5 Common Problems in Business Plan Writing

Writing a bankable business plan in Nigeria isn’t always a problem if you know what to do and you have most of the information you need but things are not always that straight forward and you’re about to learn why with 5 major problems Nigerian business plan writers face.

Common Problems Nigerian Business Plan Writers face when writing business plans

Here is, in no particular order, the top 5 business plan writing challenges you’ll likely face in Nigeria;

Difficulty in accessing reliable industry data

Reliable industry data is not easy to come across in Nigeria and this can be due to several factors for instance more than 70% of Nigeria’s economy is informal and as a result a lot of transactions go undocumented. Secondly there is no efficient regulatory framework for most of our industries and sectors resulting in businesses operating within various sectors not coming up with information that may benefit other businesses for fear of empowering their competition. Poor collaborative efforts among competing businesses in the same niche also contributes to inadequate industry data in addition to the low use of information technology for data storage and analysis have all contributed to this problem. But some institutions such as the National Bureau of Statistics, SMEDAN, CBN and Bank of Industry occasionally release relevant industry data to the press.

How long it will take to write the business plan

Another problem you may face while writing a business plan is how long it will take you to complete the business plan. If you are a business plan consultant this is one of the problems you’ll face. Ideally a business plan should take between 30 to 120 hours to write if you have all the data you need but even at that data is not easy to come by and this could take days or weeks to assemble, analyse and interpret

How reliable are the financial assumptions

The calculations you make in your business plan must incorporate certain assumptions. For instance if you wish to make financial projections such as 5 year profit and loss summary, cash flow projections, balance sheet and break even analysis must assume that certain conditions must be met in order for the financial projections to occur. But how reliable are those assumptions?

Sectoral and regional peculiarities

A particular business doing well in Abuja may fail woefully in Lagos and this may be due to environmental and regional factors which will ensure success in one location or failure in another. Secondly success in one sector of the economy or even an industry may not be transferable to another sector e.g success in mass production of clothing by one company may not enable it succeed in say agro processing that is because of the challenge of sectoral and regional peculiarities.

Which Business Plan Format is Suitable?

Another problem with writing business plans is what format is suitable for my present plan. Should I work with a 5 year plan, a 3 year plan or should I do a month by month summary? This question in not very easy to answer especially if the person you are writing to isn’t specific about what he/she wants.

However you can overcome these problems with a proven business plan writer when you contact me on preparing a bankable business plan for your presentation to a bank, panel of judges, investors or potential business partners. My number is: 0803 206 4106 or email me: paulonwueme@gmail.com