A business plan is a document that allows you to present your business idea or corporate vision and the strategies for realizing it in a structured way.

A strategic business plan is recommended both when founding new companies and when making changes to existing ones. If available, a marketing plan can serve as a starting point, as it shares a large overlap with the business plan. In addition, there is the financial plan , in which you estimate the necessary financial resources and expected sales revenue so that you can calculate the capital requirements and profitability.

Business idea for a business plan

There is no clear-cut definition of exactly which components a business plan should contain. In practice, however, the following structure has become established as the standard:

  • Executive summary: a concise summary of the entire project that immediately attracts the interest of investors
  • Business idea and USP: an exact description of the product or service as well as the unique selling points
  • Market, competitor and target group analysis: well-founded data on market size, market growth and market potential, definition of the target groups and analysis of the competition
  • Marketing and sales strategy: a concrete plan of which channels and measures you want to use to reach, win and supply customers with products
  • Company and team: an introduction to the founding team, the core competencies as well as the chosen legal form, company locations and personnel planning
  • Financial planning: a detailed profitability forecast, cost and sales forecast, liquidity planning, capital requirements and investments
  • Risk analysis and milestones: a realistic assessment of potential risks (SWOT analysis) including possible countermeasures and a milestone schedule

While many large companies have always used business plans, this has only recently become standard for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups. A strategic business plan offers the following advantages:

  • Winning over investors: If you cannot realize your business idea with your own capital alone, you have to convince financial backers that an investment in your company is worthwhile. With a business plan, this is much easier.
  • Gaining an overview and clarity: A business plan helps you to think intensively about your project and to gain clarity about the business model and the way forward. In doing so, you bring various aspects together into a coherent overall picture.
  • Evaluating market potential: Do your products really have unique selling points and can they hold their own on the market? With a business plan, you can find out whether your idea is innovative, competitive and profitable.
  • Recognizing problems: When you seriously run through your business model, weaknesses, gaps and fallacies come to light. This allows you to consider alternatives at an early stage and correct misjudgments in order to steer your project in the right direction.
  • Increasing the chances of success: A sophisticated business plan makes it much more promising to establish yourself on the market. By contrast, a poor or non-existent plan is the most common cause of a startup failing within the first five years.

Winning investors for the business plan

Of course: if you want to start a company , you usually need a business plan. But it is not only important to create a well-founded business plan when starting a new business. There are plenty of reasons for existing companies to document the status quo and goals for the future in a business plan as well:

  • Company sale or takeover
  • Restructuring or merger
  • Succession (e.g. handover within the family)
  • IPO
  • Product launch or expansion into new markets
  • Application for public funding or loans

7 steps to success – the business plan in detail #

Let’s now take a closer look at the individual components of a business plan and what you should pay attention to at each step.

Executive summary – your strategic vision #

Begin your business plan with a short summary of all the key points from the following chapters. The executive summary forms the introduction to your business plan and should immediately arouse interest and enthusiasm for your vision among readers.

How do you want to generate revenue? – Focus on the business idea #

First and foremost, you set out your business idea precisely and in an easily digestible way. This includes a vivid description of your products or services and, above all, what benefit they have for potential customers, e.g. which problem they solve. In this chapter, you usually anticipate your central analysis results and name the USPs (unique selling points), i.e. the features that set you apart from the competition.

You should also present a conclusive business model. Answer questions such as: How do you want to generate revenue and how high are the margins? For physical products: How much do the materials cost to purchase, at what price can you manufacture the product and what percentage do the sales partners charge?

Analyses and research for the business plan

What are your target groups? – Market and competitor analysis #

A successful business model, an undiscovered market gap or the right target groups – none of this has much to do with luck. In the vast majority of cases, you find them through time-consuming research and careful analyses. Because without a thorough market analysis, no niche will open up in which you can position your brand. The size and growth of the target market are also important for the market potential of your business idea – and the competitor analysis is essential for working out the unique selling points with which your offer should stand out from the competition. In the end, a clear picture should emerge of which target groups you want to address with your product.

How do you want to implement the strategy? – Marketing and sales planning #

You then derive a marketing and sales strategy from this. The focus is on the questions: How do you want to make customers aware of your offer? And how should they receive it? Ideally, your analyses have given you insights into where your target customers are, which channels they use and which prices they are willing to pay. This is now reflected in your pricing, planned advertising measures and distribution channels . The more precisely you know how your target group ticks, the more accurately you can tailor your communication and market presence to their interests and purchasing behavior.

Who takes care of what? – Founding team and organization #

For young companies, founder personalities who can spark enthusiasm for their mission are indispensable. Investors are primarily interested in the previous career: What qualifications, experience and character traits do the founders bring with them? Are they cut from the right cloth to build a company?

Of secondary importance, but not to be neglected, is which legal form, which name and which location you have in mind for your company. Also give a rough outlook on personnel planning : Which of the founders takes care of which tasks? Do you have experts for critical key positions such as finance and marketing on the team? How many employees do you want to hire gradually?

When will the project pay off? – Creating a financial plan #

Banks and investors place particular value on realistic and plausible figures. Prepare a detailed breakdown of all costs and income from which the capital requirements, liquidity planning and profitability forecast for the first 3 to 5 years are derived. Be careful not to underestimate ongoing personnel costs, as they can make up a large part of the regular expenses and are not yet covered by revenue, especially at the beginning.

In manufacturing in particular, the purchase or procurement of materials, the acquisition of machines, tools and other equipment as well as the rental of buildings and vehicles also mean high expenses and investments right at the start. This is usually not possible without enough equity, loans from banks or investor participation. Ideally, your startup should reach the break-even point at the latest in the last year of the profitability forecast, from which the company sustains itself and begins to generate profits.

Plausible calculations are crucial when you create a business plan

What risks are there? – Risk analysis and milestones #

In a SWOT analysis , take another look at the opportunities and strengths, but also the risks and weaknesses of your project. Here you can shine with a realistic assessment of possible scenarios and countermeasures. If your product or service is innovative but easy to imitate, for example, design or patent protection can be useful to defend yourself against cheap copies. Show that you are well prepared and won’t immediately buckle when faced with headwinds.

Some investors also place value on a plausible schedule . Since this often changes or shifts in the initial phase, however, it only makes limited sense to integrate a detailed schedule into the business plan. Instead, a rough outline of milestones is usually sufficient, which could look like this:

  1. January to March 2026: Completion of the first prototype, bootstrapping
  2. April to July 2026: Test phase with proof of concept, creation of the business plan
  3. August to December 2026: Financing round 1
  4. January to March 2027: Official founding, start of production and market entry
  5. April 2027 to mid-2029: Build-up phase and reaching the break-even point
  6. End of 2029: Financing round 2
  7. from 2030: Growth and scaling phase

  • Take a structured approach: You do not have to deal with the chapters mentioned above in exactly this order when writing your business plan. For example, the introduction of the team can also come directly after the business idea. The important thing is that your business plan has a clear structure and is logically constructed.

  • Pay attention to formalities: Avoid typos, changing fonts or inconsistent formatting, because poor readability of the text looks unprofessional and distracts from the actual business plan content. As with any business document, the matter at hand should take center stage.

  • As little jargon as possible: The investors who are to assess your business plan usually have a commercial focus. Especially with innovative technical products, you should try to break down the advantages so that a less expert audience can understand them.

  • Present instead of just describing: Images, graphics and statistics illustrate your business idea, support analyses and strategic considerations and lighten up the text. Photos of the team add a personal touch, while in the financial section tables with reliable figures are a must.

  • Be confident: Only if you yourself are convinced of your product and your entrepreneurial skill can you inspire others with your business plan.

When writing a business plan, many people don’t know where to start

  • Disorientation and information overload: Many aspiring founders feel overwhelmed by the mass of information and don’t know which business plan structure is really relevant for their specific business idea. Nevertheless, you should come up with a system that works for you to collect and organize information – be it a notebook or a relational database .

  • Fear of the blank page: In principle, the business idea is clear to you, but you have difficulties maintaining a common thread and casting complex strategic thoughts into a logical form that convinces investors? To resolve initial blockages, guides with fictitious business plan examples are a good option. Founder platforms and chambers of commerce often provide business plan templates and helpful instructions.

  • Unrealistic assumptions instead of valid data: What banks and investors immediately notice negatively are overly optimistic assumptions and unsubstantiated figures. Never estimate the market potential, the expected costs and income and the capital requirements off the top of your head, but research thoroughly, calculate with well-founded figures and ideally state your sources.

  • Being overwhelmed by the financial section: Many founding teams do not have specialists for financial planning or accounting in their ranks. Nevertheless, you should never neglect the financial section. You have to acquire this knowledge in order to set up tables for budget planning , cost and sales forecasts without errors, link them logically with each other and use them to calculate important key figures such as liquidity, profitability and capital requirements.

  • No collaboration tools in the founding team: Word and Excel files are static. When several people work on the business plan at the same time, important data states and agreements are lost due to documents being sent back and forth by email. As soon as a few variables in the planning change, all documents have to be laboriously updated manually, which leads to time-consuming version chaos.

Basically, a business plan is a structured collection of information: texts, figures, images, documents, etc. SeaTable is an AI no-code platform with which you can create a digital business plan – more precisely databases, apps and automated processes – without any prior technical knowledge. All team members can collaborate in real time; changes to the data are synchronized immediately and can be traced via the logs. This means there is always only one current version of your business plan, which is accessible online at any time – with read permission for investors and other external users, too, if you wish.

By the way: To make it even easier for you to get started, we have created a business plan template for you that demonstrates the structure using an example business idea.

Structure your thoughts in tables and record important information in formatted text fields. Links and formulas enable exact calculations of the expected expenses and income. With the help of a wide range of views, plugins and app page types, you can prepare your business plan for presentations and make figures graphically tangible. For example, visualize data records with images in a gallery, create a printable business plan with the report design plugin or build an app with dashboards and statistics for investors and financial decision-makers.

The permanently free basic version of SeaTable is particularly suitable for creating a business plan, as no money usually flows before the company is founded and the financing is unclear. Set up in no time, your system can later be flexibly upgraded if you need more employee accounts, functions or storage space – ideal for startups with dynamic growth.

Register for free now

Better safe than sorry: in the SeaTable Cloud , your business ideas and figures are protected in a GDPR-compliant manner and stored exclusively on servers in Germany. Granular permissions allow you to control exactly who is allowed to access which data. In addition, you have the free choice between the convenience of the cloud and the local installation of SeaTable Server for full data sovereignty.

FAQ – frequently asked questions about the business plan #

Is a business plan mandatory in order to start a company?

No, there is no legal obligation to draw up a business plan. However, if you want to convince investors and banks, there is no way around it. Moreover, a missing business plan is the most common cause of a startup failing. The effort is therefore generally worthwhile if your company is to be successful in the long term.

What does a business plan look like?

A business plan is a document in which you present your business idea in a structured way. But a good idea alone is not enough: in addition to a conclusive business model and a strategic vision, you need above all well-founded figures and analyses of the market, competition and target groups as well as forward-looking financial planning in order to convince investors. Other components of a business plan are the executive summary and organizational aspects such as the founding team and milestones. When you write a business plan, you should pay attention to a logical structure and realistic assumptions.

How many pages should a business plan have?

The scope of a business plan depends on the size and complexity of the project. A business plan with a simple business model and a regional catchment area (e.g. for trade businesses, restaurants, retail stores) should not exceed 10 to 20 A4 pages. If you want to expand your company nationwide or internationally and win over larger investors, your explanations can be up to 40 pages long. As a rule of thumb, bear in mind that most investors only take 10 minutes to review a business plan. If they are interested in further information, the investors will contact you.

What points of contact are there for founders who want to create a business plan?

You will find a lot of information on the internet on how to start a company and create a business plan. Non-commercial advisory services from founder platforms or government contact points are particularly recommended. Depending on the type of company, the employment agency, the chamber of crafts in your region or the chamber of commerce can also help with the business plan.

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