Business Plans for Art Businesses Part 1

"Fail to Plan
Plan to Fail"

In a previous post I said that I would be blogging about Business Plans and how to write one. Well, true to my word, here is the first of 3 posts on the subject. I have broken it up into sections to make a tedious task more palatable - after all, who writes business plans for fun?

Why write a Business Plan?
A business plan is a vital tool for any business, whether you are a new arts business or an exisiting business. There are two reasons why you should do this:

• to show potential funders, financial institutions, backers or partners that you have a viable business that is worth investing in


• as an exercise in analysing your business potential, finances, measure your current performance against future performance and, most importantly, high light any flaws or gaps in your business.

Your plan should show the Who, What, Where, How and Why of your business. WHO is involved (you, other businesses, customers/clients) WHAT you are doing and going to do in the future, WHERE you do it, HOW it operates and WHY you do it(and why people need it).
Your Business Plan will consist of information in each of the following headings:

• The Executive Summary (we'll deal with this in the last post)
• A description of your business (the easy part)
• Your Marketing Strategy (the fun part)
• Your team (only relevant if you are not a sole trader)
• Your Operations (where you do it and how you do it)
• Your Financial Forecast (the difficult part).

In my next post I shall be talking about how to write a description of your business - what it should include and how the layout of the business plan should look.