Tips for Writing Winning Investment Business Plans

In my experience many UK business plans are written solely as investment business plans to raise funding. I wish more business owners would make planning part of their everyday operations. But as they don’t, I thought it might be helpful to pull together some key tips for writing winning investment business plans.

There are a few potential pitfalls that a business owner and business plan writer, seeking loan or investment funding, needs to be aware of. I have put together my main tips to help you and your advisors write a winning investment business plan.

Before I go further it is worth reiterating that your business plan should tell a story about who you are, what you do, how you go about doing it and where you want it all to end up, or at least where you are headed over the next three to five years.

If your story is for the eyes of potential investors, you need to establish credibility and you need to do this without boring them to tear, i.e. in as short a space as possible, so if you are not good at writing clearly and concisely about yourself and your business, it is worth investing in a business plan writer.

At the end of the day what the investor will be seeking to find out is whether your company is worth investing in, which means they need to know how much risk is involved in making the proposed investment.
Here are some tips and thing you need to think about when writing investment business plans:

1. Remember the investor does not believe in you and your business, like you do, so you are selling yourself and your business, be as concise as you can, ideally less than around 30 pages excluding appendices (that is not 30 pages of miniscule type! 12 pts is a good typeface size).

2. Even start up businesses have history, so if you are a start-up say why you are starting this particular business and what you and your team’s experience is, that equips you to set up and run the business. A word of warning for start-ups – you will need to be able to demonstrate ‘proof of concept’, if you cannot do this you are unlikely to get funding.

3. For an investment business plan, in particular (less so for a business plans for a bank loan or overdraft), you need to demonstrate that you have assembled a good team, covering all the main skills you need in your business, including a financial advisor and a legal advisor.

4. No surprises – investors won’t want any unresolved issues left in the plan, so if there things that need resolving, like a patent that is due to run out, that is very important to the business, or a key person that is coming up for retirement, deal with them before seeking investment.

5. The investor wants to quickly get a feel for what the business is about and your earning potential, so ensure that you include an executive summary, to enable the reader to gauge the risks and potential rewards early on.

6. The following headings are a guide to the main areas of content for investment business plans:

a. Executive Summary
b. General Background
c. Business Environment
d. Business Background
e. Operations
f. Marketing
g. Investment
h. Financial Plan

If you use business planning software all these sections will be covered by the software.

7. The finance plan needs to look forward for at least three years and include a balance sheet forecast, a profit and loss forecast and a cash flow forecast - good business planning software such as Business Plan Pro is invaluable in helping you get the financial sheets together. Don’t be tempted to be over optimistic in your forecasts, put some time into your figures to make sure your forecasts are as accurate as you can reasonably make them.

8. Presentation is important, so bind your plan, include an index and write in plain English without using jargon. The people who read investment business plans will not have knowledge about every business sector, so they may not have as much knowledge about your business sector as you do, treat them as an educated layperson in terms of what they may know about your business sector.

I wish you every success with raising finance for your UK business plans.

If you would like help with finding funding, or writing UK business plans I am a professional business plan writer - find out more about my services by clicking this link to UK Business Plan - tips.


I recommend using business planning software, I use Business Plan Pro to write my clients business plans, if you would like to know more about Business Plan Pro click this link.

Five Inconvenient Truths About UK Business Plans

I am a business advisor so I talk to a lot of business owners and it constantly astounds me how many do little or no planning. In the UK business plans are still not considered core tools for running a sound business. Without a plan, or at the very least an income, expenditure and cash flow forecast, it is very difficult to know how well your business is currently performing, let alone where it is headed.

Writing a business plan need not be a huge chore, there are plenty of good software programmes around, which usually include ready made business plans, to give you a head start. There are also plenty of professional business plan writers eager to assist. So why is it that the following five truths still prevail?

1. Many UK companies simply do not have a business plan

Not having a plan is like walking around in the dark without a torch. You may get where you are going but it will take longer and you will probably trip over several times on route.

I recently helped a business move from being loss making to making a good profit. All I had to do was forecast income and expenditure figures. It immediately became blindly obvious that, unless my client put up his prices, he would continue to fail. A small price increase, against existing client accounts, soon sorted out his problem.

If he had an active, simple financial plan, which he could easily have put together using good business planning software, he would not have got into difficulty in the first place and would have saved money by not needing my services.

2. Start-up businesses are often too optimistic in their income forecasts

We all tend to be over optimistic. There are plenty of high profile, high value projects that ended up with a price tag many time greater than the initial budget forecast -- the building of the Channel Tunnel or the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Area in Greenwich) are just two examples. Getting input from professional business plan writers is one way to deal with this problem.

Having an active plan also means that you can monitor actual performance against your plan and take action if you see that things are going off course.

3. Business owners do not know what is in their business plans

This can happen when professional business plan writers are brought in. The plan they create is fabulous, it secures the funds the business needs, but all too often the business owner never really understood what was in his plan, so it is of little ongoing use and his business risks going off track. If you hire in professional business plan writers, ensure you understand what they have said about your business and that you know how to monitor your performance against your plan.

4. Start-up companies do a bad job of identifying their target markets

Perhaps one of the most tricky elements is identifying your target markets. It is not necessary to do lots of research but it is important to think deeply about what you know about the people who will buy your products and services. Who are they? How old are they? How wealthy are they? Where do they live? What do they like and dislike? Where and how to they currently buy similar services and products to those you will be providing?

If you have worked through the above questions and based your marketing strategy and sales forecasts on what you discovered, your plan will be stronger. If you also devise mechanisms for monitoring performance, based on the knowledge and assumptions behind your forecasts, you will have a much greater chance of improving your sales forecasts and marketing strategies, as your business develops.

5. Once UK business plans are written they just collect dust somewhere

Too many UK plans are filed on the 'don't bother to read this ever again' shelf. A business plan is a tool for managing your business performance. It needs to be kept up to date and used as a monitoring tool. If you took the wise decision of investing in good software to write your plan, you will have built in monitoring tools as part of the package. This makes it easy to monitor actual income, expenditure and cash flows against your plan, which is essential if you want to avoid unwelcome surprises or even failure.

In the current economic climate it is essential for all businesses to have plans and all UK business plans should be live documents. Time invested in developing your plan is only of value if you use your plan as a monitoring tool to help you manage your business. This is even more important in the current challenging economic climate.

If you are not familiar with writing a business plan, buy a good software programme - click here for more information http://businesstalent.co.uk/business_plan_software_65.html, or seek help from professional business plan writers.

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