Company Overview
Business plan refers to the written documentation about the ways that a new organization is going to achieve the goals. This document lays out a detailed plan from operational, marketing and financial view point (Scarborough, 2016). Sometimes business plans are also made for existing businesses that aim to move towards a new direction. Thus, business plans are an extremely important document to present future plans of the business about how it plans to move as per their available resources and it is an essential prerequisite for investment of capitals. This report will analyze the business plans of Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. and Pioneer Consulting, which is an advertising marketing consulting firm, and present a comparative analysis of these plans. The sample business plan for Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is collected from the book ‘Entrepreneurship and Small Business’ by Schaper et al. (2014), and the business plan for Pioneer Consultancy is collected from the website Bplans.com (2018). The purpose of this report is to study the effectiveness of the two business plans in terms of readability, presentability of the information, analytical accuracy and forecasting. The comparison of the two business plans are as follows.
Two management companies have been chosen for the purpose of business plan comparison. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is a management consulting service company that aim to provide useful consulting services to the small and medium sized enterprise sector (SME) in Sydney and other cities in NSW. The proposed services include preparing business plans for the SMEs, training the employees in the small business management skills, and book sales. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is itself a very small company initially with one employee, and which wishes to recruit three or four more people gradually in the next two to three years. The company also intends to earn revenue of AUD 100,000 and a profit of AUD 2000 by the end of the current year.
Pioneer Consulting is another consulting firm, whose business plan will be reviewed and analyzed. This firm specializes in advertising marketing consulting and aim to provide valuable service to the small firms than can rarely afford to have expensive consulting services for maximizing their marketing effectiveness. The services of Pioneer Consulting include the evaluation of various marketing communication tools and select the one that suits the requirement of the client most and then combine the tools for effective marketing. This company consists of five graduates and aims to grow its revenue to USD 25,000 by the end of the current year.
This section illustrates all about the company. For instance, its mission, history and business goals are presented in this section. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. presents this information in a very precise manner under appropriate subheadings. The company puts forward the most important factors regarding the business and its history to make the organizational goals comprehensible.
On the other hand, Pioneer Consulting only presents some headings and no subheadings to present different aspects of the company. After executive summary, it directly goes to the mission statement segment, followed by keys to success, which explain the view point of the company regarding its operations. Next it makes a broad segment about the company and presents the information about company ownership and start up summary. In this segment, Pioneer gives a detailed snapshot of its start up balance sheet that contains requirements, expenses, assets, liabilities, funding, requirement for funding and investment level and capital. This creates an impression about the financial condition during the start up for the company, which forms the basis for forecasting of the revenue and profit. Next Pioneer moves to depict the services of the company in a nutshell.
Comparison of Business Plans
This is the third section of the business plan, which elaborates the marketing plans or strategies and activities of the company. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. depicts every aspect of its marketing activities under appropriate segments, such as, market research, market analysis, marketing plan, and evaluation of marketing strategies. This is a broad segment that contains the marketing activities of the company in a very detailed manner. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. lists the sources for market research, which helps the readers to understand the credibility and reliability of the data. Next, the company provides a very in-depth overview of the market analysis, which covers the analysis of the industry for the SMEs in Sydney and in other cities of NSW, seasonality, competitors, potential strategic alliances and SWOT analysis of the company. All these segments very accurately depict the overall scenario of the industry and competitive position of the company, which create the foundation for profitability of the business in the future (McKeever, 2016).
After the market analysis, the company puts forward the marketing plan in details. This segment contains an elaborate and extensive marketing plan for Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. It also contains the market segmentation, targeting and positioning strategies, placements, promotions and advertising strategies, ICT marketing and pricing policy. This segment very precisely covers the most important aspects of the marketing activity of the company, which is essential to make the reader understand the vast network of actions and strategies needed to make effective marketing. This section is all the more important as marketing heavily influences the business performance and revenue of the company and hence, it is liable to present its activities and strategies to the stakeholders (McKenzie, 2015).
On the other hand, Pioneer Consulting also presents its market analysis summary but not much detail is present in the plan. However, the company focuses on a single specific aspect, like market segmentation. Although, it gives a thorough picture of the two market segments that it caters to, and its reason, yet, it does not focus on marketing or promotional strategies. These are significant part of any business plan, as these incur a heavy cost on the company; and unsuccessful marketing strategies, that is, targeting, positioning and pricing policies, can lead to a great loss of revenue and profit of the company down the line (Mullins, 2012). Hence, it is important to put forward the detailed information about these activities to the stakeholders. Pioneer Consultancy presents the market competition scenario through a pie chart, which is beneficial in having an easy understanding about the market competition. Apart from that, Pioneer also presented a five year growth rate analysis to calculate the CAGR. Thus, this presentation of the business plan seems incomplete compared to that of the Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd.
Once again, Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. has presented an extensive overview of its operations, which includes legal and licensing requirements, management details, organizational structure and staffing, list of professional advisors, Insurance and security issues, detailed information on the business premises, equipment, ICT and critical risks or contingency plans. This section in the business plan describes the aspects of operational management which is very crucial for any company. Through this section in the business plan, the stakeholders for Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. will get a thorough knowledge about its business operations how they intend to address these aspects in the near future. For instance, how the company plans to handle any critical risk situation or contingency situation is described in the business plan. This will help the investors to have an idea about the knowledge of the officials who are managing the operations of the business (Ward, 2016).
Background of the Company
On the other hand, Pioneer Consultancy has presented only strategies and implementation summary in the segment following market analysis. This section only focuses on the competitive edge of Pioneer due to its business operations and then straight goes to illustrate its sales strategy. This section highlights sales forecast for the next 3 years, supported by tables and charts, and it is followed by management summary and personnel plan, which uncovers the payroll of the personnel. This is the cost to the company for the employees. The operation section of the business plan of Pioneer is not elaborate in comparison to that of the Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd., however, the charts and tables make the market and profit forecast scenario easily comprehensible.
This section is another very crucial section of business plan, which is of utmost interest to the stakeholders. Once again Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. has presented an in-depth description of their financial planning through basic assumptions, scientific forecasting and its analysis of breakeven point, and few important tables on sales mix forecast, cash-flow forecast, profit and loss forecast, personal expense statements, personal assets and liabilities. This section ends with implementation time table. The presentation of this plan is very clear and concise and hence, has more acceptability. All aspects of cost, such as, incomes, expenses, tax, profit distribution, loans etc. have been clearly mentioned and statistical formulations of the forecast and break even analysis have been shown so that all the stakeholders can understand the calculations.
Pioneer Consultancy directly presents the break even analysis under their financial plan, supported by a chart. Visual representation makes it easier to understand the implications; however, this plan omits many other crucial information under the financial plan, which is heighted by Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. Thus, this business plan by Pioneer is a very basic plan that covers only some aspects under the business activities of the company.
By analyzing the structure and content of the two business plans by two consulting companies, it can be said that the business plan by Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is a more comprehensive one than that by the Pioneer Consultancy. Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. has made a business plan that covers all the important aspects of the business and how the company intends to address those aspects in the future. A detailed description of all the important functions and strategies of the company is beneficial for all the stakeholders as they get an overview about the future planning and activities of the company and hence, gain trust on it (McKeever, 2016). This is also beneficial for the investors before they invest on the company.
The structure of the business plan by Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is very much organized and presented under appropriate headings and subheadings. Those are coordinated and this structure is increasing the readability of the paper. On the other hand, the plan of Pioneer Consultancy only addresses few basic things of the business operations. Although, the company has provided many charts and tables to depict the market and operation scenario, yet it fails to address all the aspects of the business operations. Moreover, the absence of proper or chronological segments of the paper is affecting the flow of understanding of the business plan of Pioneer Consultancy. Thus, the readability is affected in this case.
Regarding the relevance of the segments and topics, Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. has focused on using only the key information in a comprehensive manner so that the stakeholder can get to know every operational details and segment of the business and its plan to address those. Hence, the presentation of the information through bullet points makes it quite readable and relevant to the readers (McKeever, 2016). The systematic ordering of the topics has further added to the relevance of the documents. In case of the business plan by Pioneer Consultancy, the plan lacks the systematic approach and focus only on the some key points has reduced the relevance of the plan to the stakeholders.
However, it can be concluded that, the business plan by Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is more theoretical and lack the visual representation of the business factors, such as, market analysis, growth forecast, sales and profit forecast and breakeven analysis. To make a paper more acceptable to the stakeholders, it is essential to make it easily comprehensible through texts as well as charts, graphs and tables (Fernández-Guerrero, Revuelto-Taboada and Simón-Moya, 2012). As the business plan by Pioneer Consultancy has quite a few graphic presentations of the data and forecasts, the plan by the other business lacks it. On the other hand, Pioneer Consultancy did not focus on elaborating the detailed aspects or business activities, which reduces the acceptability of the plan to the investors and other stakeholders. Thus, it can be said that, the plan by Blueprints Business Planning Pty Ltd. is more readable, comprehensible, relevant and acceptable to the stakeholders than the plan by Pioneer Consultancy, however, the graphic presentation is also required to make the plan more acceptable.
References
Bplans.com., 2018. Pioneer Consulting: Advertising Marketing Consulting Business Plan [online]. Available at: https://www.bplans.com/advertising_marketing_consulting_business_plan/financial_plan_fc.php [Accessed on 11 Dec. 2018].
Burns, P. and Dewhurst, J. eds., 2016. Small business and entrepreneurship. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Fernández-Guerrero, R., Revuelto-Taboada, L. and Simón-Moya, V., 2012. The business plan as a project: an evaluation of its predictive capability for business success. The Service Industries Journal, 32(15), pp.2399-2420.
McKeever, M., 2016. How to write a business plan. Nolo.
McKenzie, D., 2015. Identifying and spurring high-growth entrepreneurship: experimental evidence from a business plan competition. The World Bank.
Mullins, J., 2012. The new business road test: What entrepreneurs and executives should do before writing a business plan. Pearson UK.
Scarborough, N.M., 2016. Essentials of entrepreneurship and small business management. Pearson.
Schaper, M.T., Volery, T., Weber, P.C. and Gibson, B., 2014. Entrepreneurship and small business.
Ward, J., 2016. Keeping the family business healthy: How to plan for continuing growth, profitability, and family leadership. Springer.
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