As you may well know, the business plan for a typical small business
has two primary functions. First, a business plan helps you raise
capital for a new venture. Second, a business plan allows you to
clarify, focus and refine your business idea.
I'm sure any MBA would argue long and hard that a business plan does a
great deal more for a business than providing focus and funding. In
truth, I'm sure that a good business plan does serve many functions,
but brass tacks bottom line is that for the typical small venture,
focus and money are the biggest needs, and therefore, the most
important functions of a business plan.
Creating a viable business plan can be an arduous and time-consuming
process involving attorneys, accountants, consultants, bankers, and
marketing people. You may produce a plan that is literally reams of
paper long, though there are far simpler techniques to put together a
viable, thoughtful business plan, including various iterations of a one
page business brief.
Whatever form you choose for your plan, it should be a living
(periodically updated) document which defines your business, identifies
your goals, and serves as the compass for you as the leader of your
organization. A functional plan will also help with efficient resource
allocation and with daily business decisions, identifying markets, and
quantifying growth targets.
A
short-form business plan, or business brief should:
- Describe your vision for
the business in one concise statement.
- Define who your target
market is. Identify who your service or product(s) are for. (Hint:
"Everybody" is not a good answer for this. You must be able to identify
exactly who you are selling to.)
- A concise
strategy plan for:
- Year one startup
- Year two - three growth
- Year five goals
- Define challenges that
you face and briefly how those challenges will be addressed
- Define human resource
needs and how those needs are to be addressed. (Hiring? Outsourcing?
Are key people already on board?)
- Define success for the
business that is quantifialbe and measurable.
- For the small business
owner who is specifically interested in sustainability--the green
business, there is an additional part integral to the business plan:
- Include a sustainability
statement:
- How will the company address resource utilization in a
sustainable way?
- What is the company's social responsibility plan for the
members of the community, its employees, its suppliers and customers?
- What is the company plan for waste stream management
(chemical handling, recycling, wastewater, carbon emissions,
etc)?
- Define what the company will give back:
- to the community.
- to the environment.
- to customers.
- to suppliers.
The
Triple Bottom Line
The various parts of the sustainability statement can be somewhat
difficult to quantify. Sustainability accounting has been called
"triple bottom line" accounting. Essentially, where traditional
business accounting had only the economic bottom line as a measure of
success, triple bottom line adds elements of social and environmental
accountability to the equation. The process of quantifying social and
environmental accountability so that everything fits neatly into
spreadsheets and graphs can be a challenge. There are several good
books recently written on the triple bottom line and many MBA programs
are now including the topic into their programs.
A concise, well-constructed business plan can take a bit of time at the
outset of planning and launching a new green company, but doing it well
will pay off in the long run. The benefit of having a plan that can
guide you daily decisions and inform the overall direction of a young
growing company cannot be overstated. The added benefit of creating a
sustainability statement and incorporating triple bottom line
accounting methods will allow your new company to maintain your
commitment to clean, responsible, and profitable business practices
over time.
After all, isn't that the
reason you got into this in the first place?
