Entrepreneurship & Business Plan - Term Paper Example

The actors on the entrepreneurial stage, whether they own or run a business, know that effective business planning is the key to the long-term success of a company, as well as to its capacity of attracting investments and gathering funds. People knowledgeable in this domain, such as bankers, accountants or academicians have spoken a lot on how to prepare a business plan; therefore the importance of such a plan cannot be underestimated. Yet it seems that the more information there is the more confused people get about what a business plan should include.

There is no perfect combination of content, facts and figures. A business plan has to clearly lay out the vision of your business, its achievements (if it is the case) and its potential of development. “A business plan should tell a compelling story, make an argument and conservatively predict the future, and companies have different stories to tell, different arguments to make and different futures to predict” (Chapter 3: the role your business plan plays.). That is why, when looking to raise capital, the business plan is also a very useful instrument.

Still, loaners will mainly look at the financial part of your plan, as they are generally interested to turn profit. Investors, on the other hand, are more susceptible to the idea, the main concept of the business, although they will not invest in something that looks like a bad investment, so the idea has to be very well founded. Business planning has to be understood as a complex process, through which the entrepreneur creates a model of how the business will look like in the future. Also, business planning is a very dynamic process and the target has to be continuously moving, that is, the business has to grow and develop in order to keep the game going.

That is why, a business plan is necessary because it represents the road map for the company: it is pointing out the goals, it is