Do you need a business plan? Usually a short one

Bizer · 2026-10-01

Yes, you need one. No, it probably should not be forty pages.

The long, formal business plan exists mostly for readers other than you: a bank, an investor, a grant committee, a franchisor, a landlord taking a risk on a new tenant. If none of them is in the picture, the long version is a document you will write once and never open again. A short plan you keep updating is worth more than a long one that goes stale in a drawer.

The SBA itself describes two formats: a traditional plan, with the full set of sections, and a lean startup plan that fits on a page. Pick by reader.

What should the short plan contain?

One or two pages, in plain words:

• Who the customer is. A person or a business you can picture, not a demographic.
• The problem you solve for them, and what they do about it today.
• What you sell and what you charge.
• How customers will find you. The first ten customers, specifically, not "social media."
• The numbers. See below.
• The next three things you will do, with dates.

That is it. If you cannot write those six on two pages, a longer document will not help. It will just hide the gap.

Which numbers must be in it?

Five. Without these a plan is a description, not a plan.

1. Price per sale, or per customer per month.
2. Cost per sale: materials, labor, card fees, delivery. Price minus this is your margin.
3. Fixed costs per month: rent, insurance, software, your own minimum pay.
4. Break-even: fixed costs divided by margin per sale. This is how many sales a month keep the doors open.
5. Cash needed to reach break-even: what you will spend before sales cover costs, plus a cushion.

The fourth number decides whether the idea works. If break-even is 40 jobs a month and you can realistically do 25, no amount of writing fixes that. Change the price, the cost or the idea. Work out my break-even goes through the arithmetic.

When is the long plan worth writing?

When someone with money asks for it. A lender reviewing a startup loan or a loan for a new location will usually want projections and the reasoning behind them, and a grant application or franchise approval often spells out the sections it wants. In those cases the traditional plan is worth doing properly: executive summary, company description, market analysis, organisation, products, marketing and sales, the funding request, and financial projections, often three years monthly for the first year.

Two warnings about writing it.

First, a plan written for a lender is a sales document. That is fine, but do not then run the business from the optimistic version. Keep the honest numbers from the short plan as your working copy.

Second, the financial projections are where people spend the most time and where readers look first. Show your assumptions in plain sentences: "we assume 12 new customers a month by month six, because that is what our three test months averaged." A reader trusts a modest number with a reason over a big number without one.

Who can help, for free?

As of September 2026, SCORE mentors and Small Business Development Centers both review business plans at no cost. In Louisiana, the Louisiana SBDC network offers this, and a consultant there has seen what local banks actually ask for, which no template knows. If you have a draft, finish my business plan is one way to get it to done.

What does planning cost you?

Time before you have revenue, which is the most expensive time there is. The real risk is using the plan as a place to hide. Polishing a market analysis feels productive and is much more comfortable than calling a stranger to ask if they would buy. If you have spent more than two weeks on the plan and have not yet spoken to ten possible customers, stop writing and go talk to them. Then fix the plan with what they said.

The other cost is false precision. A spreadsheet with numbers to the dollar five years out looks rigorous and is mostly guesswork. Plan the first year in detail and the rest in ranges.

What is uncertain

Whether writing a plan makes a business more likely to survive is genuinely debated, and we have not found research we trust enough to settle it, so we will not quote any. What we are confident of is narrower: knowing your break-even before you spend money is cheap insurance, and an owner who updates a two-page plan every quarter catches bad news earlier than one who never wrote anything down.