Business Planning

Creating a business plan is an important step to ensuring the success of a business. A well-thought out projection and plan will help shape your business and build the resilience needed to understand potential risks before they prove to be a threat. A business plan should anticipate changes in the marketplace, measure the impacts these changes could have on the business, identify risks and formulate contigency plans. Not only will a business plan strengthen your business for the future, it will give prospective lenders or investors the means to determine whether your company is a good risk or a suitable investment.

Bring your business plan to HCDC and we will review it with you to help ensure it is prepared in a way that will make it effective as a continuing strategic business tool.

Why Do a Business Plan?

… a solid business plan is key to obtaining financing.

Management Tool

• Helps to draw a clear picture of your business objective
• Gives you goals to shoot for
• To help keep you focused
• Keeps you informed as to the kinds of management skills required for your business
• Helps you to make informed decisions about recruiting and training employees

Risk Assessment Tool

• addresses critical risks that may affect your business
• helps to identify new risks as they arise
• puts you in a better position to cope with the impact of potentially adverse conditions before they become a real threat to your enterprise

Monitoring Tool

• give you a chronology of events and financial data to which you can compare actual results
• monitor performance against projections
• identify company’s strengths/weaknesses
• projections should be reviewed and adjusted on a regular basis to remain realistic and credible (you’re committed to lender to meet projected targets, so any adjustments you make in one area must be compensated for somewhere else)

Planning Tool

• projections based on certain assumptions about interest rates, sales, anticipated growth, and competitive forces
• these results may be thrown off by changes in technology, legislation, competition, the economy and other forces
• by regularly reviewing your business plan you can better identify potential shortfalls and alter your business strategy to meet your objectives

If you are interested in writing a business plan for a new or existing business, there are different documents below that offer step-by-step guidance through the business planning process.

How to Write a Business Plan Template - [.doc file ]  

The Business Planning Workbook - [.pdf file]