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Just released!! Get your copy of 'Successful Business Plans' from BPS' Jane Khedair and Michael Anderson, available on Amazon price of £8.99

A business plan is essential for any business, new or established. But where do you start? Why do you need to include? This book takes you step-by-step through how and why to write a business plan. It uses practical techniques and everyday examples to ensure your business plan gets the results you want; whether it's start-up funding, strategic insight or a recovery plan.

From the Author Jane Khedair
"I sat on the adversarial side of a City analyst's desk throughout the 1990s, and it came as no surprise to those who knew me that a move away from the daily drudge of the corporate world to one of running my own business represented a more appealing option. What better way of making use of invaluable first-hand experience of evaluating, scoring and re-writing business plans than to establish a dedicated support service for people wishing to start, grow or rescue a business? Better this than to allow budding entrepreneurs like you to continue like lambs to the slaughter, facing negativity and rejection at each iteration of your business plan as you approach and are eliminated by yet another audience.

Some 17 years later and indebted to the support that I have enjoyed from both London Business School and my fellow directors, I am delighted and excited to have been invited to share our wisdom, knowledge and experience - good and bad - with you. I hope you are able to learn as much as we have, albeit somewhat more speedily, to ensure that your business plan secures you a fast-track route to success without too many painful and expensive lessons along the way.

Take your family, friends and only those who you wholly trust along a business plan journey that you can be sure you'll never forget.

Michael Anderson
After trading commodities and financial futures in the City for 5 years, I bought a specialist printing business and ran it for 12 years before selling up and spending a year at London Business School on the Sloan Masters programme - the theory following the practice as some might say. A year later I became Chief Executive of a cutting edge e-learning business, which raised over £3 million of venture capital, and subsequently became a Director of Business Plan Services Ltd. BPS is the definitive resource for business planning in the UK, seeing hundreds of business plans each year and helping entrepreneurs to improve them.

During all this activity, I started to dip my toe in the water as a business angel, i.e. someone who invests money for a minority share in other people's businesses. It has been my great good fortune in angel investment to have defied the miserable statistics and make a reasonable return on time and money spent. There have been ups and downs, the downs generally coming for extended periods before the ups. In this book, I have tried to capture the key points which have contributed to the success I have been fortunate enough to enjoy. It is my hope that reading this book will provide you with a short-cut to emulating that success, in part by enabling you to write the perfect business plan.

I have learned to accept the fact that it is especially rare for any business plan to reflect reality even 6-12 months after it has been written. We cannot foresee the future. The most we can hope for is that the underlying purpose, the vision for the business, remains the same even if the smart entrepreneur is flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. My most successful investments have been as a result of meeting outstanding entrepreneurs with a clear vision, and I intend to demonstrate in this book that a great business plan can build on that starting point.
Over the last 23 years, I have looked at businesses and business plans as an entrepreneur, as a manager, as an academic and as an investor. With the benefit of this unusual perspective, I have come to understand that anyone can write a business plan but that there is a knack to writing a successful one, which grabs the reader's attention and adds value to the business; equally, there are many pitfalls in business plan writing, which lead to the reader losing interest very quickly. In this book I have tried to marry the needs of the business plan writer and the business plan reader whatever the objective of the plan may be. Most often this is raising finance, but it is not necessarily so.

I have been delivering a regular monthly workshop at The British Library to help guide entrepreneurs in the art - for it certainly is an art rather than a science - of how to write a business plan. The wonder which greets me from so many in the audience makes me think that perhaps this is more of a dark art than I thought. I make no pretence that this book can cover all types of business plan. Specific business concerns need to be addressed differently, but my hope is that this book addresses the individuality of the audience as widely as possible whilst remaining generic in its nature. For those who feel that their issues have not been met, Business Plan Services would be happy to hear from you why your business is so different from the norm. My intention is to address a broad spectrum of entrepreneurs, who are mesmerised by the excess of advice on business plans and who seek only a simple layman's guide to the principles of business plan writing.

Before her untimely death Dame Anita Roddick of Body Shop fame wrote an article entitled "Don't get a business degree, get angry" and posted it on the British Library website under the title "Why I'm glad I never went to business school". She was, of course, right that so much that is good and necessary in entrepreneurialism comes in the category of inspiration and determination, but this book is designed to demonstrate that discipline and planning grafted onto raw passion give an entrepreneur an even greater chance of success.

We live in uncertain times, and the pace of change is likely to keep accelerating regardless of whether the wider economy improves or declines. I have tried to set out some guidelines and rules to help the budding entrepreneur to steer a path to success whatever the economic conditions may be."