How can I use the sample business plans?

Answer

Our 500+ sample business plans are presented as examples only. They are to give you an idea of what a business plan covers. They include more than 100 plans that are available free online with complete text, tables, and charts, at www.bplans.com.

Most of these plans are for real companies that were funded or financed. They were written by real people as real business plans, reflecting actual situations and specific details, for funding. They include a wide range of quality and depth, some of them quite short and superficial, some very lengthy.

You can search those plans by keyword search at www.bplans.com, using the keyword search in the middle of the page. For example, type “restaurant” and click the button and you’ll get several dozen possibilities. The search list includes both free online plans and the additional plans, more than 500 of them, that are available only as part of Business Plan Pro.

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.

Our business plan collection includes so many business plans that no one person knows all of them well enough. We have a team of editors involved. We rely on the keyword search on the site so you can search the sample plans for type of business, using search terms.

If you own Business Plan Pro, the latest version, all of those plans are already available to you in your Sample Plan Browser within the application.

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.

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 plan, Business Plans, sample, sample plans

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