Presentation Template Series 6: Business Plan & Strategic Plan | Decktopus

A proper business plan allows entrepreneurs to map out their goals and trace their achievements during their growth. To shine in front of investors and convince your users that you are the best platform or product to use you should Ace this. Here’s a guide on preparing the best business plan.

Besides a business plan, there is a second thing most business professionals and entrepreneurs search for on the internet which is a “strategic plan template”. We saw it, we took it into consideration and now we are dropping a template that merges a business plan template and a strategic plan template. So why do these two terms are so important for entrepreneurs? Here are our thoughts followed by the template!

Do not criticize me, but I believe in zodiac signs and star maps. Although I realize that it may be super unscientific and there is no way to prove the credibility of the projections these fields offer, it is still fun to somehow think there is a pattern to people’s behaviors that is in a way destined for them. All the satire aside, I did get my star map analyzed by someone once based only on my date and time of birth.

To my great astonishment, one thing they told me really resonated with me. They told me that I loved going out, getting my plate full, and taking action; but, the one thing I had the most difficulty with was the planning of it all. A natural Sagittarius, I loved saying “Yes” to everything without a concrete plan in mind, which is why I constantly felt overburdened by the amount of responsibility I had previously accepted.

My greatest learning experience, according to my star reader would be simple- saying “No”. Saying “No” takes courage. It could mean closing the door on an opportunity that could turn out to be great for you. But, it could also be the very thing that will be the refreshing change of pace you need. It could invite room for you to grow for the bigger and better.

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The bottom line of that story is: you need a plan. It may be fun to be spontaneous and live life on a whim, but one day you notice that you’re drifting with the wind and you have no means of controlling the way you are going. Planning allows for control and execution.

This is true, especially for business! This is why business plans and strategic plans are so critical. When you type in “business” on Google, the second keyword that pops up is “business planning”. The same goes for “strategy”. The first word that pops into your feed is “strategic planning”.

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What is a Business Plan?

People call business plans as a well prepared guide to understand of a companies’ strategy at a glance and we call it a company’s heart. That’s why it is advised to prepare a business plan before starting any kind of business from opening a restraunt to launching a SaaS business.

By the help of a business plan, the business owner can decide on goals, milestones, strengths and weaknesses and a strategy to craft up a successful business.  In general it can be summarized as a roadmap to success which is supported with operational and financial strategies.

Why does it matter so much to have a business plan. Well, a proper business plan allows entrepreneurs to map out their goals and trace their achievements during their growth. Many professionals argue that creating a concrete business plan is the first step of creating a new business.

What’s more these plans are sought out by investors during their decision process on whether your business is worth investing in.

A legend once said that there is no right or wrong way to craft a business plan. This is because all business is unique and worthy because of their business plan. There are a lot of names out there calling different businesses and pricing plans in categories but in fact, these categories are only gathering companies due to their similarities in their business plans. Long story short, two companies can have freemium business models but they might have whole different business plans.

A business plan is basically a strategy of growth and a strategy of making money for a company. If all companies in the same niche has the same business plan and strategy there will be no such thing as competition since there is no different thing. This is where strategic plans come in and explain why does strategic plan template is generally the most popular business template of all time.

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What Should Be In Your Business Plan?

There are different types of business plan guides which generally consist of business canvases or lean canvases. Since every business start their road with a business plan the information around this issue is well studied. People spend days, months and even years to optimize their businesses and some become legend. After all these years, professors came into a final decision.

There should be core things a business plan should include. Here we gather all of them as a list as a document template. Let’s map it out!

1. Introduction Slide

Like in every other document the proper introduction will be to start with a cover page where your business name, the title of the deck as “Business Plan Presentation”, your logo and representative photo should be included.

A fun thing to spice up your business plan presentation is to actually include your one-liner. It’s always a great idea to spread the word to anyone. It’s a win situation even if one more person knows what you do a day. Do you know why? Because building brand awareness is very hard, and also very crucial for any startup or business. Make sure you talk about your business every day with the simplest version.

Even if you use this business and strategic plan presentation template to explain your strategic plan for your team, hearing the one-liner one more time is a great idea. Did you know how political campaigns can be so successful even though they have a fresh team and the team is so junior about strategic planning? Generally in campaign centers or houses they use a whiteboard at the entrance and write the core of the campaign, the most important value, and the message they want to spread.

This is helping the whole team to stay together every day and can be consistent in every situation.

How does one can write a successful one-liner?

While sitting down to create a catchy one-liner one must never forget the key steps:

The problem

The solution

The reward

After all, no matter how catchy a person comes up with a one-liner there is no point in making it sticky if it’s not telling your brand story. If you are trying to leave a message always include your brand inside of it because you want your brand to stay at the back of their mind, not your humorous talents.

When asked we tend to tell what we do directly which leaves no impact. For example “We are offering an online presentation tool so people can create good-looking presentations without any time loss” which is okay since one can understand directly what is going on. But the key story is to bring up curiosity, the “oh I know that feeling” moment.

So instead of saying it directly try saying “People are spending huge amounts of time while preparing presentations and this makes them inefficient and unprepared for giving the presentation itself. So we created an online presentation tool to make the process smooth and fast.” Well, this is not a one-liner but you might expect the “Oh, how will your presentation tool do that?” question after that.

Then keep going with the solution. But again, instead of saying the solution directly, try to add some details which make your service special so that people will switch to the “I want to try!” mood. Finally, in the reward section of your one-liner try to make people believe your culture and value. That you are not seeing them as a money machine and what is the value you care about. The final version might look like this;

“People are spending a lot of time and money while preparing presentations so we offer an online presentation tool to reduce that time to 15 minutes on average. Because we know that the time is valuable.”

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2. The Business Opportunity

What is missing in your market and why does it matter? This is almost the most important thing a business need. A business opportunity… Otherwise what makes you stand out and what makes people want to buy from you? At early stages, most of the angel investors look for different business opportunities and try to find businesses that offer such solutions.

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3. Business Plan

In this slide one must include your charges, premium features, user rates. For short, a slide where you summarise your way of making money. Profit per product, average signup to visitor rates and many more. What if the business is a non-profit organisation? In this case scenerio instead of pricing and user rates, one should follow donator numbers, rate of impact, etc.

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4. Target Market

When talking about the target market one should include both current markets and future target markets that’s why, include your office locations and where you are planning to grow. This is important for so many reasons such currency, ease of penetration, the familiarity of the audience.

5. Competitors

Competitors slide should include main competitors. Small sharks should be included as well as big sharks since your firs direct competitors will be smaller ones. Make sure to keep this slide very simple since at a look the viewes should see what do you step on. That’s why try to choose maximum 4 core features and as many competitors as your have and make sure to make your column differ from others.

What are they missing? It may be a lack of know-how, a weak business model, or a weak management team. There are variety of ways to represent competitors hovewer Decktopus offers a lean table version in order to keep it simple.

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6. Operational Plan

This slide is all about plans and your know-how of the process. What are your short-term goals and long-term plans? In what ways to you plan to achieve these goals? What will your lead generation and sales funnel actions will look like and most importantly what is your secret sauce?

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7. Owners and Management

Also called as the team slide, owners and management slide is the slide where you introduce your shining team. This is one of the slides angel and VCs look for since they pick founders instead of business modals. If a team is promising, generally they can achieve anything and they can be creative when it comes to a stage where it requires a pivot.

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8. A Quote

It would be perfect to add a quote from a team member, a client, or an existing investor since it can be equal to a testimonial, and testimonals always expressing.

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9. Closing

Make sure to finish the slide with a impressive closing statement. This statement will excited your audience and make them want to know more about you and your business.

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What is a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan is a document where organizational management team sits on a table and discuss their goals and the roadmap they plan to achieve that goal. This kind of document is generally prepared to review and set priorities, focus of resources and efforts, strengths, weaknesses, employee knowledge, stakeholders and their commitment, outcomes and the direction of the company.

According to this document, every department should align their plans, priorities and be set for a specific goal. With the help of this strategic plan document, team managers can easily set KPIs and track the success.

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How does a strategic plan presentation differ? With strategic plans, an organization determines their strategy, direction and makes decisions on the allocation of resources as they pursue their strategy. The organization defines their priorities and the control mechanisms that will execute the strategy.

Long story short, a strategic plan is how you take action, in which order, and with what budget. Who are the key people on the game plan? In this strategic plan template, we gathered all of these important points into a deck! A strategic plan can be written for anything related to your business like before launching a marketing campaign, before hiring a sales team, before making a new product roadmap, or hiring decisions.

Always make sure to have a vision and mission on hand to move forward. Basically, with this strategic plan template, you can make sure that you conducted a SWOT analysis, core goals and create a plan according to it. Also, we added some unique but very important things to make sure your strategic plan template is on point and is very self-explanatory.

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What Should a Strategic Plan Include?

What does a strategic plan presentation template look like? The Decktopus strategic plan deck is self explanatory and presents all you need from a strategic plan template. To summarise it should include a cover page, reputation drivers slide, employees summary, customers summary, shareholders summary, core values, purpose, targets and goals, actions, SWOT analysis, and closure slide in short. But now let’s break it into portions and take a more detailed look at those slides and what those slides should include.

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1. Cover Page

A well designed, lean introduction page supported with a cheerful beginning is a perfect way to structure your strategic plan.

2. Reputation Drivers

Make sure to walk through the brand identity and how current brand is called in industry and which points created reputation in market in order not to reduce the effort and lose the flag.To summarise it should include a cover page, reputation drivers slide, employees summary, customers summary, shareholders summary, core values, purpose, targets and goals, actions, SWOT analysis, and closure slide in short.

But now let’s break it into portions and take a more detailed look at those slides and what those slides should include.

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This slide is extremely important for a strategic plan template because it actually tells a great story about what is working. Always start with reputation drivers because core things can be easily forgotten once you start to try new campaigns and strategies. Always keep what’s working and add a new thing when optimizing. For this reason, we added this slide at the very beginning of the strategic plan template.

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3. Employees Summary

A strategy should always be built around partners and team members since all resource, effort and talent that will operate through the strategy will be coming from the team. Make sure to review talents, weaknesses and strengths in team to decide on outsourcing if necessary.

Your team is basically your service or product. How fast or well you respond to your clients, how supportive are you, how informative are you, how well written your code, how easily used your product is? All of these questions are pointing our your team. In short, you can always brag about the company but backstage, you have a team of superheroes who make this happen. Make the world know your team of superheroes with this strategic plan template.

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4. Customers Summary

Listing current customers, their feedbacks, feature requests and most used features is a great way to strategize and find prioritiezed actions. It’s always great idea to see the statistics, numbers and power users to go with a community strategy.

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5. Shareholders Summary

Creating goals and objectives and going to a meeting with shareholders with a strong strategy is a good plan to start a quarter. Always review, analyze and ask for support so that everyone puts their talents on the table so that the growth will be faster.

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6. Core Values

In order to create a new strategy one must review it’s current culture. What are the core values and what does customers will look for our company? Always prioritize around core values and developing with core values so that more and more customers will resonate with the company.

7. Purpose

To remember and decide on the short and long term goals reviewing vision and purpose of the company is a great way to create brainstorming ideas.

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8. Targets & Goals

These slides always should include target numbers, goal results with a measurable perspective and these goals should always be reviewed with board members and executives.

9. Actions

Actions always should be neat and clear to reduce the misunderstandings and to be crytal clear how to operate to outcomes. It’s also a great practice to list the actions below goals and target numbers.

10. SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a must of all kinds of plan. Make sure to review strengths and weaknesses very honest and objective way.To mention, SWOT analysis is a commonly used thing in the business world. Before starting any kind of strategic planning always take your time, take a pen and paper and craft your SWOT analysis because without knowing everything about your business, you will never create a successful strategic plan.

11. Closure

Make sure to include a Q&A and brainstorming session with the closure to go through notes, sometimes the best strategies and ideas come from unexpected times and from unexpected people.

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Get ahead by planning. A plan is the necessary first step. For business plan templates, strategic plan templates and more, check out decktopus.com now! Or check other templates to match with your company needs.

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