Easy Business Plan
Created by Dick Hall - SCORE Houston Mentor: rehall1225@aol.com

The secret to a good business plan is to always gather the facts, assumptions, goals, decisions and alternatives before attempting to write the business plan. The Business Plan Toolkit encompasses this concept and makes developing a business plan easy.

Every successful business consists of a "Good Idea and Good Resources".

  • The definition of a Good Idea is that it "must be competitive in the marketplace."
  • The definition of Good Resources is "all of the assets required to implement, operate and sustain the Idea".

The model below shows six business elements that define the Business Idea and six business elements that define the Business Resources.



These 12 elements naturally create a Business Model when placed in their logical order. They describe the topics that should be included in every business plan and create a logical and revealing view of a business and the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed business concept.

A single page Excel worksheet is used to define each business element.

Each worksheet is assessed to determine how competitive that element is as compared to the competition. That value is posted on the blank PowerPoint Business Model.

The worksheets are the "work horses" of business planning. They record very precisely the intentions of the entrepreneur for all aspects of the business for the period of the business plan.

The assessment of the competitive quality of each of the 12 common business elements provides the data to turn the blank Business Model into a revealing representation of the proposed business.

If the assessment indicates that the concept is competitive and resources are available to implement and sustain the Idea, then writing the Business Plan is simple.

Business Plan Template in Word provides a Table of Contents and suggestions for the content for each section. The suggestions indicate the worksheets that contain the source data for each section. These abbreviated worksheet data need to be expanded into good business English so that your decisions and intentions are clear to the reader/user of the plan.

Here are the resources you can download to get started.

Note: We suggest you download and save all five files. Then print and read the Instructions before proceeding. We recommend you us MS Excel worksheets and MS Word template to write your business plan but have given you an option to download them in PDF so you can fill them by hand.

  1. Instructions
  2. Worksheets      Excel       PDF
  3. Business plan model (MS PowerPoint)
  4. Business Plan Template    Word     PDF
  5. Sample Business Plan

 For questions and comments, write to Dick Hall at rehall1225@aol.com