It’s a thinking tool, not a homework assignment. Keep it to one page.
Most founders either skip the business plan entirely or spend weeks writing a 40-page document nobody reads. Both are wrong. A one-page business plan is one of the most useful exercises you can do in the first week of starting up. Not because anyone will ask for it (though some will), but because it forces you to answer the six questions that matter.
The problem. One or two sentences. Who has this problem and why does it matter? If you can’t explain the problem clearly, you’re not ready to build a solution.
Your solution. What are you building? Keep this tight. If it takes a paragraph to explain what you do, simplify it.
The market. Who are your customers, roughly how many of them exist, and what do they currently spend on solving this problem? You don’t need a McKinsey report. You need a sensible estimate you can defend out loud.
How you’ll make money. Subscription? One-off sales? Commission? Freemium? Pick one. You can change it later, but having a starting position forces useful thinking.
What you need. Money, people, tools, time. What does the next 6 to 12 months actually require? Be specific. “We need £30k to build a prototype and run three months of testing” is useful. “We need investment” is not.
Key risks. What could go wrong? What are you most uncertain about? Founders who acknowledge their risks are more credible than founders who pretend they don’t have any.
Constraints force clarity. If you can’t fit your plan on one page, you haven’t made the hard decisions yet about what matters most. A one-page plan also makes it easy to share with co-founders, advisors, or early supporters without asking them to read a novel.
More often than you think. Opening a business bank account in the UK usually requires a basic business description. Applying for Start Up Loans requires a business plan (they even provide a free template). Grant applications from Innovate UK and local councils ask for something similar. And when you start talking to investors, even informally, being able to hand over a clean one-pager shows you’ve done the thinking.
Your plan will change. That’s the point. Revisit it every month for the first six months. It takes ten minutes and keeps your thinking sharp.
What good looks like: A single A4 page, clearly laid out, that any intelligent person outside your industry could read in two minutes and understand: what the problem is, what you’re building, who it’s for, how you’ll make money, what you need, and what could go wrong.
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