Write the Business Proposal By Yourself
I can’t believe I have paid a company to write my business proposal for me. Truth be told, a business plan is very personal. How can somebody else recognize the vision and passion you have as an entrepreneur and write a business plan that is up to your expectations? If you don’t have time to research and develop your own business plan, it doesn’t have the potential to build a successful business. A business proposal includes writing your own financial projections as well. If there’s a change in the projected cost, you should know how to update it in order to see how your projections auto-populate to affect the bottom line. No doubt, it’s a rigid learning curve, and you have to stay patient. This will eventually build up your confidence while presenting your plan to potential investors and stakeholders. The first step to becoming the master of your start up’s success is mastering your business proposal.
Work On Your Business Proposal (Almost) Every Day
It’s significant that you work on your business proposal almost every day. As far as I am concerned, I assigned two hours every weekday, and six hours on the weekends to researching and writing my plan. The physics of inertia will work in your favor if you touch your plan daily. What is inertia? It’s the phenomenon that refers to the concept that objects in motion will stay in motion and objects in a resting state are harder to get going again. If you put your plan down for too long inertia will work against you.
Don’t Agonize: Your Business Proposal Will Be Wrong Before You Even Start Writing It
When you start writing your plan, don’t put so much pressure on yourself to be 100 percent right about every minor detail. Avoid moving back and forth, worrying about future projections. Rather, you need to make sure that you have sufficient start-up capital to cover you for the first 1 to 2 years of operations. Pay attention to building a strong relationship with your customers and a quality product that makes them come back for more.
Fall in Love With Your Product & Industry
Falling in love with your product is really important. As we all know, loving something means you want to know everything about it. You become serene and investigative with it. It’s like you have a crush on your product and you’re stalking your product category online. You’ll follow your competitors and industry leaders on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to stay abreast of the latest trends and modifications within your industry. You may also gain knowledge of price points, where competitors manufacture their products, how are they advertised, and how you steal customers from your competitors. What will you do that draws customers towards your product? To build an award-winning business proposal, you need such level of dedication.
Network
Stay evident within the community of the business plan competition. For this, you need to introduce yourself and your company to the facilitators. Get involved and ask questions. Before submitting your business proposal pdf, the contest community should know who you are and about your business idea.
In the end, you need to carefully review the proposal to confirm it completely fulfills the requirements specified in the RFP. Just make sure that the information is arranged logically, meaning that it fully addresses each of the decision maker’s concerns. Lastly, proofread the proposal to grasp spelling and grammatical mistakes.
Don’t let careless mistakes or sloppy writing ruin a proposal; many contracts are awarded solely on the quality of the proposal.
Featured photo credit: 5 Steps to Writing an Award Winning Business Proposal via lifehack.org
