business plan outline harvard

Brought to you by:

How to Write a Winning Business Plan

By: Stanley R. Rich, David E. Gumpert

A well-conceived business plan is essential to the success of an enterprise. Whether you are starting up a venture, seeking additional capital for an existing product line, or proposing a new…

• Length: 7 page(s)
• Publication Date: May 1, 1985
• Discipline: Organizational Behavior
• Product #: 85314-PDF-ENG

What's included:

• Educator Copy

$4.50 per student

degree granting course

$7.95 per student

non-degree granting course

Get access to this material, plus much more with a free Educator Account:

• Access to world-famous HBS cases
• Up to 60% off materials for your students
• Resources for teaching online
• Tips and reviews from other Educators

Already registered? Sign in

• Student Registration
• Non-Academic Registration
• Included Materials

A well-conceived business plan is essential to the success of an enterprise. Whether you are starting up a venture, seeking additional capital for an existing product line, or proposing a new activity for a corporate division, you will have to write a plan detailing your project's resource requirements, marketing decisions, financial projections, production demands, and personnel needs. The plan must reflect the viewpoint of three constituencies: the customer, the investor, and the producer. Too many business plans focus excessively on the producer.

Learning Objectives

To ensure that one's business plan includes proof that a large market exists for the proposed offering and that it addresses investors' concerns, such as when they can cash out.

May 1, 1985

Discipline:

Organizational Behavior

Harvard Business Review

85314-PDF-ENG

We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience, including personalizing content. Learn More . By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies and revised Privacy Policy .

• Crimson Careers
• For Employers
• Harvard College
• Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
• Harvard Extension School
• Premed / Pre-Health
• Families & Supporters
• Faculty & Staff
• Prospective Students
• First Generation / Low Income
• International Students
• Students of Color
• Students with Disabilities
• Undocumented Students
• Explore Interests & Make Career Decisions
• Create a Resume/CV or Cover Letter
• Expand Your Network
• Engage with Employers
• Search for a Job
• Find an Internship
• January Experiences (College)
• Find & Apply for Summer Opportunities Funding
• Prepare for an Interview
• Negotiate an Offer
• Apply to Graduate or Professional School
• Access Resources
• AI for Professional Development and Exploration
• Arts & Entertainment
• Business & Entrepreneurship
• Climate, Sustainability, Environment, Energy
• Government, Int’l Relations, Education, Law, Nonprofits
• Life Sciences & Health
• Technology & Engineering
• Still Exploring
• Talk to an Advisor

Write a Business Plan

• Share This: Share Write a Business Plan on Facebook Share Write a Business Plan on LinkedIn Share Write a Business Plan on X

Instructor: Google for Education Course

Define and organize your business’s growth by writing a business plan.

How to Write a Great Business Plan

Every seasoned investor knows that detailed financial projections for a new company are an act of imagination. Nevertheless, most business plans pour far too much ink on the numbers—and far too little on the information that really matters. Why?

In an article in the Harvard Business Review , HBS Professor William Sahlman suggests that a great business plan is one that focuses on a series of questions. These questions relate to the four factors critical to the success of every new venture: the people, the opportunity, the context, and the possibilities for both risk and reward.

The questions about people revolve around three issues: What do they know? Whom do they know? and How well are they known? As for opportunity, the plan should focus on two questions: Is the market for the venture's product or service large or rapidly growing (or preferably both)? and Is the industry structurally attractive?

Then, in addition to demonstrating an understanding of the context in which their venture will operate, entrepreneurs should make clear how they will respond when that context inevitably changes. Finally, the plan should look unflinchingly at the risks the new venture faces, giving would-be backers a realistic idea of what magnitude of reward they can expect and when they can expect it.

A great business plan is not easy to compose, Sahlman acknowledges, largely because most entrepreneurs are wild-eyed optimists. But one that asks the right questions is a powerful tool. A better deal, not to mention a better shot at success, awaits entrepreneurs who use it.

Based on an article "How to Write a Great Business Plan" by William A. Sahlman in the Harvard Business Review , July-August 1997.

[ Order the full article ]

The Opportunity of a Lifetime—or Is It?

Nine Questions About the Business Every Business Plan Should Answer

• Who is the new venture's customer?
• How does the customer make decisions about buying this product or service?
• To what degree is the product or service a compelling purchase for the customer?
• How will the product or service be priced?
• How will the venture reach all the identified customer segments?
• How much does it cost (in time and resources) to acquire a customer?
• How much does it cost to produce and deliver the product or service?
• How much does it cost to support a customer?
• How easy is it to retain a customer?

Who are These People, Anyway?

Fourteen "Personal" Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer

• Where are the founders from?
• Where have they been educated?
• Where have they worked — and for whom?
• What have they accomplished — professionally and personally — in the past?
• What is their reputation within the business community?
• What experience do they have that is directly relevant to the opportunity they are pursuing?
• What skills, abilities, and knowledge do they have?
• How realistic are they about the venture's chances for success and the tribulations it will face?
• Who else needs to be on the team?
• Are they prepared to recruit high-quality people?
• How will they respond to adversity?
• Do they have the mettle to make the inevitable hard choices that have to be made?
• How committed are they to this venture?
• What are their motivations?

Business Strategy

Start thinking like the top strategists with this course from Harvard Business School (HBS) Online.

Associated Schools

Harvard Business School

What you'll learn.

Assess business opportunities through the lens of value creation

Apply the value stick, a research-based framework for strategy formulation, to key strategic decisions that companies face today

Master the language and tools of business strategy to contribute meaningfully to strategic conversations and your team’s success

Create value for customers, employees, and suppliers, often in surprising ways, that rival companies will find hard to match

Build sustainable success with the help of complements and network effects

Course description

Business Strategy is an online course that enables anyone to think and act strategically. You’ll learn an effective, easy-to-grasp framework that some of the world’s best companies use to create value and achieve outstanding financial performance.

Instructors

Felix Oberholzer-Gee

You may also like.

Creative Thinking: Innovative Solutions to Complex Challenges

Learn how to grow a culture of creativity to innovate competitive solutions.

Strengthening Business Relationships: Creating Strategic Alliances and Building Trust

Foster innovation and creativity by learning new ways to stimulate effective relationships and build powerful alliances.

Designing and Executing Corporate Revitalization

Confront major corporate challenges with confidence. Set a strategic direction and lead a transformation that will revitalize your company.

Please sign in

You need to log in to use the bookmarking feature.

• Baker Library
• Special Collections
• Fast Answers
• All Services
• Plan Your Visit
• Working Knowledge
• Academic Programs
• Faculty & Research
• Harvard Business Review
• Initiatives
• Map / Directions

How to Structure a Business Plan

Resources and advice to help you write a business plan.

Author/Editor (By:)

Contributor, corporate author, related organizations, citation type.

Business Plans

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Creating a Post-Covid Business Plan

• Dev Patnaik,
• Michelle Loret de Mola,
• Brady Bates

Organizations need to understand how the pandemic is changing behaviors and habits.

To plan for a post-pandemic world, businesses must understand what your stakeholders’ behaviors will look like after the pandemic. Some behaviors will return to their pre-crisis state; others will be transformed; and others will disappear entirely. Drawing on research into habit formation, technology adoption and behavioral economics, the authors offer a framework to help companies make reasonable predictions on what happens next.

Right now, every company in the world is facing the same question: What’s going to happen when the pandemic is over? Grocery stores and consumer packaged goods manufacturers have experienced an unexpected boost in sales: Will that growth sustain? Hotels and airlines have experienced unprecedented drops in demand: Will their business ever come back? Movie studios, video game producers, and theaters need to envision how the pandemic will permanently affect entertainment habits. When the pandemic is over, many companies will find that their business model has been disrupted in fundamental ways.

• Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates . Dev is a frequent keynote speaker at major forums, and his writing has appeared in BusinessWeek , Forbes , Fast Company , and many others. He is the author of the book Wired to Care , named one of the best books of the year by both Fast Company and BusinessWeek . Malcolm Gladwell called Wired to Care “just what we need for the lean years ahead.” When not at Jump, Dev is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he teaches a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design, and business strategy to discover insights about people and create new products and services.​​
• Michelle Loret de Mola is a director of strategy at Jump Associates . Michelle is an expert at bringing together clear strategic direction and compelling experiences to drive change, and she advises future-focused leaders across industries. She has worked with a major financial institution to define the future of finance, partnered with a Fortune 500 consumer goods company to develop a sustainability strategy, and helped a leading retailer define its five-year marketing strategy. If you want to learn more about Jump and what we’re doing to help companies figure out what’s next, please connect with us.
• Brady Bates brings together rigorous bottom-line focus and bold creativity to help his clients thrive in uncertain times. Brady helped architect America’s fastest growing loyalty program for a Fortune 50 retailer, supported the U.S. government in establishing innovation practices for farmers across the country, and envisioned the future of finance for a $50 billion banking institution. Prior to Jump, Brady was an analyst in Deloitte’s Strategy & Operations practice, where he worked with leading health care and financial services clients. In addition to business administration, Brady studied painting and artistic expression, spending time to hone his skills in Perugia, Italy.

Partner Center

Trying to devise a structure for your essay can be one of the most difficult parts of the writing process. Making a detailed outline before you begin writing is a good way to make sure your ideas come across in a clear and logical order. A good outline will also save you time in the revision process, reducing the possibility that your ideas will need to be rearranged once you've written them.

The First Steps

Before you can begin outlining, you need to have a sense of what you will argue in the essay. From your analysis and close readings of primary and/or secondary sources you should have notes, ideas, and possible quotes to cite as evidence. Let's say you are writing about the 1999 Republican Primary and you want to prove that each candidate's financial resources were the most important element in the race. At this point, your notes probably lack much coherent order. Most likely, your ideas are still in the order in which they occurred to you; your notes and possible quotes probably still adhere to the chronology of the sources you've examined. Your goal is to rearrange your ideas, notes, and quotes—the raw material of your essay—into an order that best supports your argument, not the arguments you've read in other people's works. To do this, you have to group your notes into categories and then arrange these categories in a logical order.

Generalizing

The first step is to look over each individual piece of information that you've written and assign it to a general category. Ask yourself, "If I were to file this in a database, what would I file it under?" If, using the example of the Republican Primary, you wrote down an observation about John McCain's views on health care, you might list it under the general category of  "Health care policy." As you go through your notes, try to reuse categories whenever possible. Your goal is to reduce your notes to no more than a page of category listings.

Now examine your category headings. Do any seem repetitive? Do any go together? "McCain's expenditure on ads" and "Bush's expenditure on ads," while not exactly repetitive, could easily combine into a more general category like "Candidates' expenditures on ads." Also, keep an eye out for categories that no longer seem to relate to your argument. Individual pieces of information that at first seemed important can begin to appear irrelevant when grouped into a general category.

Now it's time to generalize again. Examine all your categories and look for common themes. Go through each category and ask yourself, "If I were to place this piece of information in a file cabinet, what would I label that cabinet?" Again, try to reuse labels as often as possible: "Health Care," "Foreign Policy," and "Immigration" can all be contained under "Policy Initiatives." Make these larger categories as general as possible so that there are no more than three or four for a 7-10 page paper.

With your notes grouped into generalized categories, the process of ordering them should be easier. To begin, look at your most general categories. With your thesis in mind, try to find a way that the labels might be arranged in a sentence or two that supports your argument. Let's say your thesis is that financial resources played the most important role in the 1999 Republican Primary. Your four most general categories are "Policy Initiatives," "Financial Resources," "Voters' Concerns," and "Voters' Loyalty." You might come up with the following sentence: ÒAlthough McCain's policy initiatives were closest to the voters' concerns, Bush's financial resources won the voters' loyalty.Ó This sentence should reveal the order of your most general categories. You will begin with an examination of McCain's and Bush's views on important issues and compare them to the voters' top concerns. Then you'll look at both candidates' financial resources and show how Bush could win voters' loyalty through effective use of his resources, despite his less popular policy ideas.

With your most general categories in order, you now must order the smaller categories. To do so, arrange each smaller category into a sentence or two that will support the more general sentence you've just devised. Under the category of "Financial Resources," for instance, you might have the smaller categories of "Ad Expenditure," "Campaign Contributions" and "Fundraising." A sentence that supports your general argument might read: "Bush's early emphasis on fundraising led to greater campaign contributions, allowing him to have a greater ad expenditure than McCain."

The final step of the outlining process is to repeat this procedure on the smallest level, with the original notes that you took for your essay. To order what probably was an unwieldy and disorganized set of information at the beginning of this process, you need now only think of a sentence or two to support your general argument. Under the category "Fundraising," for example, you might have quotes about each candidate's estimation of its importance, statistics about the amount of time each candidate spent fundraising, and an idea about how the importance of fundraising never can be overestimated. Sentences to support your general argument might read: "No candidate has ever raised too much money [your idea]. While both McCain and Bush acknowledged the importance of fundraising [your quotes], the numbers clearly point to Bush as the superior fundraiser [your statistics]." The arrangement of your ideas, quotes, and statistics now should come naturally.

Putting It All Together

With these sentences, you have essentially constructed an outline for your essay. The most general ideas, which you organized in your first sentence, constitute the essay's sections. They follow the order in which you placed them in your sentence. The order of the smaller categories within each larger category (determined by your secondary sentences) indicates the order of the paragraphs within each section. Finally, your last set of sentences about your specific notes should show the order of the sentences within each paragraph. An outline for the essay about the 1999 Republican Primary (showing only the sections worked out here) would look something like this:

I. POLICY INITIATIVES

II.  VOTERS' CONCERNS

III.  FINANCIAL RESOURCES

            A.  Fundraising

                        a.  Original Idea

                        b.  McCain Quote/Bush Quote

                        c.  McCain Statistics/Bush Statistics

            B.  Campaign Contributions

            C.  Ad Expenditure

IV.  VOTERS' LOYALTY

Copyright 2000, David Kornhaber, for the Writing Center at Harvard University