Business Plans Made Easy: Necessary Information to Build a Business Plan

We need to know why this deal is happening now. Why is the seller selling or why is the buyer buying? That's crucial to some of the things that we need to know. We also need to know how the business makes money. There are several industries that already know how they make money, but just fill in the details. Like with hotels, what is your average daily rate? What seasonality? Help us with that. We can also look at the previous financials and help discern some of that as well. But the documentation that we're looking for includes, in the case of an acquisition, if there's a business broker, we would love to see that the seller has provided financials. Those are things that we want to see.

If there's a pitch deck, we would love to see that as well for our clients that we work with. We just want to see the same documentation that the bank is going to want to see. From there, we formulate our financial projections with the written assumptions. Like I was saying before, if it's a company where we don't know, tell us how you're making money, tell us what you charge, things like that. That helps us build out the revenue side of the financials. We have a lot of institutional data. We've been doing this for 10 years now. We have a lot of knowledge on what are some of the expenses and costs that are associated with a particular industry. We use a combination of what the client gives us with a little bit of know-how or the experience of our team. Plus, we also have a wealth of information from previous business plans that we've done too.