Answer

A business plan could be either a one page document or a tome. It depends entirely on who the reader is to be. For lending or grant making purposes, the reader will want to know exactly who is asking for money, what their vision is, what they intend to do, how they know they can do it, who they expect to work with and how they will use the money. But for awareness and stakeholder development purposes, a one page overview is all that is needed. What experience tells us is that there is no one size fits all business plan and I have seen charities and social enterprises waste time, perspiration and money trying to do just that. The other reality about business plans is that they always change, so a plan for one project may very well change shape half way through the project and a new plan will need to be created. The core purpose of the business plan is internal – to keep the organisation managing its direction by always prompting it to ask the right questions of itself and to produce good evidence. The secondary purpose is to prove the organisation to outside bodies, of which there may be many. My guidance is to create an electronic business plan with the right headings and to write as much as can be done for each section. Each time the organisation decides to change direction, just update the core business plan and save the new version with a new number (XYZ Business Plan2, XYZ Business Plan3, etc). It is fascinating in itself to read the changing drafts; it is a good place to find evidence for the history of an organisation. Keeping the core plan always updated means that it can then be copy/pasted into a new document and edited down for whatever recipient needs it, at any point. I also suggest that the plan is printed out at various stages and put in a ring binder. Then, when evidence or ideas are gathered (magazine articles, newspaper features about your organisation or its beneficiaries, etc), they can be put in the plan at the right place, and you always have the hard copy reference of what you name in the electronic plan. Really active business plans have bulging binders and many electric drafts. I will put our Experts Online Business Plan template and guidelines in our resources section so that you can see the headings for any business plan. It is time consuming to create the core plan at the start, but well worth the effort. From there, it is only updated, saved as new versions and can be extracted for any use. One page or a tome is up to you, but the information headings are the same no matter what media or length you choose.