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The blueprint to start your business project or venture, creating an effective business plan is necessary to chart out the process roadmap of any organization.

What is a Business Plan?

A Business Plan can be defined as any document which identifies, describes, and analyses the techno-economic and financial feasibility of a startup or an already existing business. A well written business plan seeks to create and establish all processes and strategies necessary to turn any business opportunity into a viable project, and also to propel existing business entities into an upward growth trajectory.

The following are some simple business plan examples:

  • Start-Up Business Plans
  • Internal Business Plans
  • Strategic Business Plans
  • Feasibility Business Plans
  • Operations Business Plans
  • Growth Business Plans

Why make a Business Plan?

Before creating an effective business plan, it’s vital to know the compelling reasons to draft it, i.e. to:

Establish a business focus: The main objective of a business plan is to put in place a future strategy. The business plan should incorporate goals or milestones, with detailed steps explaining how to reach each step. The process of crafting a suitable roadmap for these targets will ensure a growth-oriented business focus.

Get funded: Investors, banks, and other private financiers look for a well-researched business plan first and foremost, before planning to invest. They want to understand the firm’s operations, revenue and expense projections, and crucially how they will receive a return on their investment.

Attract top & mid level management team: Business expansion and a larger scale of operations necessitate the recruitment of top-quality talent. Thus, a well-structured business plan helps to attract executive talent and determine if they are a good fit for the company. The business plan also inspires employees and management to join, assuring them that the business idea and revenue model is sound and that the business can achieve its strategic goals.

Provide a global analysis of business: A global business plan acts as a strategic process guide that helps organizations in making key business decisions in its foray into international markets. This plan is also used by stakeholders and investors to shape their investment plans.

Analyze whether the business project is viable or not: By studying a business plan’s financial projections, marketing and sales strategies, and the overall company description including its mission and vision, an investor, shareholder, partner, or analyst can assess the feasibility of the business project.

Helps manage the business strategically and optimally: Strategic business management and planning facilitates the setting up of overall business goals and consequently developing a business plan to optimize and achieve them. For example, startups and small businesses need to focus on their special business identities, target markets and clientele, and customized products or services for them.

Effectively function as the Business Card introducing the business: A business card is synonymous with the identity of the business. It introduces the business to potential stakeholders and offers an insight into the business background, credentials, strategy, and key focus areas.

Business milestones: The business plan lays out the long-term milestones and a step-wise plan of action critical to the success of the business.

Revenue model: This part of the plan documents how the business will earn money for potential investors, i.e. its revenue model, its assumptions, challenges, and approach.

Brand Positioning: Creating a business plan helps to define the company’s role in the marketplace and also optimally position the brand to potential customers, investors, and partners.

Business repositioning to tackle changing conditions: This is applicable for changing scenarios amidst difficult economic or business environments. If the current sales and operational models aren’t effective, one can rewrite and reposition the business plan to redefine, implement, and validate new ideas, objectives, and strategies.

Forecasting the company’s staffing needs: The business plan provides a structured program for all the company’s staffing needs, ensuring smoother expansion and diversification.

Unlocking new opportunities: Creating a business plan entails multiple brainstorming and white-boarding sessions, as also thinking out-of-the-box and creative interviewing. Thus, the business is seen in a different light, with new ideas being constantly incubated concerning product/service marketing and business management.

Things to consider while crafting a well written business plan

The secrets to writing a successful business plan consist of asking and addressing fundamental questions like:

  • Where do we want the business to evolve to?
  • Where you would like to see the business in the long term, i.e. the next five, ten, or fifteen years?
  • Revenue and profit expectations for the future?
  • The number of employees to be hired?
  • How would business expansion occur?

Initially, it is ideal to start with a short-term plan applicable to a shorter period, i.e. a year or so. This plan should try to address queries like:

  • Goals for the current year?
  • Targets to be achieved to reach this goal?

Various factors have to be considered to make business plan. The format of a good business plan contains the following essential components:

  • Executive Summary: Appearing at the start of the business plan, this provides a brief description of the company’s mission statement and products & services portfolio. It could explain why the company has been established and the company’s experience and credentials in the particular industry sector.
  • Company Description: This is a general overview of the key aspects of the business, including the company history, goals, mission and vision statement, target clientele, and the USPs of the business, products, and services.
  • Management Plan: The management segment of the plan outlines the organizational structure, staffing plan, and the management roles and hierarchy, including members of the board of directors. It will specify the legal structure, i.e. if the business will operate as a corporation, limited liability, partnership, sole proprietorship, or any other ownership structure.
  • Operational Plan The operational part of the business plan should clearly and transparently describe the functioning of the business, including the logistics and operational side of the company. Every aspect should be clearly defined, be it the management team’s responsibilities, capital requirements to run different operations, as also tasks and roles assigned to all the people within the organization.
  • Market Analysis A quantitative and qualitative assessment of the state of the market and industry, it examines the market size in terms of both volume and value, customer segments and buying patterns, consumer demographics and profiling, and the economic environment regarding barriers to entry and regulation.
  • Competitor Analysis: This analyzes the business vis-a-vis its direct and indirect competitors, including their SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), and may include their current and potential product and service development. This segment is normally analyzed along with market and sales strategy planning.
  • Marketing Plan: This will showcase the marketing strategy for the business, i.e. where and how the business fits into the market and how its products and services will be priced, promoted, and sold, including the budgets for these marketing expenses.
  • Sales Strategy: A sales strategy plan is the company’s masterplan for securing stable, long-term revenues through the acquisition and retention of new and existing customers. This can include specific tactics, market strategy, processes, objectives, forecasting, budgeting, and timelines to achieve sales targets.
  • Funding requirements: This outlines the future funding requirements and financial plans of a company, usually for the next five years, especially when writing a business plan for a startup. The amount of funding required at different phases and the different sources of capital will be a part of this funding request.
  • Financial Projections: This key section shows anticipated revenue projections for the first 12 months and annual projected earnings for the second, third, fourth, and fifth year of business. The section should include a sales forecast, expenses budget, cash inflows and outlays, income statement, balance sheet, and a profit and loss statement. If the business is applying for a personal loan or a small business loan, an appendix providing additional financial or background information could be added.

Objective to create a Business Plan has to be well-defined:

Writing a business plan for a startup: This involves the following activities: Developing the goals of the startup, choosing the business entity to be incorporated, budgetary analysis, regulatory compliance, with respective authorities for the start-up, risk analysis and mitigation, and keeping a close watch on the startup’s activities.

Writing a Business Plan for Investors: Keeping potential investors in mind, we help create a unique, personalized business plan specifically focusing on the investment opportunity and funding goals, team overview, market opportunity, revenue model, target clientele, user acquisition and marketing strategy, traction & company milestones, industry analysis, future growth and development strategy, and financial overview.

SME Business Plan: Our business plan writing services for SMEs consist of creating the SME’s business action plan and objectives, strategic advice for business scenarios and cases, funding options, and regulatory compliance advice.

Large Enterprise Business Plan: Here, our business plan proposal is all about shaping business strategies, services, product diversification, and expansion strategy consulting.

Vertical Specialization: This implies focusing on a niche domain or business sector to boost business development and project management workflows. For optimal vertical specialization planning, we have to prepare a business plan based on the business potential of the vertical, decision-making processes, regulatory environment, and competitive advantage, etc. 

Retail & eCommerce Business Plans: Leveraging on our years of retail and eCommerce expertise, we help in writing a successful business plan outlining the retail business roadmap and its growth strategy.

Business plan writing experts

Business plan writing experts shall analyse and review your business plan proposal in terms of:

  • Financials
  • Any creative ideas or action plan from you
  • Any other information

After freezing the terms of engagement, the format of business plan will essentially comprise:

  • Business Introduction
  • Executive Summary
  • Business Products backgrounder
  • Financial Projections & Budgeting
  • Final Business Plan

Why YRC to make your Business Plan?

Your Retail Coach (YRC), is a retail management and finance consulting company with a proven track record to help you in writing a successful business plan every step of the way.

Our business plan writing services are tailored and customized to fit every business need. We are amongst top business plan writers with established industry credentials in writing a business plan for a startup, writing a business plan for investors, and business plan development & market analysis.

To prepare a business plan, the proposal has to be an agile, continually evolving operational document that can adapt to ever-changing business, customer, and market needs. YRC’s business plan writing services believe in hand-holding and guiding you at each crucial juncture, adhering to a focused process-oriented approach to enable you to carve your own success story.

To tap into new age growth opportunities and realize the true power of your business potential, reach out to YRC’s business plan writers today and embark on your journey to success.

PROCESS AUTOMATION

The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

Photography includes the following steps:

  • Cataloguing your products
  • Cataloguing your images
  • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
  • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

IT INTEGRATION

Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

  • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
  • Where should your Warehouse be located?
  • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
  • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
  • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
  • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
  • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
  • How much space do I require for warehouse?
  • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

 

At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

UI & UX DESIGNING

This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

Part 2: UX Designing:

“UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

“As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

Part 3: UI Designing:

UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

  • In-house Design Team
  • Freelance Designers
  • Outsourced Design Team
  • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

BRANDING

Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

CRITICAL PATHWAY

Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

MARKET RESEARCH

Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.