When you eventually finish your Business Plan (including Financials, Executive Summary and Pitch Deck) you can breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Sadly however, that’s not the end – you see, these documents are living things – every time you make a change in your business strategy, direction, purpose, or indeed have a full blown “pivot” then the business plan needs to be updated.
Why update your business plan, an example:
Dawn, Bob and Michelle have come up with a great idea for a new widget, to be manufactured overseas and sold directly to consumers. The Business Plan, Pitch Deck and Financials are written on this basis.
They then discover that (a) the widget needs to be redesigned to work properly (increasing the raw material and manufacturing cost), (b) a huge distributor has approached them seeking to stock the widget and sell to consumers (major change to route to market and revenue streams) and (c) Manufacturing overseas is proving hard to control (quality and logistics) so they decide to produce it in England (increase in manufacturing costs, reduction in logistics, better quality control).
These are major changes that all need to be captured in Business Plan V2.
It will mean revising the Financials – which is bound to impact revenue and profit, which in turn might impact valuation.
Whenever you communicate with stakeholders, especially investors, the Business Plan, Pitch Deck and Financials must be the latest and correct versions. Otherwise you will be communicating a false picture.
Recommendation: Whenever you have regular meetings in your startup, make it an agenda item to discuss and confirm these important documents are up to date, and use a system of document control to ensure that when accessing a shared server hosting these documents, everyone accesses the correct version.
If you are wondering how to best update your business plan, get in touch with one of our gurus today and we can help you out!