Key elements of a good business plan

Ted Ladd, Professor, Social and Internet Entrepreneurship, Hult International Business School

Professor Ted suggests that one should not write the business plan too early. Outline and test different pieces of the business model. You need to have valid, validated business model.

A good business plan has four projection sections:

1. Financial: Revenue and costs
2. Staffing: Who is going to be there on your team?
3. Marketing: How are you going to reach your customer?
4. Operations: How are you going to actually produce the goods or the services and get it to the customers?

These four projections are interlinked with each other. Have a baseline for each section, that is, what you think is going to happen if everything goes well - the best case scenario. Also, have a dream scenario for when everything goes so well and worst case scenario when everything is going down.

If it gets worse than worse case scenario, you should have self discipline to stop or mindset to change, make major change in what you are doing.

This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘social entrepreneurship’ offered by Copenhagen Business School through Coursera (2014).