At Sampa we have 4 different versions of the business plan, excluding all the variations on PowerPoint presentations. Why a company need 4 different business plans? That is easy to answer: Because each investor or investment forum have different requirements on length and content.
That is close to absurd, but it is the reality.
We just finished writing our canonical business plan. It has twelve pages, some charts, comprehensive information, yada-yada.
They have this 5-page crazy rule. Why is it crazy? Because from their site "submit...executive summary of the business plan... no longer than 5 pages".
I don't know if you ever send an executive summary to an executive with 5 pages, but if you do that he (or she) will absolutely not read it, shred it and ask you to try again.
In my book, an executive summary always has 1 (one) page only. In extreme cases it can be two pages. But that is it.
Now, the ESIF email to participants asks for the following: "You have until March 6 to submit your final business plan" and "...your plan must be no more than 5 pages...". They remove the "executive summary" part, but the problem now is that a 5-page business plan is short, very short.
If you think a business plan must describe the state of the market, the competition, the opportunity, the company, the product, the customer, the directions and goals, financials, team, marketing plan, and a few other elements, you can see how hard it is to fit everything into 5 pages.
Anyway, I believe the ESIF is not asking for an executive summary, but for a short version of the business plan, which is fine. The problem with the shorter version is that you have to trim information that might be exactly what they were using as a key selection criteria. Of course, the obvious stuff will be there, but the devil is on the details.
We've just finished building and online business planning tool that I think would solve most of your problems. 1) Business plans should be short but shouldn't lack detail - PlanHQ uses a lot of visual information so results in plans that aren't too wordy, yet still show indepth detail of your competitors, target markets, goals and financial information 2) Every stakeholder needs a different view - We suggest that most highlevel people will only ever need to go to the dashboard page to see an entire overview of your plan - if they want to dig further they can. You can also choose which parts of the plan you export to documents if you'd rather give it to them in that format.
As far as entering your plan in a competition goes, PlanHQ will definitely make you stand out. If you'd like ot try the free trial at http://www.planHQ.com, I'd be really interested in hearing how far we go to fitting your needs!
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(ESIF), which is an annual event by the 
Comments (1) for "Business Plan vs. Executive ...
December, 2007