1. For a secured future: No one wants to start a business and in few months the business closes or dies due to bad decisions. You want to stay in the game for as long as you can, possibly forever. To do this, you have got a good business plan because it covers the future projections and guides you towards actualizing that dream. Am sure you got that into your head.
2. Attract and convince Investors: No funder or investor wants to put his hard earned money where it can’t be guaranteed to make profit. Even, if you are the investor, you wouldn’t want to waste your money in this kind of harsh economic conditions now in Nigeria.
3. Sustainable growth: This takes into account that the business should be available to record and maintain a good track record of increase in quality of products and service delivery as well as profit.
4. Constant funding: You should understand that if sustainable growth is to be achieved, funding must be well taken care of. Of course you are going to be providing fund but that will not be enough if sustained growth is to be reached. Interested and non interested Investors would be wooed to come in and loans must be secured from any entity of your choice. Business plan takes care of those issues beforehand.
5. Cash Flow Management and Forecast: A very important part of any business venture is the cash flow. For start-ups, the most interesting part is usually with the break-even point. That’s the point where total revenue will be equal to total cost. After that, there is bound to be growth and more inflow and outflow of cash. Business plan helps you to fix all that. To be able to manage that cool money coming into your business, you will need a good business plan.
6. Termination Strategy: A well written business plan contains a termination strategy/plan or what i call exit plan. This is a laid out method that the owner wishes to adopt to close the business or take it to another point which would no longer give him 100% control over the business. This exit could be the form of handing the business over to a successor or selling the business or even expanding the business.