V. Operational Plan
Write down the entire operational plan including daily operation, necessary equipments, people, processes.
Production
How will your products and services will become available? Explain the methods of production costs and methods, customer service, product development and most important quality control.
Location
If your location will be visited by customers, describe the type of location you’ll have like zoning, type of building, amount of space. Is the access important to clients? It is convenient to suppliers?
Write down the requirements for parking and include a drawing of your location.
If you plan to build your location you should specify costs and information about what you plan to build. Estimate your costs including maintenance, insurance etc.
Legal Facts
Describe its like: licensing requirements, permits, insurance coverage, trademarks, copyrights, building code requirements. You should talk to a specialist to show you what are those legal facts.
Personnel
Write down what number of employees do you need, what skills must they have, pay structure, training methods, who will do which task, job description for every employee.
Inventory
Specify what kind of inventory will you keep for suppliers, goods, values in stock, seasonal buildups.
Suppliers
Identify and write down your suppliers with addresses, amount of inventory furnished, credit and delivery policies, reliability. You should consider having more than one supplier as a backup.
How will you deal with fluctuating costs?
Credit Policies
Do you plan to sell on credit? What policies will you have for who buy on credit? How much credit will you offer? What terms and conditions will you have?
You’ll need a policy for dealing with late-paying customers: when do you call them, do you send letter to them? When do you call your attorney to threaten them?
VI. Management and Organization
Will you run the business day by day or will you hire someone? If you’ll need a person to run the business, what experience should he bring to business? What competencies must he have? What do you do if he is not capable of running the business?
Create an organizational chart for management hierarchy, including position descriptions.
Professional and Advisory Support
Write down the board of directors, attorney, accountant, banker, consultants etc.
VII. Personal Finances
List what assets and liabilities the owners have outside the business, you’ll often need finance for the business and this could help you knowing where you could find the money. If you’ll search for investors, they’ll want this information as well.
VIII. Startup Expenses
It’s important to estimate what expenses will you have before beginning operating the business. It will not be exactly for sure, opening a new business always has costs more than you anticipated.
For trying to avoid not anticipated costs, when you write your plan you should add a little more amount of money for every item in your budget. If you don’t want to do like this, you could add a separate item called “un-expected expenses” and calculate how much you should have put aside for unexpected costs.
If you know persons that run a similar business try to get in touch with them and get an idea of how much to allow to unexpected costs. Anyway, you should consider at least 20% of your total costs to be put aside to those costs.
Explain in this chapter how you came to those costs in detail with sources and amounts.
Write down the entire operational plan including daily operation, necessary equipments, people, processes.
Production
How will your products and services will become available? Explain the methods of production costs and methods, customer service, product development and most important quality control.
Location
If your location will be visited by customers, describe the type of location you’ll have like zoning, type of building, amount of space. Is the access important to clients? It is convenient to suppliers?
Write down the requirements for parking and include a drawing of your location.
If you plan to build your location you should specify costs and information about what you plan to build. Estimate your costs including maintenance, insurance etc.
Legal Facts
Describe its like: licensing requirements, permits, insurance coverage, trademarks, copyrights, building code requirements. You should talk to a specialist to show you what are those legal facts.
Personnel
Write down what number of employees do you need, what skills must they have, pay structure, training methods, who will do which task, job description for every employee.
Inventory
Specify what kind of inventory will you keep for suppliers, goods, values in stock, seasonal buildups.
Suppliers
Identify and write down your suppliers with addresses, amount of inventory furnished, credit and delivery policies, reliability. You should consider having more than one supplier as a backup.
How will you deal with fluctuating costs?
Credit Policies
Do you plan to sell on credit? What policies will you have for who buy on credit? How much credit will you offer? What terms and conditions will you have?
You’ll need a policy for dealing with late-paying customers: when do you call them, do you send letter to them? When do you call your attorney to threaten them?
VI. Management and Organization
Will you run the business day by day or will you hire someone? If you’ll need a person to run the business, what experience should he bring to business? What competencies must he have? What do you do if he is not capable of running the business?
Create an organizational chart for management hierarchy, including position descriptions.
Professional and Advisory Support
Write down the board of directors, attorney, accountant, banker, consultants etc.
VII. Personal Finances
List what assets and liabilities the owners have outside the business, you’ll often need finance for the business and this could help you knowing where you could find the money. If you’ll search for investors, they’ll want this information as well.
VIII. Startup Expenses
It’s important to estimate what expenses will you have before beginning operating the business. It will not be exactly for sure, opening a new business always has costs more than you anticipated.
For trying to avoid not anticipated costs, when you write your plan you should add a little more amount of money for every item in your budget. If you don’t want to do like this, you could add a separate item called “un-expected expenses” and calculate how much you should have put aside for unexpected costs.
If you know persons that run a similar business try to get in touch with them and get an idea of how much to allow to unexpected costs. Anyway, you should consider at least 20% of your total costs to be put aside to those costs.
Explain in this chapter how you came to those costs in detail with sources and amounts.
