What Is a Business Plan?
Before there was a business... there was a business plan.
A business plan is a document with one main purpose: to launch a new venture. By "new venture" we mean a product or service that you will charge money for.
Like many other kinds of plans, business plans include some assessment (what is the environment) and, in response, some action steps (how are we responding to that environment). These are four of the key questions that a business plan seeks to answer:
- What is this new venture, exactly? (How is this thing meant to work?)
- Is there a need? (Who wants this thing?)
- Is there a revenue stream? (How much will people pay for this thing?)
- Will that revenue stream last? (How many customers will pay? Will they keep paying?)
A business plan in a public health setting—within a government agency or a non-profit organization—has exactly the same function. It is a tool for analyzing and planning a new product or service that will meet a critical community need, will generate revenue, and be sustainable past the first few years of effort.
Throughout this section we will use the Dare County, North Carolina Health Department's Miles of Smiles to illustrate the parts of a business plan. The local health department staff wrote a business plan to implement a mobile dental health program. Part of that program included the purchase of a van to provide dental care and oral health education to low-income children in Dare County and Hyde County (a neighboring county). You can read through the Miles of Smiles business plan in the resources.
