Sophie runs a small company that maintains commercial buildings. Because a lender asks for it, she writes a 28-page business plan in eleven days. It is declined, with no explanation. When she asks, she is told that the amount requested follows from nothing in the document, and that the year-two forecast implies roughly twice the billable hours her own operations section describes. The plan was polished, but it had been written for the wrong job.
This case is fictional. It is the running thread of The Business Plan, the second book of The Modern Business Encyclopedia, the La Machine business library by Pierre Vinet. You can read the book free on maveco.ca. Here is what to take from it.
What is a business plan, and what is it for?
The book defines it as a dated, written document stating what the business intends to do, what it assumes in order to believe that is achievable, what it will cost, what it expects to earn, and how the reader can tell whether it is working. It is not the same thing as a business model, a strategy or a budget.
A plan can do three jobs: decide (record dated decisions), finance (persuade a lender or an investor) and execute (turn into work shared among people). Before writing a line, the book asks four questions. Is money being requested within 90 days? How many people must act differently? Which decision is blocked? What is the earliest date on which the document will be measurably wrong?
A plan written only to obtain a loan is the first to be abandoned. Once the decision is made, nobody opens it again.
Does planning actually improve results?
The book draws on a meta-analysis of 46 studies (Brinckmann, Grichnik and Kapsa, 2010). The association between planning and performance is positive, but strongly dependent on context: it is stronger for established firms than for brand-new ones, which have less to plan against. The practical instruction is to plan at the resolution your evidence supports.
On survival, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (Key Small Business Statistics 2025) reports, for businesses with 1 to 99 employees, 94.8% still operating after one year, 79.9% after three, 68.0% after five and 48.2% after ten. The danger sits mostly between years three and ten, when the original assumptions stop being true and nobody notices.
What are the nine sections of a business plan?
- Executive summary
- The company
- Market analysis
- The offer
- Go-to-market
- Operations
- Team and governance
- Financials
- Risks and mitigation
Each section answers one question. A page that answers none belongs in an appendix. For a loan, the book aims at 20 to 30 pages of body plus appendices; for an internal plan, 8 to 15 pages.
The order of reading is not the order of writing. The summary is read first and written ninth, after the assumption log, the market, the offer, operations, the financial model, the financing request and the risks. A last pass on paper checks that every repeated figure is the same figure. On average it finds three to six inconsistencies in a first plan.
How do you build credible financial projections?
Four habits recur in the book:
- Start from drivers (customers, price, frequency, capacity), never from a growth percentage applied to last year.
- Compute the capacity ceiling before forecasting. In the fictional case it is $612,368 against actual revenue of $612,100: the business was already delivering everything it could.
- Model cash month by month for year one, because you can be profitable in month six and out of cash in month five.
- Derive the financing request from the cash curve. In the fictional case the trough is $31,400, and the second version of the plan asks for less than the first.
The book adds one rule: every figure must trace to a named assumption with its source. A figure that cannot be traced cannot be updated, and the plan deteriorates around it.
How do you turn a business plan into work?
This is the part most guides leave out, and the book gives it two chapters. The conversion takes about four hours once, then 90 minutes a quarter.
- Reduce to three objectives, each falsifiable, with an owner and a date. The others are queued, not cancelled.
- Break them into projects, then tasks, each with a verification criterion that someone other than the doer can check.
- Choose five numbers, each tied to a decision: if this number moves past X, we will do Y.
- Hold a 90-minute quarterly review that ends in decisions with owners and dates.
On risk, the book proposes a register with six columns: the risk, its probability, its dollar impact, the response, the owner and the trigger. A risk with no owner and no trigger is a worry, not a risk.
Can you write a business plan in 30 days?
Yes, if you book the time. The book allows 30 calendar days and about 39.5 hours of work, in three blocks of ten days, each ending in a checkpoint that stops the clock if its condition is not met:
- Day 10: every assumption has a source.
- Day 20: the three financial statements tie.
- Day 30: the second reconciliation pass finds fewer than three inconsistencies.
In the fictional case, the second checkpoint failed: a loan principal repayment had been treated as an expense. It took two days to find, and the plan was better for it.
How MAVECO can help
A business plan takes time, method and an outside view. MAVECO supports small and mid-sized businesses in Québec on these points:
- business planning;
- profitability analysis of products and services, and pricing optimization;
- grant applications to support a launch or an expansion;
- accounting, through partners.
📘 Read the book free: The Business Plan.
📅 Let's talk about your plan: book a meeting with a MAVECO representative. In 30 minutes, we will tell you frankly where to start.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a business plan be? According to the book, 20 to 30 pages of body plus appendices for a loan application, and 8 to 15 pages for an internal plan. Beyond 40 pages, the marginal page is read by nobody.
Which section should you write first? The assumption log, then the market, the offer and operations. The executive summary is written last, from finished numbers.
Do you need to rewrite the plan every year? No. The book recommends amending it when assumptions move, and rewriting it only when the structure of the business changes.
Is the book free? Yes. The Business Plan is free to read on maveco.ca.
General information for educational purposes only. This article is not legal, tax, accounting or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional before acting.
