There are six stages involved with developing a high-power business plan. These stages can be compared to the process of hosting a dinner for a few friends. A host hoping to make a good impression with their anticipated guests might analyze the situation at multiple levels to collect data on new alternatives for healthy ingredients, what ingredients have the best prices and are most readily available at certain times of the year, the new trends in party appetizers, what food allergies the expected guests might have, possible party themes to consider, and so on. (Swanson, 2017)

The following figure illustrates the six stages of developing a high-power business plan (Swanson, 2017):

During the past few weeks, we have gone over initial research in developing a business concept. This week, you are going to take your business concept and draft a business plan (Stage 3) to include the following elements (Swanson, 2017):

• Essential initial research (Stage 1):In this stage of development, you analyze the environment in which you anticipate operating at each of the societal, industry, market, and firm levels of analysis. (You completed this PESTEL in Unit 2.)
• Business model (Stage 2):In this stage, you determine how each element of your business modelincluding their revenue streams, cost structure, customer segments, value propositions, key activities, key partners, and so on might fit together to improve the potential success of their business venture. (This is the discussion in units 1 and 3)
• Business plan draft (Stage 3):Thisstage involves taking the knowledge and ideas developed during the first two stages and organizing them into a business plan format. An approach preferred by many is to create a full draft of the business plan with all of the sections, including the front part with the business description, vision, mission, values, value proposition statement, a preliminary set of goals, and possibly even a table of contents and lists of tables and figures all set up using the software features enabling their automatic generation. Writing all of the operations, human resources, marketing, and financial plans as part of the first draft ensures that all of these parts can be appropriately and necessarily integrated. The business plan will tell the story of a planned business startup in two waysby using primarily words along with some charts and graphs in the operations, human resources, and marketing plans and through the financial plan. Both ways must tell the same story.

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