6 Resources for Free Business Plan Templates

Planning a new business can be both exciting and overwhelming - and it can be tricky and challenging when you are starting a business. Whether you are writing a business plan for any company, business expansion or any other venture capital - you will get a lot of options for free templates. Basically, creating your business plan is more than getting different ideas and putting them together on a paper for potential funders to observe. It’s an exploratory process to evaluate your options and discover new opportunities.

Designing a business plan can seem like a huge task, especially if you’re starting a business for the first time without any financial background. That doesn’t mean you have to hunt out Word and start planning the business from scratch. The template comes in handy here as you don’t have to dig deeply related to any task as it provides a proven structure for your plan. Then what are you waiting for? Let’s check out some comprehensive business plan templates that you can use for free to get started.

What is a Business Plan and why should you build one ?

In simple words, a business plan is a document designed to help in streamlining your ability and which describes the company’s goals, operations, marketing objectives, and financial records. Both startups and established companies use business plans. It handles the structure for focusing on filling in the blanks and initializing the key aspects of your business. A good template for the business plan includes everything right from the start - a complete outline, table of contents, cover page, disclaimer for legal points, and easy instructions. 

There are a few key points to tell why it is worth starting your business journey with a business plan template :

Also, the structured format of business plans is quite intuitive and it helps in bringing and implementing the best of our ideas. It mainly consists of the following sections :

Once you have your plan’s structure for your business in place, you’ll need to add the contents to the skeleton but how will you write a business plan for your startup that can put you in the position of success? This is where you need the resources to create your own business plan. Let’s take a look at some of them : 

Score

The score is a non-profit American organization that serves as a marketplace to help entrepreneurs volunteer their companies off the ground for growth and success. The platform provides dedicated services to mentor the business through various on-demand webinars and courses on business strategies to finance and management. Its template is available in a different formats as PDF or word for download and is generic for customization of various businesses. And most importantly, the refining plan resource that comes with it is quite helpful in case you are writing a business plan for the first time. Apart from that, it offers a free startup library including practical business-building resources.

SBA or US Small Business Association

SBA’s organization has been around since 1953 and was established to help small business owners and entrepreneurs effectively to build their businesses properly. The template for SBA is available to be filled out online and then downloaded as a PDF. The template can be modified later leaving no worries about having everything ready the first time. The Small Business Association’s section Create Your Own Business Plan present on its website is an excellent place to start while drafting a business plan. And this free resource will not only walk you through each and every section but also help with how to write and draft the template for your business. Even when it is broken into sections, it is a long document that produces a professional looking useful business plan. This comes in handy and is quite helpful if your idea is not fully fleshed out and you know the t-do task or homework. Not only this, but SBA also provides customers with financial assistance and funding programs that can bear loans, find investors, use various security bonds, and so on.

Bplans

Bplans offers startups and business owners the to enhance their businesses. It contains a vast number of over 500 free business plan templates that you can download for traditional plan usage and it also provides the user with various tools and interactive calculators for managing the business more efficiently. It is a phenomenal resource for startups as it offers quite informative blog articles to help you get started and raise funds for your business. The outline of the bplans template contains different sections and there is full gain access to instructions for each section.

Startups.com

Startups.com is one of the world’s largest launch platforms for startups, which provides informative education and tools to walk founders through the entire startup process. This includes resources mainly on education, business planning, mentorship, customer acquisition, funding, and staffing. Apart from this, the company has its own library where you can find playbooks, stories of different founders, and also expert pieces of advice. 

Futurpreneur

Futurpreneur is a non-profit organization that provides entrepreneurs with mentoring, support, and finances. It provides a library that has been designed to simplify the business planning process. Not only does the tool help you customize the business plan, but also there are more than 3000 volunteer mentors who give startup advice and help your business grow. Futurpreneur also offers online resources with tools, different articles, and quite interactive business plan writers apart from just mentoring and coaching.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is another resource that offers a rich set of reports, workflows, views, or dashboards to keep track of and plan your business. It provides a simple business plan template which is quite convenient and easy to implement. This type of template lays out each element of a traditional business plan and assists you to build your own. Hence, it provides space to add financial information for startups who are seeking funding. Moreover, you can use and customize this simple business plan template effectively to fit the needs of organizations of any size.

Conclusion

Starting a business comes with lots of challenges but the fact is, you can access the free resources online based on your requirements. These resources will not help in grooming your business plan but will also support the initial stage of your business. So, empower your employees to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt those changes as needed. When the teams have clarity about how one should ease into the work getting done, there’s no way of telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.