Stage 2:
Business Plan

This is the stage where you design your business by creating a business plan. It’s the first practical step towards realizing your startup vision as a business.

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​​Objectives

The goals for this stage are:

• Translate your startup vision into a business plan in the form of a Lean Canvas.

• Test your plan on others.

• Either continue with your plan as is, refine it, or find another idea.

• Provide the basis for a formal business plan.​

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Design your business

The thought of designing your business may seem daunting, but we've made it as simple as we can. We’ll guide you to think about your idea from a customer perspective, then consider how that impacts the shape of your new business.

 

To help with this, we provide both a template and a guided tool to help you complete a Lean Canvas, which is like a business plan on a page. It looks easy to do, but may require a lot of thought.

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Your Lean Canvas provides the basis for creating a formal business plan, which may be critical later, if you want the support of funding providers.

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Using the Business Plan phase

On the webpage, the stage is broken down into several steps containing:

• A description of the step and how it works.

• Learning resources like guides, blog posts, templates, or tools that can help you with this step. 

• Links to resources elsewhere on the web that can help you with the step.

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We recommend that you follow each step in turn and use the resources that most suit how you like to work.

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Conclusion

The Business Plan stage should provide you the understanding and tools to structure your new business, some allies who will support developing your startup, and the confidence to decide your next step. This decision is important. If you decide to proceed, you’ll be committing to investing more time and energy in the next step of the Toolshed framework, Metrics & KPI's.

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We want to make your start-up journey enjoyable, successful, and as easy as possible. If you find any aspect of the site confusing or lacking, please advise on our Contact Form and we'll improve it.

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Finally, if you’re feeling lost, head to the Toolshed Community Forum, and get some help from a fellow founder or an expert mentor.