I did write a draft of the first section of the SBA business plan template that I discussed yesterday. Then I skipped through all the other sections. At the end SBA's template generated a general outline with a cover sheet, table of contents, and what I had written so far. For whatever reason their generated plan didn't have any paragraph breaks! Fortunately I had already copied and pasted into MSWord (along with their section and review bullets) what I had written.
I've gone on to another section at the SBA site, the Essential Elements of a Good Business Plan, to get more information about business plans. Looking under each of the sections listed there gives a lot more insight into what I should be writing. There are also a couple more parts to the business plan under this page, with 9 sections to the template generator's 7. The template generator is briefer and more general in scope. This is probably fine if you are just trying to get started. In fact, they offer an even briefer list of elements if that works better for you.
I've found that just copying and pasting the whole mess, both the outline bullets from the template and the more extensive and verbose sections under the 'Essential Elements' page, into one document works for me. I'm now going through and replacing their text with my proposed company information a bit at a time. I just have to keep in mind this doesn't have to be perfect yet since I hope to find a mentor at my local SBDC (see prior posts) to go over this draft with me.
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