Business plan competition templates

Screening Round The Screening Round takes place online, and is the first major hurdle for students participating in the Business Plan Competition. Student teams submit their business plan executive summaries online. Over the course of a weekend, each business plan executive summary is read and scored by eight to ten judges who are encouraged to provide written feedback for students. After the Screening Round, an announcement of teams advancing to the Investment Round is sent via email.

Get a professional business plan template at no cost. Any funder worth his or her salt wants to see it right off the bat. Moreover though, a solid business plan is a living document that will continue to guide your efforts as your business grows.

A lot of those mistakes most of them, in fact are the result of poor planning. Bad location, a marginal niche, having no specific user in mind, raising too much or too little money--all of these issues can be prevented or at least mitigated with good planning.

Creating your business plan is more than just getting your ideas down on paper for potential funders to see. It might even lead you to kill off aspects of your business before investing too much time or money in them. Pretty much everything on it can be customized. Check out these comprehensive business plan templates you can download for free to get you started: Its template, available as a PDF or Word download, asks a whopping questions and is generic enough to customize for most types of businesses.

The Refining the Plan resource that comes with it is helpful, especially if this is your first crack at writing a business plan. Some funders are going to want to see a lot of detail, but you can provide that in appendices.

It walks you through getting started, marketing, product, competitive analysis, SWOT, and more, with a window below the input fields to show you the plan as you work away at it. It contains 10 broad sections, including market analysis, management and organization, etc.

A second download on the same page is an Excel file to help with your financial projections. Business Plan Template and Guide Global financial services firm vFinance offers a basic, page business plan template to download from its website--one the company says has been downloaded more than a quarter of a million times.

VFinance is the creator of the massive Venture Capital Directory and has tailored the plan to appeal to funders. Each one also contains a marketing plan and executive summary template. Kudos to Invoiceberry for figuring out this effective lead-gen tactic too! On the site, you can download each of the 15 business plan sections individually as Word documents, or grab all 15 together in one doc.

These plans are tailored to meet your financing requirements in your state, which is a huge bonus for those seeking funding through banks. These articles are editorially independent - that means editors and reporters research and write on these products free of any influence of any marketing or sales departments.

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The opinions expressed here by Inc.To use your business plan to grow 30% faster than the competition, you need to track your actual results - the sales that you get and the expenses that you incur - against the goals that you set out for yourself in your plan.

To use your business plan to grow 30% faster than the competition, you need to track your actual results - the sales that you get and the expenses that you incur - against the goals that you set out for . In my experience, a business plan is not always the long, complex and scary document you think it is.

Depending on your target audience (banks, investors, business plan competition), a business plan can be as simple or complex as you want it. The list below covers a wide range of businesses.

If you'd rather do a business plan presentation than a Word doc, you can download one of Microsoft Office's half a dozen or so PowerPoint templates for just that purpose.

Business Plan: Free Excel Templates Some of the Excel spreadsheets include a Balance Sheet, Break-even Analysis, Cash Flow, Competitive Analysis, General Demographic Profile, Personal Financial Statement, Profit and Loss Projections, and Sales Forecast.

A great business plan template will also provide instructions for each step of your plan and show you what an investor-ready and SBA-approved business plan should look like.

There are tons of free business plan templates available (including the one you can download right here on this page).