Do you have a sample business plan for my business?

With apologies, this is a standard answer to the question we get so often: “do you have XYZ business plan?” Our business plan collection includes more than 500 business plans now, so no one person knows all of them that well. We have a team of editors involved.

We don’t know from your question whether or not you already own Business Plan Pro. If you do, then it’s fairly easy. All of the 500+ plans included with Business Plan Pro are available through the Sample Plan Browser inside Business Plan Pro. Make sure your Internet connection is open. Click the browser form in the column headings and you’ll see that you can sort the plans different ways to make selection more convenient.

If you don’t own Business Plan Pro, you can still read and access more than 100 business plans that are complete with full text, tables, and charts, for free, on the sample plan site at www.bplans.com. We’re not sure whether we have what you want or not, but we hope we’ve made it easy enough for you to go see for yourself. To see what we have, please go to www.bplans.com and click the link for Sample Plans, then click the links into whichever type of sample plan you want. There is also a keyword search for sample plans, on the very front page, so you can explore them more easily.

That same area also lists the 400+ additional plans that aren’t available for free on the web but are included with the purchase of Business Plan Pro, for about $100.

Just FYI, because some people ask, We don’t sell business plans. We have more than 100 you can read for free on the web, and more than 500 you can use as a starting point with Business Plan Pro, but what we sell is Business Plan Pro, an excellent tool for developing a business plan, with or without sample plans. We sell it for less than $100. It had the same price back in 1994 when it was version 1 with 2 sample business plans, and also when it had 10 samples with version 2, 20 with version 3, and 30 with version 4, and now 500 with Version 11. The software is worth every penny, but the sample business plans, without the software, have no value. They are just examples.

The idea of having so many plans available isn’t that a business plan should necessarily start with a sample plan, or that business plans apply to only these types of business. There are more than 9,000 types of business included in the Standard Industry Classification (SIC) system, and we have just a fraction. What we expect to happen is that seeing a sample plan gives you a good idea of what’s included in a plan, and makes it easier for you to develop your own plan because you’ve seen what somebody else has done with theirs. Also, we want you to be able to view a plan for a similar business, and get something out of it. So for example if you have a retail jewelry shop you can get the idea of how your plan would look by viewing one for a retail shoe store. If you have an electrical contractor business you can get a lot out of a plan for a concrete forms contractor.

After all, obviously, the only plan that will really work for you will be one that you develop yourself. Even if we have a very similar business (and we sometimes do), you would still have a different summary, a different company description, a different list of products, different strategy, different management team, and different financials. A sample plan is useful as an example, not for the information it contains.

If you accept that idea, then you’ll find that we have a lot that might apply. You will probably find some close to yours, and even if the products sold aren’t the same, we’ll give you examples of how to find a market analysis that matches, product or service descriptions that match, and financial structure that matches. You can gain a lot of ground like that, even though the business plan isn’t an exact match.

Frankly, one of the things we intended when we decided to have them posted was to show you that you can do a business plan, it isn’t that hard a task. Some of those plans are not all that impressive. They are there because they were successful, not necessarily because they are great plans.

Sample plan or not, Business Plan Pro starts a new plan by asking you 17 questions about your business and customizes your plan to match. It customizes outline topics, tables, and charts, depending on whether you are retail, service, manufacturer, etc., and whether you are a home office, an on-going or a start-up company, etc. We haven’t yet heard of a business that couldn’t do a business plan with Business Plan Pro.

You can find more information about Business Plan Pro at www.businessplanpro.com or you can just call tollfree at 1 (800) 229-7526.

Tags: Business Plans, sample

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