Write a business plan a bank officer would actually read

The situation

Kamran wants to open a small printing and photocopy shop near a university in Faisalabad and needs a loan of PKR 1.5 million. The bank has asked for a business plan. He has seen templates of forty pages full of national statistics and does not know where to start.

Write a short, honest plan for a real reader, built on numbers you can defend, that someone can understand in one read.

What you'll be able to show

• Write for a specific reader and say what the business does in one sentence
• Size the market from something real, not a share of a national figure
• Build a forecast with the assumption written beside every number
• Name the biggest risk in the plan instead of hiding it

What you need

• A word processor and a spreadsheet
• Your own observation of a real location, or an invented one described in detail

Tasks

1. 1The five-page version first

   Write a five-page plan for yourself: what the business does, who buys, how it earns, what it costs to start, and what could go wrong. Open with one sentence that says what the business does.
   A correct result: A five-page draft whose first sentence a stranger could repeat back.

2. 2Size the market from the ground

   Estimate demand from something you can observe or count: students on the campus, hours the shop is open, how many copies a student needs a week, and the nearest competitors. Show the arithmetic.
   A correct result: A market estimate built from local counts, with every step shown.

3. 3The numbers with their reasons

   Build a twelve-month forecast: start-up costs, monthly fixed costs, expected sales and the month the shop breaks even. Write the assumption beside every number.
   A correct result: A forecast where every figure has a written assumption and the break-even month is stated.

4. 4The loan question

   Show how the PKR 1.5 million would be spent, line by line, and how the monthly repayment fits inside the forecast's cash flow.
   A correct result: A use-of-funds table and a repayment line inside the cash flow.

5. 5Name the worry

   Write the one thing that worries you most about this plan, inside the plan, with what you would do if it happened.
   A correct result: A clearly named main risk and a response to it.

6. 6Test it on a reader

   Give the plan to someone who has not seen it. Ask them what the business does and how it repays the loan. Fix whatever they hesitated on.
   A correct result: Their answers and the changes you made.

What to hand in

The final plan (no more than eight pages), the forecast spreadsheet with assumptions, and the record of the reader test.

How it is marked