A business plan has one job: to convince a specific reader that you understand your own business. A bank wants to know you can service debt. An investor wants to know the thing could get large. A co-founder wants to know you agree on what you're building.
Write for the reader in front of you and the plan gets shorter and better. The outline below is the scaffold — Feasy Pro organises it as four groups, fourteen of which are narrative chapters you write, with the financial sections drawn from your live forecast.
Group 1 — Summary
Executive summary
The only section many readers finish. Two pages at most, covering what the business does, who it serves, why now, the headline numbers, and what you're asking for.
Write it last. It is a summary of a plan, and you cannot summarise something you haven't written yet.
Group 2 — Opportunity
The problem
What's broken, and for whom. Be specific enough that a reader can picture the person having the problem. “Small businesses struggle with finance” is not a problem statement; “founders without a finance background can't produce a lender-ready forecast” is.
The solution
What you do about it, in the plainest language you can manage. Resist the temptation to list features — describe the change in the customer's situation.
Target market
Who exactly buys, how many of them there are, and how you reach them. A narrow, reachable market beats a vast theoretical one. If you claim a large market, say how you sized it.
Competition
Who your customers use today — including spreadsheets, doing nothing, and doing it manually. Claiming you have no competitors reads as inexperience, not opportunity.
Group 3 — Execution
Marketing & sales
How people find you and how they decide to buy. Channels, the shape of the sales process, and what acquiring a customer costs. This section should be consistent with the sales and marketing expenses in your forecast — a plan claiming rapid growth on a $200 monthly marketing budget invites an obvious question.
Operations
How the thing actually gets delivered. Suppliers, premises, systems, capacity. Short if you're a software business; central if you're a restaurant.
Milestones
What happens by when, with dates. This is where a plan becomes checkable — and where readers judge whether your timelines are serious.
Team
Who's involved and why they're the right people. Cover the gaps honestly, and say when you'll fill them. Your hiring plan here should match the personnel table in your forecast.
Group 4 — Financial plan
These sections come from your model rather than your prose, which is why keeping them wired to a live forecast matters. If you revise a price and the plan still shows the old projection, the reader will find it.
Revenue forecast & assumptions
Your projected revenue and — more importantly — the assumptions behind it. Stating your drivers explicitly invites scrutiny of the right things, which is what you want.
Projected statements
Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. Annual figures in the body, monthly detail in an appendix. They must reconcile with each other — an unbalanced balance sheet ends the conversation.
Funding request & use of funds
How much, on what terms, spent on what, and what it buys you. “Eighteen months of runway to reach $50K monthly recurring revenue” is a use of funds. “Growth” is not.
How long should it be?
Shorter than you think. Fifteen to twenty-five pages including appendices covers almost every situation. Length is not evidence of rigour — a tight plan signals that you know which parts matter.
Tracking completion per section helps here, because plans usually stall from not knowing what's left rather than from any single section being hard. Feasy Pro's plan editor keeps a running count for exactly that reason.
What to do next
Start with your Business Brief — the short answers about what you do, who you serve and how you charge. Those answers seed several sections and save you writing the same paragraph four times.
Then build the forecast, so the financial sections have something real to read from. When the plan is done, the same material becomes your investor deck.