Business Plan Development

Both Andrea Cockerton and Dr. Steven Gedeon have some good points on how to write a successful business plan.    Andrea feels that it is important to have a good executive summary and a fantastic pitch, while Steven is more focused on refining your business concept and your management team.  Some other important aspects discussed between the two of them were: having a point of pain, ensuring that your idea is groundbreaking, and continuously refining and changing your plan.

A few ways that I intend to incorporate what I have learned from my research on these experts into my own plan are: to start, I am going to ensure that my executive summary clearly details and outlines exactly what my company is about in a way that I get both my concept explained and get my audience excited about it at the same time.  Another way I intend to incorporate what I’ve learned is by constantly refining my pitch until I can easily and expediently convey my concept to an investor.

Based on the information provided by the experts, I have already made a couple changes to my business plan.  One change I have made is I have gone back through my financials and done additional research on the costs to ensure I had the best numbers in my financials section.  Steven mentioned that you need to continuously refine and change your plan, so I already started doing that.  Another change I made was looking at my point of pain and making sure that there was really a market for it.  I had to do extensive research to be able to prove that my business has a point of pain, but I did and it has helped me tremendously.

           I noticed that both Andrea and Steven agreed that the investors are mainly focused on your financials and that is the section that really interests them.  So, based off of their advice and my own knowledge of business plan development, I would have to say that investors are most interested in financials, but your concept and your pitch are also very important to them as well.