Business Plan Template You've thought about, and now you need to document: 1. Why are you considering this business? 2. What are the skills and difference that you'll bring to your customers? 3. Why would these customers prefer your product or service? 4. What is the likely profit? 5. When do you plan to exit? 6. What's the exit strategy? Sell? Transfer to family? Franchise it? 7. How long do you have from now to the exit? 8. Your numbers need to be stable and on an exponential growth path for the last 4 years, so how many years do you have to get this start up business running efficiently? This means (Time frame to exit less 4 years) 9. What is necessary to get this running efficiently? 10. What processes will the trading operation require - Marketing, Personnel, IT, Database, Technical Processes, Inventory Management, Customer Service, Accounting, Continuous Training, etc? 11. Now the numbers - work backwards. How much profit do you want to make in Year 1. Knowing your profit margin, calculate the revenue. 12. How many sales does that revenue equate to? 13. You can extrapolate this to get to the profit you want to achieve on sale at the point of exit. 14. If you know there has to be growth, you need to decide what systems and improvements will need to occur to achieve this. 15. At what stage do you plan to move from your role as technician to entrepreneur. What steps need to be in place for that to occur?