How we build a plan
A business plan is only worth something if you can tell where each part came from. This page sets out exactly what goes into yours, what is calculated rather than written, and what you still have to check yourself.
What goes in
Your answers
Your town, the capital you have, your skills, the premises you can use, how hands-on you want to be, and — if you brought your own idea — what you want to sell and to whom. Nothing else about you enters the plan.
Approved structured data
Individual facts: an equipment cost, a rent observation, a permit name, a government fee, a supplier category, a pay range. Each one is a single typed value with a source, a date and a named reviewer who approved it. They are facts, not passages of writing.
Our own planning framework
The section list, what each section has to cover, and the instructions the writer works to. We designed these around the decisions a first-time owner has to make, in the order they have to make them.
A deterministic financial model
Startup costs, the 12-month cash table, break-even, payback and the three-year summary are computed by a model, from your capital figure and your plan's own cost and price assumptions. The language model is never asked to do arithmetic.
Current sources, on the Researched Plan
Searches for prices, supplier categories and county requirements, run at the time your plan is generated. Every figure taken from one carries a link you can open.
The structure, and why
Most business plan templates open with an executive summary and a company description, because that is the order a bank reads them in. That is not the order you have to think in. Ours follows the sequence of decisions: is there demand where you are, who exactly buys, what do you charge, can you actually run it, can you buy the inputs, are you allowed to trade, how do you get the first customers, what does it cost, does the money work, what could break, and what do you do in week one. The summary is written last and printed first.
01
The plan in short
Let a lender, a partner or the owner themselves grasp the whole plan in one page.
02
The opportunity where you are
Establish that there is real demand in this specific place, or say honestly that it is unproven.
03
Who you will serve
Force a concrete customer, because a plan aimed at everyone prices and markets badly.
04
What you sell and what you charge
Tie the offer to a price the customer will pay and a margin that survives.
05
How the business runs
Turn the idea into a week that a person can actually work.
06
What you buy, and from whom
Make the supply side concrete before money is committed.
07
Registration, licences and rules
Stop a launch being blocked by a permit nobody mentioned.
08
Getting your first customers
Replace 'marketing' with the first fifty sales.
09
What it costs to open
Confront the plan with the money the person actually has.
10
The money model
Show the twelve-month cash picture the deterministic engine produced.
11
What could go wrong
Pre-commit to a response, so a bad month is a plan rather than a surprise.
12
Your first 90 days
End on actions with dates, not intentions.
Where numbers come from
Every figure in your plan is one of three things, and the plan tells you which:
- A checked fact. Reviewed, dated and attributed. It carries a reference you can trace.
- A current source. Found at generation time on a Researched Plan, with the link printed so you can open it.
- A marked estimate. Where we had neither, the plan says so and tells you where to confirm it — usually the supplier or the county office.
The projections are not one of those three. They are computed from the costs and prices in your own plan by a model that does the same arithmetic every time, so the same inputs always give the same table.
Which sources we will use
Not every page on the internet is a source we are willing to build your plan on. Before anything is read, extracted or quoted, it goes through one policy that decides whether the site is permitted. Kenyan government and regulator publications are permitted. Sites that republish other people’s documents are blocked outright. Anything we have not reviewed is treated as not permitted — the default is no, not yes.
We keep the facts and the links, not copies of the pages. We do not bypass paywalls, logins, rate limits or any other access restriction to obtain a source.
Originality
Your plan is written for you. It is not assembled from other people’s business plans, and the writer has no reference documents to copy from — it works from your answers, approved facts and our own instructions.
Before a plan is delivered, it is checked automatically for reproduced wording, reused headings and any marker that would show text had come from somewhere else. A plan that fails that check is not delivered. The first plans produced under this process were also read end to end by a person.
What this cannot do
- It cannot tell you a business will succeed. It can tell you what it would cost, what it would have to earn to break even, and what would most likely go wrong.
- It cannot guarantee that a lender, a county office or a regulator will accept it.
- Prices and fees go out of date, and sources are sometimes wrong. Confirm every amount before you spend money.
- It does not know your specific street, your landlord, or who is already trading next door. You do. Read it with that knowledge and adjust it.