Business Development Planning Made Easy

Do you need a business development plan or business continuity plan? We can help you write a business plan that builds on top of your existing business and your historic development to help you with your merger-and-acquisition, take over and growth financing wishes. A business development plan is different from a business plan in many aspects. In this article, we will explain some of the factors that go into composing a professional business development plan.

Typical fees and pricing of a business development plan are somewhat more difficult to calculate because usually there is different and more voluminous briefing material to deal with. Usually, a business development plan will in our own practice here at BrainHive consulting fall unto at least our COMPLEX category and depending on the individual business case might even have to encompass more demanding components of business planning and therefore require even more budget, in average around 2,000 USD. But read on to learn what factors exactly determines the cost of business development planning services.

Business Development Plans Compared to Normal Business Planning

These are some typical differences of a business development plan versus a business plan for a new business:

• ► There is a historic development of the company that needs to be looked at and brought into alignment with the future vision of the company. An actual bridging of business experience and business projection must be built
• ► There are annual reports and quarterly reports of the financials and the accounting which need to be included or latched onto when drafting the financial projections for the next 3 to 5 years
• ► There is usually already a larger team and all key team members need to be described and their input for the company evaluated. The chemistry for future team member needs to be commented on in the business development plan
• ► There are slight differences in the structure and the components of the business development plan and usually, a business development plan will contain a section about the past development. Depending on the reason why the business development is written a business development plan can be much longer than a normal business plan. This is also due to the fact that after some time operating there typically exists a more elaborate spectrum of products and services and the company may sometimes already be active in several geographic markets, adding complexity to all regular components of the market analysis.
• ► To make up for a higher complexity and to visualize all the data appropriately on the management level, a business development plan may employ more charts, diagrams and lists than a normal business plan, adding degrees of skill and procedural steps for the business development planner
• ► The business development plan will pay close attention to what are current key topics for the organization, or what was historically an important aspect such as winning products or liquidity issues
• ► Even more so than a normal business plan a business development plan should be worded in a compact and concise manner, is sober and professional town and should contain lots and lots of highly relevant facts and figures
• ► More source work is expected to come directly from the organization instead of being researched on the internet or generated by plump assumption. A business development plan is to contain the result of thinking and testing that has taken place inside the organization since it was established.
• ► Sometimes a business development plan is written with a very distinct purpose and this distinct purpose will, of course, influence the way the plan is structured as well as the prime focus within the construction of each planning element
• ► Since there is less margin between the reality and the imagination of the founder, the added experience and the polished observation of day-to-day operation, the business development plan can attempt to truly pose a real evaluation tool for the company versus the business plan, which will turn out in many cases to have amounted to mostly wishful thinking, retrospectively comical assumptions and inaccurate estimation

As you can see, there are a lot of differences between business plans for startup companies and business development plans for seasoned companies. But of course there are also a lot of similarities: The basic methodology that helps us structure any given business case into a planning format is untouched and still the most important criteria of both business planning documents is the degree of detail and the degree of plausibility that turn them into actual communication instruments, navigation and success measuring tools and pitch-winners that make them worth their extended effort.

Reasons to Write a Business Development Plan

Business development plans are usually written when there is some kind of significant change coming to the organization either from an internal source or from an external source. An internal source might be certain growth aspirations, the change of ownership, acquisition of another business or a pivot in the value proposition. An external source would be a change in the market conditions, an onboarding partner or a requirement by a bank or insurance entity. There are many cases in which a business development plan is either helpful to have or a hard requirement.

In certain cases, some entrepreneurs choose to have a business development plan made only to obtain an additional navigation tool for their decision making. Just like the normal business plan, a well researched, well-written business development plan can give a birds-eye perspective overall success factors that make up the business model. The only difference is that the business development plan is an even more dynamic tool and therefore even more sensitive to quality. More data needs to be looked at to make sure one is looking at a comprehensive and informative planning document.

How to Get a Business Development Plan Made by BrainHive

In reality, getting your business development plan written by our consulting company isn’t much different than having any other business plan written. The only difference is that the everything will have to be somewhat more detailed and in some cases, there will be a business plan already existing that may or may not be at least in part useful for compiling the new business development plan. As part of our ASSIST option, if you are already in the possession of useful pieces of content that we can use for our draft, it will improve the conditions that we can offer you to come up with the full and final planning documentation.

In the beginning, we will ideally have a good conversation about what are the objectives for the business development you are looking to have written. The type of business development plan recipient you are looking to convince also determines the volume and the focus that the plan should have. We will then come up with the formal offer documents and you will have the chance to read up on the terms and conditions as well as possible discount options as part of our BrainHive content creation strategy. Of course you also always have the option of submitting the project as an Express order to shorten the duration of the process, which usually takes at least 10-14 business days while your typical business development plan is usually more on the farther side of that estimate since they’re more elaborate than the average normal business plan.

Conclusion: Quality Business Development Planning

No matter if you want to have a professional business development planner create the business development plan in whole or in part for your organization, you will find a lot of resources and a lot of consultants that can help you out. It is always good to have useful planning executed inside your organization to build planning intelligence capacities, but every part of those aforementioned three words need to be addressed expertly. The planning needs to a) be useful, the planning needs b) to be actual planning and the planning should c) be executed as outlined in the plan. If those three aspects are considered you can rest assured that an added value will be created for your organization through the process of composing an accurate business development plan.

BrainHive Consulting is always here to help if you get stuck at any point in your journey. Just contact us via email, phone or our contact form and we will be right with you and help you draft your perfectly credible, convincing and growth-conducive business development plan.