HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN?
Generally, a business plan will begin with you identifying an opportunity in the market and developing a strategy that you believe will allow you to best achieve the objectives which you set out in writing your business plan. If the market opportunity is given to you through a case study or business problem, you should then begin developing a goal and a strategic plan to achieve it. If, in contrast, you are writing a business plan from scratch, you will have to first identify an opportunity, then identify a goal in relation to it, and only then begin developing strategy. Your approach to developing and writing a business plan will thus depend heavily on the specific scenario you are writing in relation to.
As you move forward in writing a business assignment, you must develop strategies which link the opportunity which you have discovered in the market with your tangible goal. In so doing, it is important to justify the strategies that you will be using so as to obtain top marks. When writing a business plan, professors tend to prefer if you use multiple types of strategies in different areas, like the supply chain, marketing, research and design and others, so as to build a holistic business plan. Regardless of the strategies you use and the areas they are in, it is important that you ensure that all of your strategies are aligned with your core goal.
Moving forward, it is very important, if requested, that you provide forecasts of your business’ likely success. This can be based on benchmarking analysis that assesses how similar firms have performed in analogous contexts or can be based on hypothetical data regarding how you believe your firm will perform given the conditions that you have created in a novel case study. While these metrics and complex econometric analysis tend to be more frequently required in higher level classes than in lower level ones, writing a business plan with type of forecasting data will gain you points even if it is not a mandatory part of the rubric you are following. As professors tend to value critical thinking, engaging in such forecasting even if it is not mandatory will be rewarded by your instructor.
Finally, the most important element of writing a business plan is justifying all of the elements of your business plan in a manner that is internally consistent, and wherein every element of the plan is tied to achieving the strategic objective and business opportunity that you have identified. Because writing a business plan is associated with tying a goal to a strategy in the context of an opportunity, all elements of your business plan must be justified. This means that you must explain the logic of all of the components of your business plan. In this respect, justifying the inclusion of each component of your business plan is critical for achieving the best possible grade. Even if your professor does not think your business plan is realistic, you will receive a good grade if you write a business plan in which all strategies are justified and internally consistent.