Limit Your Business Plan to a Few Pages

A business plan is not the great American novel. You want your business plan to be chock full of the right information, but you don't want it to be the size of an encyclopedia.

Ideally, you should be able to explain your product, market, sales strategy, and all other salient details in 15 to 20 pages. That page count does not include exhibits and other reference material that you might want to use to support the main text.

However, even a 15-page business plan may still be too long for busy financiers to read. For those who are hit with dozens of business plans every day, you'll want to include a one-page executive summary. The executive summary should touch on all of the points that your full business plan does. Upon reading the executive summary, a financier should have a strong and clear idea of what is contained within your business plan.