Business Planning

A business plan is much more than a tool to obtain financing for your business. Preparing a business plan helps clarify your company's direction, ensures your key leaders are all on the same page, and keeps both management and staff focused on the tasks at hand. A business plan is often needed when:

• starting a new venture, product or service
• expanding a current organization, product or service
• purchasing an existing business
• turning-around a declining business

The business plan provides a blueprint, describing your company, its products, the competitive environment, management team, financial health, and business risks. Business planning requires market research, assessing customer needs, competitive analysis, thinking, and rethinking. Business planning involves evaluating and discussing options, and fine-tuning the business model. It takes time and effort to do this and to condense all this work, all this information and insight into a well written, concise, compelling document. Working with the experienced business planners with a proven success rate will improve your odds of business success or receiving funding.

CEO READY can tailor our services to meet your needs and budget:

Full-Service Planning: We will help you optimize your strategy, research and analyze your market and competitive position, and create a clear and compelling business plan to articulate your opportunities. CEO READY will save you many, many hours that you can better spend on other priorities. Please see our FAQs to learn more about our typical business planning process.

Limited-Service Planning: If you are on a more limited budget and have the time to conduct the majority of the research and writing, we can guide and prioritize your efforts; supply templates and other helpful materials; and critique, edit, and format your drafts.

Business Plan Review: If you have already written your plan, we can provide an objective, third-party critique before you launch your business or present the plan to lenders or investors.

Presentation Design: Whether seeking capital, partners, customers, or employees, comprehensive, concise presentations are crucial. CEO READY will help design a state-of-the-art presentation and coach you on how to deliver it in a professional, yet engaging manner.

Entrepreneur Coaching and Tactical Guidance: How should you organize your company? Where should you incorporate? What should your capital structure be? When do you need to consult an attorney, and which one? Can you patent your ideas? The list of questions facing start-up businesses and emerging growth ventures can be overwhelming. So let our seasoned business counselors help you sort it all out.

A CEO READY business plan will:

1. Identify and describe your target market and customer profile and how to get your message in front of your target market in the most efficient and least costly way.

2. Justify that your plan and projections are credible by fully researching your business model and basic business assumptions.

3. Develop marketing plans, including full descriptions of targeted promotional campaigns with implementation timelines. Also included in your marketing plan is an examination of current market conditions, the nature of your customers, as well as your competitors, sales potential, and projected results of your promotional campaigns.

4. Develop staffing plans including identifying the key players, skills, attitudes, and expertise needed to build your business.

5. Develop management plans, including full descriptions of management systems and timelines for implementation.

6. Develop financial plans, including projected startup costs, operating costs, revenue, profits, and break-even analysis for the first three to five years. Projected financial plans allow you to effectively predict cash flow problems and budget according to the life-cycle of your business model.

7. Identify building and equipment needs, including vendors and cost estimates.

8. Formulate company milestones, including timelines for upcoming products and services in development.

For more detailed information about our business planning services, please contact us.