If you have never used your head to write a business plan or a marketing plan, you are not alone.
If you have scarcely thought about the intelligence that goes into a strategic document – the ideas and facts, the words and numbers – where they come from, how to organize and present them, you are not alone.
Until one needs financing to leverage opportunity, relatively few entrepreneurs, unless one is an MBA, use their heads in this way -- and now, even such an one is not alone.
At your service: Plan A Business PlanWorks, aka “TwoHeads”
Its MultTiered Intelligence Wizard guides and informs every aspect of your plan – with information and tools that help you use your head to do the following:
Clarify your vision and state your mission. Define your market opportunity, and project near-, mid- and long-term targets. Position your marketing concept for customer acceptance and competitive advantage. Quantify and qualify your financial assumptions. Prioritize your goals and objectives. Anticipate cash needs and sources. Define your management, marketing, and financial strengths, challenges, and strategies. Schedule rollout of your plan and returns to lenders, investors, strategic partners, owners.
On the Wizard’s Strategies tier, you choose modules containing the basic information content – aka “context” – for the type of plan you want to do. The context is fully interactive.
As you read it, click on buttons, icons, and infralinks in the context -- to open tiers of personalizing options and examples, which you may select or model and then insert into the context – as well as explications, pointers and tips. Integrated editing features – on the options and context tiers – allow you to personalize text, tables and charts, add, modify, delete, and so forth.
The end result of using these interactive features is: a comprehensive and comprehensible strategic document which you have reason to believe will take your forward – whether you have ever used your head in this way or not.
The tone of the document is straight from the shoulder of your company’s head man or woman – confident but not cocky, professional but not stuffy. (A context-sensitive glossary explains all buzzwords.) Since the text is also completely flexible, you may make it as stuffy or cocky or as you like.
The financial assumptions tables – modules on the Financials tier – give you information on which to base your input for each item in every table that you use. This handy feature informs your sales, costs, profits, cash flow and all other financial assumptions. Gauges help you do what-if scenarios. Detailed schedules and graphs are automatically generated, and summary reports are inserted into the document on the Strategies tier.
Among other useful tools, there are both long and short executive summary modules, and a title page template. The built-in printing feature lets you order the modules you want to publish, and automatically numbers the pages and generates a table of contents page. (All printable text is pre-formatted for your convenience, but font control and other formatting tools are available on the toolbar. There is also a spell checker.)
Your head may be as full of information as a business school diploma, or as empty as a pre-startup’s bank account, and you’ll still find “TwoHeads” better than one – if only to make doubly sure that the one on your shoulders is as wise as it thought it was.
