When writing the business plan for your hair salon, entrepreneurs tend to make a number of mistakes that turn off readers, especially those who have a number of plans on their desk to consider.
 
Too Much Detail
 
There is such a thing as too much detail in a business plan. While the plan must cover its bases completely, including company description, industry, customer, and competitor analysis, marketing and operations plans, management team, and financial plan, it only needs to be detailed enough to persuade some investors to work with you. To create a plan that is detailed enough to convince every investor may end up working for no one. If the document is this long and complicated, it can easily be set aside by professional investors who will happily pick up another business plan that is less of a headache to read.

 
Remember that a human being is reading your salon’s plan and that he or she is just interested in hearing the story of how the salon business will work and what the payoff will be for them. They don’t care about the minutiae of how you will run the business or pages and paged of detailed customer research. This type of detail might be appropriate for an appendix, which is considered optional for readers to peruse, but the body of the plan must get to the heart of the matter by simply fulfilling the purpose of each individual section.
 
Assuming Reader Understanding
 
At the same time, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the reader already knows recent industry trends in hair salons or is familiar with your key competitors. You must show what you feel is important about these items in the appropriate sections of your plan, to reassure investors that you’ve done your homework and understand the situation yourself. If a statement is obvious you don’t need to dwell on it, but, nevertheless, don’t skip key steps in the logic of why your hair salon is a viable business.
 
Financials Without Notes
 
Finally, the financial plan includes many pages of pro-forma financial statements which are, in a sense, guesses about what will happen in the future. Readers will feel much better about these guesses if they understand the assumptions they are based on. Explain these assumptions in notes that accompany the financials. Without these explanations, the reader will make his or her own assumption – that you simply pulled numbers out of the air that sounded good and tried to pass it off as financials projections. Even if readers disagree with some of your assumptions, it is better that they know what they are than them writing you off in this way. Disagreements with readers can lead to valuable further discussion and maybe can help you strengthen your plan further in the end.