Please raise your hands if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by business plan writing.
The moment you start writing out your plan, you’re hit with stark black ‘verdana’ font on a white background, killing any technical inkling you may have felt. It’s intimidating enough to develop a business plan for use in-house – never mind putting together one to be evaluated by a potential investor or financier. It is estimated that an average entrepreneur can spend up to 400 hours just to develop one plan.
While most business owners appreciate the fact that writing a successful, investor-ready business plan requires the expertise of a professional business development consultant; more often than not, the exorbitant fees charged by these professionals stop most aspiring business owners dead in their tracks. Many others proceed without a plan simply because they could not afford to pay for one.
While there is definitely a target market for those over-the-top pricey business plans, there exists an even greater need for cheaper ones for the business owner round the corner. Today’s small business owners on shoe-string budgets can’t afford, and don’t need the 4 or 5 – digit fee, range of corporate type plans.
Well, there’s good news: affording a professionally written, investor ready business plan doesn’t have to be that daunting; whether the resulting document is to be used as a strategic road-map or for raising funds.
At a minimal fee, a business owner can easily hire the right business development professional to create a business plan that will stand out from the pile of applications and capture the financier’s attention from the first sentence – at an affordable fee. Such a plan would include all the major financial reports (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, etc.) complete with graphs and charts. It would also feature the all important Executive Summary written with the intention of holding the reader’s attention from the initial paragraph through to the end.
So, how are these professional consultants able to charge minimal fees for their services without sacrificing quality while their counterparts in the so-called Tier I firms charge an arm and a leg for the same? The reason is because most of them operate remotely and pass on the related costs to you. Besides, as solo professionals, they are essentially business owners. So they have a perfect front row seat to view both sides of the coin.