Most business plans are written for somebody else — a bank, a landlord, a funding application — and once that person has read it, the document goes in a drawer. That is a shame, because the useful part of planning is not the document. It is being made to answer questions you have been avoiding.

Here is what to put in a plan so it is worth opening again in six months.

Start with who you are for

A plan that describes what you sell tells the reader very little. A plan that describes who has the problem you solve tells them almost everything. Be specific enough that you could name three real people who fit the description.

A useful format is: for [customer] who [need], [your business] is a [product or service] that will [benefit]. If you cannot fill that in without vague words, that is the work to do first.

Be honest about the competition

Every business has competitors. If you cannot name any, you have either defined your market too narrowly or you have not looked. Listing them is not admitting weakness — it is the only way to work out what you genuinely do differently.

Worth asking of each one: what do they do better than you, and what do you do better than them? A plan that answers only the second question is marketing, not planning.

Write goals you could argue about

“Grow the business” is not a goal. “Increase sales by 20 per cent in the next twelve months” is, because someone could reasonably say I do not think you can. That is what makes it useful.

For each goal, two questions worth answering:

• What will it cost to achieve, and when will that money go out?
• What extra sales will it bring in, and when will they arrive?

Goals without those two answers are aspirations. With them, they become something your forecast can be tested against.

Make the numbers connect to the words

This is where most plans fall apart. The written section says you will hire a salesperson in month seven; the forecast spreads the same salary evenly across all twelve months. The plan says you will spend on marketing to drive growth; the revenue line grows anyway, whether or not the spending happens.

A plan is only worth revisiting if the numbers follow from the decisions. When you change your mind about a hire, the cashflow should change with it.

Look at cash, not just profit

Profitable businesses run out of money. It happens when the costs arrive before the revenue does — stock bought in advance, a hire made before the sales they will generate, tax due in a lump.

The question is not only “will this be profitable?” but “will I have the money in the bank in month four?”

A twelve-month cashflow forecast answers the second question. It is the single most useful page in any plan, and the one most often missing.

Keep it short enough to reread

Nobody rereads forty pages. If the plan is short enough to look over in fifteen minutes, you might actually check it against reality every quarter — which is the only thing that makes planning worth doing at all.