Business Plans For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Learning from Others: A Sample Business Plan

In This Chapter

• Viewing a sample business plan

• Following a business-plan template

• Learning about the tourism industry

Sometimes, you have to see something up close and personal before you really understand what it's all about. Viewing a real live business plan should get you much closer to putting your own plan down on paper.

Note

Your written business plan says something about all the important parts of your company. After all, you want to convince people – and yourself – that your company knows what it's doing. If you want to persuade people of anything, however, they have to actually sit down and read what's in front of them. So you want to be clear, concise, and to the point, and it doesn't hurt to spend some time with your prose, either.

In this chapter, we show you a sample business plan. (We changed the names and some of the numbers to protect the innocent.) By reviewing the plan in some detail, you can learn a bit about how to construct a business plan of your own, and as a bonus, you'll pick up some tips on the tourism industry. But please don't rely on any of the data; it is provided simply to illustrate the business plan and not to help you kick start your way into the tourism business.

There is no such thing as a universal business plan but you can use the table of contents below as a rough guide as to what to put into into your own business plan, as a sort of template. But every business is different as is the situation ...