VOICES OF THE SEARCHERS
Help for Writing Business Plans
by Marydee Ojala
An essential part of starting a new business is the business plan. Business schools consider writing a business plan foundational in courses on entrepreneurship and small businesses. Public libraries often are the first stop for those with a new business idea who need to get started with a business plan.
No shortage of books on the subject exists, and software templates for their creation are also readily available. A simple search for business plan templates on Google results in thousands of potential templates. The U.S. Small Business Administration has a nice introduction into writing business plans (sba.gov/business-guide/plan-your-business/write-your-business-plan) that explains the traditional and lean approaches. SCORE, on its website (score.org/resource/template/business-plan-template-a-startup-business), has a template that uses a very traditional approach.
I know of one very successful serial entrepreneur who, for his latest idea, prompted ChatGPT to write a business plan, which he thought was good enough to take to the bank. I mean that literally. He met with his banker for a loan to fund the new business idea, and the ChatGPT business plan was what he presented as documentation.
WORKING THROUGH BECOMING
AN ENTREPRENEUR
A new entry into the business plan creation market is Gale Business: Plan Builder, previously known as Gale Small Business Builder, which Gale introduced in 2017. The newer iteration has a more descriptive name, leaving no doubt about what it is designed to do. Not a database, it’s more akin to a mini-course in business plan writing, walking you through all aspects of the process and forcing you to think through, in detail, what the new business will entail. It’s not a quick process. Luckily, you can pause your interaction with the planner and resume later without losing any of what you’ve done. You can also download your work as either a PDF or a Word document for textual information or as a CSV for some of the financial data.
Should you be dealing with a multilingual userbase, it’s good to know that Gale Business: Plan Builder provides the possibility to interact in 15 languages. Note that, despite the 15 languages, the product assumes a U.S.-based business, particularly when it comes to taxes.
The main dashboard shows what you’ve decided about the basics of the business in the center of the screen: the business name, starting date, company type, incorporation date, base currency, company tagline, website, email, state of incorporation, D-U-N-S number, Federal Tax Employer Identification Number, and licenses. Not all business will have every one of these datapoints, but it’s good to be reminded of them. To the left of the page are the five areas covered by the plan builder—an Entrepreneur profile, Business ideation, Break-even analysis, Business plans, and Financial projections.
Under each of those are pull-down menus for further exploration. A worksheet is provided for your Entrepreneur profile, along with resources for business ideas entrepreneurship, and innovation, all drawn from Gale databases. You can also enter search terms if you have particular avenues you wish to explore. The worksheet first asks, “Why do I want to start a business?” That’s an excellent place to start. If you can’t answer that, it’s unclear you’ve got a good reason to write a business plan. It asks six other questions pertinent to the entrepreneur’s mindset. It’s really an exercise in self-reflection.
Business ideation spotlights the Lean Canvas tool. Its lean approach encourages entrepreneurs to describe their business in just one page. The idea is to summarize your assessment of your business idea by breaking it down into nine building blocks. Once you’ve got that figured out, you’ll be better able to determine whether or not to proceed.
When you select Lean Canvas under Business ideation, you get another worksheet, starting with what problem your business is designed to solve. Other boxes ask for information on who the customers will be, the unique value proposition for the business, key metrics, cost structure, and revenue streams. Notice that the boxes are numbered but they don’t appear in numeric order. At the top left is number 1, Problem. But number 2, Customer segment, is at the top right, with other boxes in between. The Lean Canvas approach is designed purposely this way to optimize your thoughts and surface common themes. Interestingly, when you download your canvas, the numbers disappear.
Gale Business: Plan Builder also offers alternative tools, including SWOT, PEST, and Porter’s Five Forces. Choose SWOT and the worksheet is the standard matrix for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Likewise, the PEST worksheet is a matrix for political, economic, social, and technological issues affecting the business. Porter’s Five Forces asks for input on new market entrants, supplier power, competitive rivalry, buyer power, and product and technical development.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Break-even analysis gets into the nitty-gritty of money. Here, you fill in your expectations surrounding expenses, cost of goods sold, capital, sales, and reporting capabilities as a graph or table. The resources identified by Gale in this section keep you from having to delve into multiple accounting books to understand the basic components of doing a break-even analysis. The whole point of starting a business, after all, is to cover expenses and hopefully make a profit.
The Business plans section appears after you’ve done sufficient homework and self-analysis to know that starting a business is really what you want to do. Gale pushes you toward the Lean Business Plan, based on Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business, 2011). But if you lean toward a more traditional approach, Gale offers, under Other Business Plans, a template for a full business plan and an executive summary. Whichever plan type you choose, Gale also has hints for how to create a pitch deck, although it does not provide a template.
The final section, Financial projections, covers capital expenditures, debt and loans, equity, general and administrative, inventory, sales, and staffing. Additionally, nine charts can be created based on the financial data entered.
STARTING A NONPROFIT
What about starting a nonprofit? Gale Business: Plan Builder has that covered as well. On the main page, choose nonprofit, and the guidance will change slightly. It’s still a process, though, with a considerable amount of self-reflection, forcing you to thoroughly think through what is entailed in starting a nonprofit organization just as you would for a small business.
The language for the sections on the left-hand side of the page change slightly for the nonprofit scenario. Instead of Entrepreneur profile, it’s Founder profile. Business ideation becomes simply Ideation. Business plans changes to Bylaws & strategic plans. Many of the other details under each of the sections do not differ materially from the for-profit ones. You still need a good reason to start the nonprofit; you still need to understand the elements vital to success, such as having a real problem to solve; and you still need to cover costs even when you’re not planning to make a profit. Taxes are interesting, since some states exempt nonprofits from state taxes while others do not. The resources offered in each of the five areas are tailored toward nonprofits.
WHY GALE?
So what makes Gale Business: Plan Builder different from all those myriads of books, templates, and explanatory websites? For one thing, it’s more comprehensive, offering a variety of options in one place. Additionally, it features tie-ins to informational articles contained in Gale databases. Access to these articles does not require a separate database subscription; articles have been preselected and added into each area of the plan-building process.
Uniquely, Gale offers marketing support for libraries subscribing to the business plan writing product (support.gale.com/marketing/products/gsbb), including images, banners, suggestions for email and blog content, flyers, and printable bookmarks. I wonder if Gale followed its own advice and used Gale Business: Plan Builder when creating Gale Business: Plan Builder. Obviously, Gale is not an entrepreneur, not a newly hatched small business, but even established companies can find it valuable to consider a new product or an offshoot business as if it were a new business. It’s a good tool to focus your thinking and guide you through all the nuances of starting a business or a nonprofit.
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