Of course many people just start their businesses without knowledge about main steps in business planning, but problems will wait because they do not know their business well enough.

Planning is needed to grow or start a business. The main source of planning for a company is the business plan. A business plan is a document that details the strategy of business owners on how they intend to run their business. There are several objectives that should be covered in a business plan from what the company’s goals are to how many employees are going to be hired. Business plans provide a road map for where the owners want to take their businesses. It is also necessary to have if owners want to secure financing.

There are the main steps in the business planning (not only business plan’s writing but about the whole process):

1. You have an idea, unique or not much. Try to describe your idea as detailed as possible. As Einstein once said, if you can’t explain something to your grandmother, then you probably don’t understand it properly yourself. After that you will know the products or services, consumers, location of business and other main characteristic of you future business.

2. Next step – is express evaluating of your idea’s efficiency. Express or “rude” estimation, because you don’t have enough information yet. For this step you already should know about the legal structure of your business, decide which form of ownership is best for you: sole proprietorship, partnership, Limited Liability Company (LLC), corporation, nonprofit or cooperative.

3. If you have understood on previous step that your idea has any chance to be effective, so you need to go on and analyze factors which have or can have influence on its realization, such as consumers, competitors and others. So, you can get more detail information about idea – sales forecast, capital and expenses forecast (direct and fixed). And again estimate your project to check the efficiency. Write business plan yourself or with professional helping.

4. Now, when there is a clear understanding of project efficiency, you need to decide about financing. It may be your own capital or you should find loans (banks or investors), venture capital and research grants to help you get started.

5. Get a list of federal, state and local licenses and permits required for your business.

6. Make the detailed plans for your project, including investing process, plan of recruiting and maintaining your employees or handling outsourced work, marketing plan and others.

7. Start your business, but don’t forget about the regular checking up on the main values and indexes of your project to make an appropriate decision in time.