FORMATTING YOUR BUSINESS PLAN

Creating a consistent format for your business plan will make it much easier for your audience to digest. Generally this means devising particular rules for your business plan document and uniformly applying them. For example, you may decide that all your section headings will be the Times New Roman font, 16 point, all capitalized; your subheadings will be Times New Roman font, 14 point, with small capitalization. However you choose to do it, just ensure it is consistent throughout the entire document.

Formatting Guidelines

While our business plan competition does not have rules governing how the formatting of the business plan must be done, we do provide some helpful guidelines that improve how easily your plan will be read. We suggest that you use:

Font: Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman

Size: 11 or 12 point

Margins: 1" margins on all sides

The Length of Your Business Plan

While we impose no limits on the overall length of your business plan, it is suggested you keep the length between fifteen (15) and twenty (20) pages (not including appendices).

If You Remember Anything, Remember This...

Everything you find here is designed to help you write a better business plan. Take what you like, ignore what you do not. The most important thing to remember is that there is no single "right way" to write a business plan.