Finding a good business plan template in Excel format can be really hard, for the following reasons:

You need the right level of detail. More often than not, the templates provided by others (your corporate HQs, your boss, you name it) are much too detailed – if you work for a large company, you know what I mean. In those horrible templates, you really wonder who might ever read the hundreds and thousands of rows that try to forecast what could happen 10 years down the road….

If you are looking at an existing business, the financial projections should also take the recent past into account. Too often, the templates don’t seem to care about what happened in the last couple of years. If you haven’t analysed the recent performance of the company, how can you pretend that your 7-10 year forecast is realistic?

Forecasting ‘costs’ is hard, but forecasting markets and revenues is really a lot harder. One way to address this problem is to forecast the market in two different manners: by regions / countries on one hand, and by products / product lines on the other hand. And then reconcile them so that the two projections are aligned.

Finally, the financial plan must look good. Not only it must support the story that you are trying to sell (to your management, or to investors), but it must also be visually appealing.

In the ICT industry, there are quite a lot of software and service businesses (as well as hardware, for sure), with the added charm that gross margins can be (very) high, and working capital requirements low (who doesn’t love prepayments or annual software / service fees paid upfront?). So we have reflected these salient features of the ICT industry in the template below.

Enjoy the template in PDF format!

Download “Business Plan in the ICT industry Template”

INVESTAURA_Business-Planning-Template.pdf – Downloaded 12844 times – 1.50 MB

 

For access to the Excel template, you need to register as a Business Plan Starter member on ‘The Art of Business Planning’ web site. Go to the registration page

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future”

Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics

Yes, forecasting can be hard. But on the supply side, the good news is that many technologies display constant growth rate over time. This means that capacity is growing exponentially and when plotted on a logarithmic scale, capacity is a linear function of time. Sounds familiar? Yes, this is Moore’s law: the number of transistor per chip has been correctly predicted by to double every 2 years on average since the 1960s, giving an annual growth rate of +40%.