Starting up a business takes a lot of time, hard work, and patience. Businesses can bring out the best in a person. It is indeed a big challenge for novices, especially those without relevant business training, to start a business and have it doing very well. If you’re not equipped with adequate knowledge and experiences, you are most likely to falter along the way. If you consider yourself a newbie when it comes to businesses, try not to commit the petty mistakes that could cost you your entire investment. What you need is a great startup business plan and stick to it at all times. This is also necessary for seasoned businessman if they want to succeed on a new business on their first try.

Here are the ingredients of an effective startup business plan that would propel you towards success:

1. Your startup business plan should be modern.

Today’s new marketplace has no place for old strategies. What used to work before the boom of the internet will not see the light of the day at this current time. If you want your business to reach great heights, you have to think globally while starting locally.

2. Your plan should focus on your cash flow.

What is a business if it can’t provide you with the cash flow that you need to sustain it and eventually to profit from it? There’s a big difference between capital investments and profitable returns. In the first few months of your business, you should try to achieve balance between these two. After that, you must make sure that your profits are higher than your investments. It all boils down to making a startup business plan that is guided by the right business decisions.

3. You must be competent.

The marketplace has become vast – but so are your competitors. Right now, one product or service is being offered by hundreds of resellers and service providers. You have to make sure that you can compete well in the market. It must be very clearly stated in your startup business plan all the methods you ought to use so you can keep up with your competitors. Better yet, you must find ways to triumph upon them for you to enjoy a bigger market share.

4. Your startup business plan should incorporate all your skills, knowledge, trainings, and experiences.

What kind of business would thrive if the owners won’t put a special touch to it? When creating a startup business plan, be sure that you make the full use of everything you’ve got – from your assets to resources, investments to skills – and profit from them well. The more hands-on you are with your business, the better the results will be.

5. Your startup business plan should be created like a clear guide to success.

The main reason why you are writing a startup business plan in the first place is because you wanted to use it as a guide to be successful. It is then recommended that you create it with expert-like precision. You don’t want a plan that couldn’t take you to your goal. If you have to, consult with an expert so he can show you how to build the perfect plan for your specific business. If you have to be properly trained to do so and to possess the critical thinking of a businessman, go for it. All of these are very crucial to your success.

A simple business plan is all you need to keep your company moving along the success track.

Ask many entrepreneurs if they have a strategic/business plan/blueprint and they will nearly always say yes, but ask to see it and you’ll discover that it is often just a mental vision they have in their heads.

Writing a strategic blueprint is one of the single most important things that any company owner can do and yet, many small business owners never get around to doing it! Yes, they may have a dream for what they hope to achieve with their company but unless it is written down with goals, strategies and a plan of action, it’s really just a pipedream.

Planning is a critical part of ‘working on rather than in the business’. Many people with an entrepreneurial mindset have read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber and they are aware of the need to do this but still, there is resistance to doing it.

This may be because the typical entrepreneur is full of ideas and loves putting them in to action. Planning and strategizing is seen as boring or simply overwhelming. Where do you start when you’ve got such a huge vision for your burgeoning enterprise?

Sometimes the resistance to planning can be a plain old time management issue – it’s far more exciting to respond to urgent emails and phone calls, to solve problems on the shop floor and chat to important customers than to sit in the back office writing down goals. But allowing your ego to be puffed up by these urgent things rather than focusing on what’s really important can be to the detriment of your company.

Any business coach, advisor, banker or accountant will tell you that a plan is critical to your success.

A strategic blueprint gives you a sense of direction even when you’re immersed in the daily grind of running a company. It also allows you to make better decisions and, very importantly, it gives you peace of mind knowing what you need to do each day.

Any plan is better than nothing. It is better to have something written down on a piece of paper and stuck on your office wall than nothing at all.

Many of the templates on the Internet are long and complicated – but unless you are applying for finance they don’t need to be. A short simple business plan, of one page, that you actually use and refer to is far more valuable than a huge document that collects dust.

A famed book by Stephen Covey highlights one habit that makes individuals and organizations succeed – begin with the end in mind. This is a very good answer to the question “why write a business plan”? It is tempting to put up a business and have a see-what-happens-next approach towards its management, twitching things along the way and be flexible enough to the challenges of running a business. But the truth is, even though that sounds simpler than drafting an exhaustive plan in paper, it can really get complicated – fast. In fact a business without a business plan is, put bluntly, a business that is planning to fail. A business must be intentional, and nothing can facilitate this better than having a written plan of what the business is all about, its direction, its goals, and its ultimate purpose. This will serve as the glue for the stakeholders of the business, a point of agreement on how the business should be run, and the route it would take to realize its profit targets.

It is simply impossible to grow a business if there is no tangible point of reference to where the business should go. Vision, mission, objectives and values of the business are all included in the drafting of the business plan, thereby making it possible for organizations to have objective metrics of performance. It is only then changes and adjustments can be effectively implemented. You simply cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Writing a business plan is important because it allows a business to sell itself better to its customers. The business plan is a 360 profile of your business model, giving you a bird’s eye view of what you can offer to your clients. Marketing would not be as hard because the point of differentiation and the niche market you want to develop overtime can be clearly seen. You can identify your competitive advantages and then capitalize on that exhaustively. It can also bolster your positioning efforts because you understand the strengths of your services or products. You can simply develop strategies that puts you in the best spot to both retain and attract new customers.

Why write a business plan? One of the most profound answers to this question is to be able to get the right people to run the business. It is of course a well established fact that a business is as good as the people that leads it to greatness. Well, you can have the best of the best in the field, but if they do not fit in, they are doomed to fail in establishing your organization as an industry leader. A business plan can help you implement a very good human capitalization effort. This simply means you are able to identify the right person for the job and then help that person identify himself with the job, and then the business.

Many small and medium enterprises downplay the question of why write a business plan. And this is the reason why many fail to reach its growth projections. Do you want your business to run smoothly? First things first. Write a business plan!