One page business plan

A traditional business plan can take a lot of time and resources, but you don't always have to use this type for your business. The simple or one-page business plan uses a much smaller and more affordable format for the novice entrepreneur.

This type of plan is a much more simplified and concise one, which you can use as your final plan or as a first draft of a more complex one that you will progressively shape. You must keep in mind that, although it is a synthesized version of the more traditional plan, all the information required for a complete business plan must be included. It must also be specific to your company.

Questions to answer

In order for your one-page business plan to contain all the necessary information in its limited space, you must answer a number of questions that will serve as a framework for your company's specifics.

Below, I share a set of questions that you can use as a guide for your plan and sample answers. I'll use a digital promotion business for small startups as an example.

What are you going to create and how do you see your venture in 1, 3 or 5 years?

• I am going to create a digital marketing platform that promotes small businesses, especially in the area near where I live.
• In one year I predict to increase the number of clients by at least 90% and to have coverage on all social platforms.
• In three years I expect to have more than 120 clients and to have SEO specialists and Copywriters on my staff.
• In 5 years I plan to expand beyond my locality and become a marketing platform with national reach.

Why have you started this venture and what is its purpose?

I have started this particular venture as I have experience and knowledge of marketing and promotion and I want to use it to form my own business.

The main purpose of my business is to provide promotion and marketing services to small ventures that cannot do it themselves or do not have enough budget to pay a big company.

How will you check the fulfillment of your purpose?

I will use tools such as Google Analytics, Business Suite and others that will allow me to analyze the traffic to our platforms and how this translates into increased consumers and sales for my clients.

In addition, I will create a database for all my clients with their business packages and backups.

What strategy will you use to attract customers?

My business will be hosted on an online platform that controls all aspects of promotion and marketing. My niche market will be small business owners in my area such as barbershops, hair salons, gyms, tattoo parlors that require marketing services, but can't feasibly use the big promotion companies.

Since this service is usually expensive and complicated to perform, by focusing only in my area where there is no other marketing company, I can break into a virtually virgin market.

How much initial capital will you need?

In this case I will need a medium start-up capital. I need first of all the money for the creation of the online platform, the hosting server and for the designer and programmer of the site. In addition to the capital for the maintenance of the site.

In addition, I will require a certain amount of money to implement the marketing strategies of the company in order to reach as many customers as possible. At the beginning I only need at least 5 employees, so I need budget to pay their salaries. I estimate that my total start-up capital would be about twenty thousand dollars.

What are the estimated expenses?

My maintenance expenses will be mainly composed of the maintenance of the online platform, with its hosting server and other operating expenses. I will also use part of the budget to stay active in marketing and promotion for the company. And the expense for the salaries of the employees.

Of course if the flow of customers increases, the expense will increase to cushion the extra burden. I estimate that I will need at least $10k per month to keep the company operational.

What is the estimated monthly revenue?

We will take into account that each package offered to customers will be customized and tailored to the characteristics and needs of their specific business.

But I can use the average that each client will be charged between $500 and $700 per month per promotion package depending on many variables. Let's say I start with 10 clients, this could average between $5000 and $7000 per month.

Initially this will represent a loss, but my business goal is to significantly increase the number of customers and expand the quality of the packages which will allow us to increase their prices.

With this model I hope to double the number of clients in one month, and start generating profits. And by the first year I hope to have more complete and expensive promotional packages and have at least 80 regular customers.

What will be your plan of action?<