Business Plans for Small Businesses

Chapter 2

The One-Page Business Plan

The exact format of the one-page plan, walked through with three real businesses.

A page has 11 short fields. Five at the top describe the business. Three in the middle describe the year. Three at the bottom describe the risks and the next moves. That's the whole template. Once you've seen it, the format won't surprise you again.

What's harder than the format is filling it in honestly. The fields are short on purpose - they force a choice. "We serve people who want quality" doesn't fit. "We serve homeowners aged 35 to 55 within a 20-mile radius who are renovating a kitchen" does. The constraint is the point.

This chapter walks the page field by field, with examples. By the end you'll have your own page filled in - rough, but real.

The full chapter has the page laid out field by field, three businesses worked through and the language tricks that keep each field honest.

The page

The 11 fields

1. Customer (one sentence, specific)
2. Offer (named clearly, with price band)
3. The promise (one sentence outcome)
4. Channels (two or three, no more)
5. Conversion path (the steps from enquiry to paid)
6. Revenue target for the year
7. Customer count needed to hit the target
8. Costs - fixed and variable, rough numbers
9. Top three risks for the year
10. The retention move that earns the second sale
11. The first 90 days - three concrete actions

If you can fill those 11 fields with answers a stranger could understand in one read, you've done more strategic thinking than 90 percent of small businesses do in a year.

Worked example: the consultancy

Customer: founder-led B2B services businesses doing 500k to 2m, owner running marketing themselves. Offer: a 90-day go-to-market reset, 12,000 pounds. Promise: a clear customer, a clear offer and a working growth map within 90 days. Channels: search-ranked website, weekly LinkedIn post, two referral partners. Conversion path: 30-minute discovery call, then a one-page proposal with three options. Revenue target: 240,000 pounds. Customers needed: 20 projects. Costs: 6,000 fixed monthly, 1,500 variable per project. Risks: referral partner churn, owner burnout, slow Q1. Retention: a quarterly check-in plus an annual retainer offered at month nine. First 90 days: rebuild the offer page, restart the LinkedIn rhythm, agree the second referral partner.

On a single A4 page. Honest enough to be useful. Short enough to be opened on a Monday.

Worked example: the homeware shop

Customer: women aged 30 to 55 furnishing a first or second home. Offer: 40 handmade products in three collections, plus gift cards. Promise: pieces with the warmth of one of a kind, made to live with for years. Channels: Instagram, Pinterest, an email list, occasional pop-up markets. Conversion path: clean product pages, free returns within 30 days. Revenue target: 180,000 pounds. Customers needed: 1,200 orders averaging 150 pounds. Costs: 2,200 fixed monthly, 35 percent of revenue variable. Risks: slow autumn, supplier lead time, Instagram reach drop. Retention: a thank-you note in every parcel, a quarterly new-product email, a loyalty discount for second purchases. First 90 days: photograph the new spring collection, restart the Pinterest pinning rhythm, plan the May pop-up.

The honesty test

After you've written your page, read it aloud. Anywhere you used a soft phrase - "premium", "high-quality", "customers who appreciate", "those looking for" - rewrite it with a number, an age, a postcode, a pound sign or a named alternative. Soft phrases are how plans become unused. Specifics are how plans become useful.

What to do this week

Print the 11-field template. Fill it in with a pen. Don't open a Word document. The pen makes you commit. Pin the page where you'll see it tomorrow morning. You can type it up neatly later - or not.

The recurring principle this chapter sits on is make the offer clear. The 11 fields are designed to force that clarity. The next chapter, Market, Customer and Offer, takes the top half of the page and gives you the thinking that sits behind it.