue? Give your reader a clear picture of why these funds are needed and how they will pay off.

If you are not seeking financing, you can just remove this topic from your plan.

Sources of Funds

Describe your financing plans. Are you investing your own money in the business? Do you have a credit card or line of credit? What other types of funds personal or business loans, equity investments from others, etc. do you expect to receive and when? If you do not have the full detail of future financing worked out yet, that is understandable. Just explain what you do know and when you expect to sort out the details.

If you are not seeking financing, you can use this space to explain your plan to bootstrap your company, funding its growth from its own profits. Or you can just remove this topic from your plan.

Milestones & Metrics

Key Metrics

Explain which performance metrics are most important for understanding how your business is doing. What does success mean for you, and how will you know it when you see it? Is it critical to contain your direct costs in a low-margin industry? To generate a certain number of leads to keep your sales pipeline full? To get a certain level of traffic on your website or convert a certain percentage of those visitors into customers? To keep a certain amount of cash in the bank?

The goal here is to keep your plan alive by tracking your actual results, identifying poor assumptions or weak performance as early as possible, and correcting course right away to keep your business on track. The first step is to get clear on which metrics are going to be the most important to watch closely.