Avoid these common pitfalls when writing your business plan

• Lengthy plans.  Even business plans intended to raise significant amounts of capital from sophisticated investors for complex products should have a target of 20 pages.  Give yourself a little latitude, but not much. 
• Hyperbole.  Strong descriptors such as incredible, fantastic, highest quality are probably off limits. Don’t make the claim that you have no competition or that nobody produces a product like yours without extensive research.
• All form no substance.  If you make it look good but don’t tell the reader anything substantive about your product, company, and industry you will be written off rather quickly.  Business plans are a mix of technical writing and marketing.  Make it look good, read well, and inform.
• Unsubstantiated claims.  Be sure to back all market, business or industry claims with statistics, documented trends, or objective opinions. 
• Rumors about the competition.  Speak objectively about your competition.  Feel free to list their prices, time in business, size, etc., but refrain from listing your own opinions, rumors, or attitudes in the marketplace.  The person reading your business plan might be a customer.
•  Non Standard financial formats.  Pay a professional to project your financials.  The experience will help you evaluate your assumptions and look much better to the audience.   You may hire an accountant, a professional business plan consultant or writer, or somebody who has managed the financial function of a business.
• Exaggerated financial projections.   If you’re like many entrepreneurs – you’re highly optimistic and even a little deluded about your first year of growth.  Put yourself in the reader’s chair. How believable are your assumptions?
• Tipo’s and missspelled wodrs.  Does this make the point?  Obviously find somebody to proof read your business plan.  Then find another.  And maybe one more.

Obviously for help in any of these areas you can turn to EPIC Business Planning.  Our team of business planning professionals can write your plan from scratch, overhaul your plan, build you a forecasting tool, or merely put the finishing touches on the business plan you have completed. 

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Email an EPIC analyst- epicanalyst@epicplanning.com for a consultation or call: 866-718-0092.

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