business plan

(noun)

A summary of how a business owner, manager, or entrepreneur intends to organize an endeavor and implement activities necessary and sufficient to achieve success.

Related Terms

Examples of business plan in the following topics:

  • Starting a Small Business: Business Planning

  • Overview of Inputs to Strategic Planning

    • Strategic plans can take the form of business or marketing plans, and consultants and industry experts are used in their development.
    • A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons they are attainable, and the plan for reaching them.
    • For example, a business plan for a nonprofit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization's mission.
    • It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of subplans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
    • A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan.

  • Benefits of Strategic Planning: Focus, Action, Control, Coordination, and Time Management

    • To meet business goals, managers develop business plans not only to reach targets but also to strengthen and change public perception of the company's brand.
    • This is how planning achieves focus.
    • Perhaps the most important benefit of developing business and marketing plans is the nature of the planning process itself.
    • This business plan takes aspects of a business and identifies clear goals for each: e.g., for the technology to move from being weak and non-integrated to enabling workflows, and for the business's focus to transition from being inwardly to outwardly focused.
    • Identify the critical benefits derived through utilizing business and marketing plans in strategic management

  • Defining Strategic Planning

    • Strategic planning generally deals with at least one of three key questions:
    • Common components of a business plan include external and internal analyses, marketing and branding, investments, debt, resource allocation, suppliers, production processes, competition, and research and development.
    • While different business models include different components in their planning, based on unique organizational or industry needs, the central theme is that all aspects of the strategy should be researched and discussed prior to incurring the costs of operations.
    • This image summarizes some of the factors that should be considered in the creation of a business plan, such as a company's mission and purpose, personnel, financial resources, market and customer base, competition, and strengths and weaknesses.
    • Assess the definition of planning in context with strategy and the various planning process approaches

  • Overview of Types of Strategic Plans

    • The broader overview of strategic plans, as well as the five subgroups within strategic planning, provide businesses with direction.
    • Strategic management is primarily concerned with the planning and execution processes that lead to the effective operations of a business.
    • Strategic management leverages strategic planning in order to design and execute a variety of plans specifically created to approach various facets of the business and competitive environment.
    • It is worth analyzing the broader overview of strategic plans, as well as the five subgroups within strategic planning that provide businesses with an outline of their strategic direction.
    • Standing plans:Standing plans are based on the operations that must be repeated indefinitely within a business or corporation.

  • Human Resource Planning

    • It responds to the importance of business strategy and planning in order to ensure the availability and supply of people—in both number and quality.
    • Human resource planning serves as a link between human resource management and the overall strategic plan of an organization.
    • The planning processes is loosely about determining what will be accomplished within a given time frame, along with the numbers and types of human resources that will be needed to achieve the defined business goals.
    • Competency-based management supports the integration of human resource planning with business planning by allowing organizations to assess the current human resource capacity based on employees' current skills and abilities.
    • These skills and abilities are measured against those needed to achieve the vision, mission, and business goals of the organization.

  • Bureaucratic Control

    • The quality control cycle improves processes through a continuous cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting.
    • PDCA (plan–do–check–act or plan–do–check–adjust) is a four-step management method used in business to control and continuously improve processes and products.
    • Plan: In this step of the quality control cycle, a business establishes the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output (the target or goals).
    • Do: In this step, a business implements the plan, executes the process, and makes the product.
    • Check: A business then compares the actual result against the expected result to find any differences.

  • Fulfilling the Planning Function

    • Planning involves the creation and maintenance of a given organizational operation.
    • To meet objectives, managers may develop plans, such as a business plan or a marketing plan.
    • Generally, strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:
    • Draw-See-Think-Plan: Draw – What is the ideal image or the desired end state?
    • Plan – What resources are required to execute the activities?

  • Planning a Project

    • The stages of a project within the strategic-planning discipline provide a step-by-step approach to generating and implementing an effective strategy, for either a corporation or a strategic business unit (SBU).
    • Planning and design: Planning and design brings the project under the microscope by assessing the smaller details.
    • This stage is the most strategic in nature, mapping out the business processes in sufficient detail to effectively accomplish the required objectives.
    • Monitoring the operation for ways to increase value can redirect the strategic-planning cycle back to the planning-and-design stage.
    • As shown in the figure, there are five basic strategic management steps in the planning cycle.

  • Implementing Strategy

    • Strategic planning involves managing the implementation process, which translates plans into action.
    • Accountability is critical to the action plan process.
    • Additionally, businesses must consider the exact means of implementing a strategy, which may entail:
    • Doing business with protectionist countries such as India and China, which require market entrants to operate via partnerships with local firms
    • One of the core goals when drafting a strategic plan is to develop it in a way that is easily translated into action plans.