Bizstartup.ie - NewsA winning business-plan formula

A large emphasis of the GEP, which is run at the Rubicon Centre at Cork Institute of Technology, is the development of a comprehensive business plan at a high level.

“I had experience of writing business plans from my years working in the shellfish industry, but I didn’t realise how low level they were, although they were still successful,” says O’Neill.

“I have seen four- or five-page plans that are very good. Our plan was 40 pages including annexes. The main thing I would say is your executive summary is very important. Any investor will tend to read it first and if it doesn’t catch their eye they’ll put it in the bin. Your plan has to be like a good book, flowing well to hold people’s attention right through. You have to have pertinent information and a good set of figures that make sense, but you also have to bring people to the stage of looking at them.”

The structure of the business plan

O’Neill looked at various templates and took the best of three or four that made sense to him when deciding on the structure of his plan.

“I like working with figures and am reasonably good with projections so I started from there and worked backwards. The financial model has to work before you can do anything.”

He then worked through various headings. “It’s about putting a reality spin on what you’ve developed, stating what you need to do, but pointing out what you have to do it with. In the back of your mind have your time scale, the problems you have and how you intend to overcome them.”

O’Neill started with a basic bullet-point introduction and once he had 25 pages written, used that to write the executive summary.

“Whether it’s a bank, Enterprise Eoard or Enterprise Ireland, they will want to see how your thought process is developed. I believe a business plan is a document that’s always changing. I would refer to it on a regular basis and update it every six months. It should provide a realistic interpretation of your business for the year to 18 months ahead. Once you get outside 18 months there is more room for error.”

The story of how Irish Atlantic Salt was set up can be found here.