Writing A Business Plan:
A Free Business Plan Sample Will Jump Start Your Presentation!

Getting a free business plan sample is the easy part. In fact, every single business plan package that we put together has at least a few business plan samples; many have quite a few. This is simply part of our business plan help.

Once you've got your business plan sample, what do you do with it?

Do you use it verbatim? Not a chance.

A free business plan sample is going to represent vanilla style writing and presentation for some non-existent business. Honestly, most of them are pretty lousy.

But yours is not a "non-existent business". Your business is very real, even if it doesn't have a home yet. Your business has a personality, a direction, a sense of style that sample business plans just don't have.

Let's look at a "for instance".

Here's a typical paragraph from a free business plan:

The pizza parlor will serve the residents of Sunny Hollow. It will be more successful than existing pizza parlor because the pizza will be better. We have tried out our pizza on lots of test groups, and they really like it.

Now this paragraph has good intentions. For instance,

It tells what population will be served.
It explains why it will be successful.
It notes that there has been testing on the product.

These are all important things to include in a business plan. But you can do it a whole lot better. Lets take just one of those sentences and show how you can write it. Let's take that last sentence: "We have tried out our pizza on lots of test groups, and they really like it." Here is what your page may look like:

Field Testing Our Pizza

What good is a pizza if kids don't like it? So we decided to test it with the toughest panel in town: my son's sixth grade class.

We made three pizzas. We bought three from Pizza Heaven, and another three from Round Table Pizza. We took all this to Baker Street School Cafeteria, and with the able assistance of the food service staff, we served it all steaming hot.

As with a good blind test, we simply labeled each pizza "A", "B" and "C". We invited the kids (and Ms. Johansen, of course!) to try whatever pizza they wanted and rate them.

Here are the results, as calculated by Ms. Johansen:
Round Table Pizza       B-
Heavenly Pizza            C+
OUR PIZZA                   A-

[insert a picture of the "testing panel"]

We were thrilled! (Not surprised. Just thrilled.)

Will this approach get you funding if the projections aren't right? NEVER!

But will it bring a smile to your lender? Absolutely. And smiles are worth a lot in this economic climate.

This kind of approach for a pizza parlor makes you a real person. This isn't a cold, calculated business plan from a free business plan sample. It is a real business plan from a nice person with ingenuity and humor.

So Why Even Bother With a Free Business Plan Sample?

It would be easier if we just left out the free business plan samples. They take a long time to track down and categorize. There are actually two reasons we include them: the troops would rebel, and they really do serve a useful purpose.

Everyone asks for free business plan samples. When we started writing business plans years ago, we wanted samples to go from too. We needed all the business plan help we could find!

And that brings me to the "useful" part. Reading through a few business plans to get an idea of what they cover, how they are organized, etc., is very useful. As you read through your free business plan sample, there are some things you should be looking for, such as:

Formatting that looks clean and sharp.
Color schemes that "work".
Strong descriptions of business.
Marketing plans that are persuasive.
Biographical summaries that describe a successful person.
Types of funding that have worked, especially those non-obvious ones.
Mention of sources for demographics or marketing stats.
Specific language or phrases that sound snappy.
Cover art that is interesting.
Projections that make sense.
Clues to the basis of projections.
How to handle the catastrophe contingency, an increasingly important issue.
How much money to set aside for a rainy day.
How others found ways of saving money and locating bargains.
How to use charts and graphs and maps to present your demographics.
What they do to entice the reader to read more.
What do they do if the industry is in a slump.
What makes you like one business plan, and not like another.

There is a lot more that you can discover in a free business plan sample. Whatever your special circumstances are, keep an eye out for how other people handled the issue. You will be amazed at how often you can devise a better solution for yourself.