Free business plan
One page. The forty-page version exists to impress someone; this one exists to be true, and to be rewritten when it stops being true.
Business plan
[Business name]
[Your name] · [DD/MM/YYYY]
Structure
[Sole trader / Limited company]
1. What the business does, in one sentence
[We help [who] to [outcome] by [what you actually do].]
2. Who it's for
Customer: [be specific: "people who resell clothes on Vinted and have outgrown a spreadsheet", not "small businesses"]
The problem they have today: [ ]
What they do instead right now: [ ]
3. What you charge
| What you sell | Price | Cost to deliver | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| [ ] | £[0.00] | £[0.00] | [0]% |
| [ ] | £[0.00] | £[0.00] | [0]% |
4. How people find you
[The two or three routes you'll actually work at, not a list of every channel that exists.]
5. The numbers that decide it
| Figure | Amount |
|---|---|
| Money to start (stock, kit, fees) | £[0.00] |
| Fixed costs per month | £[0.00] |
| Average profit per sale | £[0.00] |
| Sales per month to break even | [0] |
| Sales per month to pay yourself £[0.00] | [0] |
| Months of runway you have | [0] |
6. What has to be true for this to work
[The assumption the whole thing rests on. Write the one that scares you, not the safe one.]
7. The first 90 days
Days 1-30: [ ]
Days 31-60: [ ]
Days 61-90: [ ]
The one number I'll judge this by at day 90: [ ]
Why one page
The long business plan is a genre, and the genre has a purpose: it exists to be handed to a bank or a grant panel. If you need one of those, write it, but write this first, because everything in the long version is an expansion of these seven boxes.
For everyone else, length is where plans go to die. A one-page plan gets finished, gets read again in three months, and gets edited when reality disagrees with it. A forty-page plan gets abandoned at page nine and never opened again.
Section 5 is the whole document
Sections 1 to 4 are where optimism lives. Section 5 is where it's tested, and it's the part most people fill in last and fastest, which is exactly backwards.
Work out break-even properly: fixed costs per month divided by profit per sale. If your fixed costs are £400 a month and you make £18 profit on an average sale, you need 23 sales a month before you have earned a single pound for yourself. Write that number down. It reframes every other decision in the plan, and it's usually higher than the guess.
Then do it again for the number you actually need to live on. The break-even calculator does both, and the margin calculator gives you the profit-per-sale figure to feed it.
Section 6 is the one to be honest in
Every plan rests on one assumption doing the heavy lifting: that people will pay this much, that you can source at this cost, that you can find twenty of these customers a month. Name it. Then design your first 90 days to test that assumption as cheaply and quickly as possible, rather than building everything else first and finding out last.
Then keep it alive
A plan is only useful if you check it against what actually happened. Diary a date three months out to reopen this, put the real numbers next to the projected ones, and change the plan rather than defending it.
That's easier when the real numbers already exist. Sedonis tracks income, costs and profit as you go, so the day-90 review is reading a figure rather than reconstructing a year. Free to start.
Before you fill this in: sole trader or limited company, naming the business, and the full guide to writing a business plan. Starting from nothing? Begin at how to start a business in the UK.
Next steps
Do the maths
Read the guide
fills this in for you, tracks who's paid, and keeps every client and number in one private app. Free to start.
A free template for general use. It isn't financial advice, and a lender or grant panel may want their own format.