Writing A Business Plan:
Sample Business Proposals. Find the Pearls Amongst the Junk (and there is a lot of junk)

There's a real knack to working with sample business proposals, like the ones you find in our business plan packages.

Rarely, rarely will you be able to take anyone else's business proposal sample and copy it. You will need to amend even the very best ones to suit your business.

Finding A Good Sample Business Proposal

The links to the left will take you to some of the best business proposals that we know of. Hundreds of different industries are covered, with lots and lots of styles and presentations.
But there is another great place you can look as well: annual reports.

Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year developing annual reports that "sell" their business to the public, to the potential investor. And that is just what you want to accomplish. You want to sell your business to a potential investor, whether it is an angel investor, a venture capitalist or your local banker. It is still a sales job, just like an annual report is a sales job.

So where do you find these wonderful epistles?

Try a local business library, or a business section of a main community or university library.

Failing that, ask a local stock broker. Or, write away to some large public companies in your field and ask them for one. By law they have to send it to you.

Sample Business Plan Proposals and You

So you've got a good sample business proposal in hand. Now what? You certainly don't want to copy it exactly. But here are some things that you can do:

1. Study the structure. What comes first? What's hidden in the middle? Read the first sentence of each paragraph to get a feeling for the flow the business presentation.

2. Look for super terminology and phrases. When a sentence or paragraph reads exceptionally well, what are the phrases that tie it together? What pieces are especially descriptive? You can use that terminology and those phrases in your own business proposal.

3. Study the layout. Look at the graphics and the use of color. Odds are pretty good that there is restrained use of color. That's not just to save on printing costs, although it does. It is also a way of using color to highlight the sections that are especially important.

4. What's in their future? All good sample business proposals will include a hint at what is to come, teasing the reader into believing that a bunch more great stuff is just over the horizon. What's in the future of your company? Is it anything comparable?

5. Most importantly, from what you know of the company, study the types of information that are actually presented. There is no law requiring that all the dirty laundry come out in an annual report, and it doesn't.

The same holds true for your business proposal. Focus on the positive, on the "mission accomplished" and the missions yet to come.

I am often asked if an entrepreneur should state up front if there have been financial difficulties in his past. I am solidly against it UNLESS it can be phrased in such a manner to demonstrate that the entrepreneur has learned a great deal from that experience.

You are writing an introduction to your company, to your idea, and to yourself. When you introduce a friend, you don't say, "Hey, by the way, Fred declared bankruptcy three years ago." Neither should you say it about yourself.