A business plan on one page
Write down who buys, what you sell, how you reach them and what it costs, on one page you will actually use.
5 min read
A fifty-page business plan is mostly written for somebody else, and mostly never read again. A one-page plan is written for you. It fits on a sheet you can pin above your desk, and it forces the decisions a long document lets you avoid.
Why one page
When a plan is long, the gaps hide between chapters. When it is one page, every empty box is a question you have not answered yet. That is the point: the page shows you what you do not know while it is still cheap to find out.
It is also the page you will come back to. In month three, when sales are slower than you hoped, you read one page and ask which line was wrong — not fifty.
The nine boxes
Fill these in, in this order. One or two lines each. If a box needs a paragraph, you have not decided yet.
| Box | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| 1. Who buys | One kind of buyer you could find tomorrow, and where they are |
| 2. Their problem | What they need, and what they use now instead of you |
| 3. What you sell | The product or service, in one sentence a customer would say |
| 4. Why you | Why they would switch: price, speed, quality, nearness, trust |
| 5. How they hear of you | The two or three ways you will reach them first |
| 6. Price and margin | What you charge, and what is left from each sale after its cost |
| 7. Running costs | What you pay every month whether you sell or not |
| 8. Starting money | What you need before the first sale, and the months before break-even |
| 9. The first test | What you will do this month to check boxes 1 to 6 are true |
Boxes 6, 7 and 8 come straight from the previous lesson. If you have not costed your first months yet, do that first — the rest of the page leans on those numbers.
Write the page in pencil, or in a file you will edit. Every box is a guess until a customer proves it, and the plan should change as they do.
Mark what you know and what you are guessing
Go back over the page and put a mark next to every line that is a guess rather than something you have seen. "Office workers will pay for a healthy lunch" is a guess. "Twelve people in my building paid for lunch last week" is a fact.
Most first plans are almost entirely guesses. That is fine. Box 9 exists to turn the most important guess into a fact, one at a time — usually starting with whether people will pay your price.
The commonest mistake is a plan where box 1 says "everyone". If you cannot name where to find ten buyers, boxes 5 and 6 are fiction, because you do not know how to reach them or what they will pay.
When you need the long version
A bank or a scheme will ask for a project report, with costs, a repayment plan and a few years of projections. The Money to start or grow course has a lesson on writing one. The one-page plan is where that report starts: every section of it is one of these boxes, written out with numbers.
Read it once a month
Put a date on the page. Once a month, read it and ask:
- Which guess turned out wrong?
- Which box changed because of what customers did?
- What is the one test for next month?
Ask the tool below to go through your page with you: describe your idea box by box, and it will point out the gaps and the guesses most worth testing first.