When you’re building your own startup from scratch with limited funding, you know just how important it is to stay lean and be agile. Things in your business’s day to day operations can change at the drop of a hat when you’re still in the very early stages of running your company.

That’s precisely why it’s important that you leverage a lean business plan to strategize your company’s operations. If you use a traditional, overblown, and cumbersome business plan to guide your operations, then chances are that you might be limiting yourself in more ways than one.

In this article, we’ll introduce to you the basic elements of a lean business plan so that you can take your startup to greater heights.

Identify Mission

The first and most crucial part of your business plan should be your mission statement. This is your five-second elevator pitch. It should be a 1-2 sentence statement that describes what your company does and what problem it solves for its customers.

The mission statement should communicate your company’s value. It should say why customers should invest their hard-earned cash in your business.

Create a Target Audience Profile

Whenever you’re building a lean startup, early sales are the name of the game. Because of your limited funding, you can’t afford to provide a free service to lots of beta users before you start charging them money. Instead, you need customers fast.

In order to sell better to those customers, you need a better understanding of who they are. That’s where the customer profile comes in. A target audience profile lists the characteristics of your ideal customer. This allows you to target your marketing campaign to these specific individuals.

This ensures that you don’t waste your sales efforts chasing prospects that don’t fit your ideal profile, allowing you to instead focus on only the prospects with the highest conversion rates.

Detail IT Operations

With any modern startup, technology is a massive part of the business’s operations. Given the digital age that we live in, there exist a hundred and one different software tools to support pretty much every function of a business’s multifaceted operations. You need to leverage such software if you want to optimize your time and achieve the highest productivity levels possible.

Your lean business plan needs to incorporate a strategy to deal with the technical operations of your company. This may include a system administration plan, cybersecurity services from BeStructured IT security, and more. Without a good plan for technical operations in place, your business will flounder.

A Lean Business Plan, Made Simple

Now that you know what a lean business plan looks like, all that remains is for you to start building out these elements for your startup. Remember to stay agile and nimble. Be ready and willing to accept change and pivot your business as necessary in order to better serve your customers.

For more business advice, be sure to check out the rest of the articles on the website!