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Business Planning Essay

The business plans provide guidance to the owners, investors and management at the start up entity and advances through some phases of success. The actual or prospective business owner of the entity creates a business plan as a means of providing clarification of every aspect of the business operation. A business plan is an imperative component that paints the bigger picture of how the business will operate, the different personnel necessitated, the costs that can be incurred and the potential income to be generated. Characteristically, a business plan comprises of the objectives to forecast and prepare for the growth and development of the business. Furthermore, a number of business owners create a business plan with the main objective of providing guidance to the management, which will be responsible for the everyday running of the entity and also with the main aim of encouraging investment of capital. Typically, there are five different kinds of business plan models, which comprise of start-up model, strategic model, internal model, growth plan model, and operations model. The purpose of this paper is to make a comparison and contrast of the aforementioned business plan models and providing the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Lastly, these business plan models will be compared to the business plan models contained in Microsoft Project. In delineation, the start-up business plan model comprises of the comprehensive and in-depth steps of starting up a new business. The model encompasses the different sections outlining the organization, market assessment, the projected management team, and the different kind of products or services that will be offered by the business. What is more, this business plan provides a financial analysis by utilizing spreadsheets, outlining some of the key financial aspects such as revenues, incomes, expenses and also cash flow projections. There are different advantages of this particular business...

To begin with, it makes it possible for the individuals involved in the business to undertake some financial projections, thereby facilitating the growth of their businesses. Secondly, it is simpler to make adjustments to this particular business plan model owing to the reason that such alterations do not have a significant impact to the business. However, the disadvantages of this business plan model are that it is largely applicable to small and medium sized businesses. In addition, the model can only be utilized for business forecasts for the short-term period (Cavico et al., 2014).
Internal business plans lay emphasis and target a specific...…beneficial tool for numerous types of projects ranging from marketing and building projects to manufacturing initiatives. Microsoft Project makes it possible for managers to organize themselves in the right manner and expect any kind of hiccups all through the projects (Mercer, 2017). One of the major differences is that Microsoft Project aids in the division of large projects into groups of smaller tasks, therefore making the project to be significantly easier to manage and execute. For instance, with regard to a web marketing plan, the plan of Microsoft Project would split the plan into its different elements, for instance, search engine optimization, social media marketing, redesigning of the website and its different programs. Taking this into consideration, these parts of the plan could be further categorized into smaller tasks, for instance, preparation of market research on rivaling website, attaining quotation for new website and the completion of mock designs. Another key difference of Microsoft Project models is that it is possible to enable the users to indent tasks and outdent tasks to generate a pecking order of the project as a whole and refers to as the completed set of all the tasks as the work breakdown structure (Mercer, 2017).

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References

Cavico, F. J., Orta, M., Muffler, S. C., & Mujtaba, B. G. (2014). Business plans as legally protected trade secrets under the uniform trade secrets act. Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 6(2), 42.

McKeever, M. (2016). How to write a business plan. New York: Nolo.

Mercer, E. (2018). Examples of Microsoft Project Plans. Chron. Retrieved from: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/examples-microsoft-project-plans-34336.html

Pinson, L. (2008). Anatomy of a Business Plan: A Step-by-step Guide to Building the Business and Securing Your Company's Future. aka associates.

Ristau, R. A. (2010). 21st Century Business: Intro to Business. New York: Springer.


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