Vintage Clothes Shop Sample Business Plan

Writing your Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan is a vital task when starting up your Vintage Clothes Shop Business. It will ensure you

set targets,

collate all your ideas,

plan for the future of your Vintage Clothes Shop Business, and

verify that your ideas are realistic and workable.

Your Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan is an essential tool for attracting finance and it should be a dynamic document, reviewed regularly to help you measure the performance of your business.

The Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan is for you and it can help you to:

Bring together your ideas and research into a structured format.
Decide whether your business will be commercially viable.
Show you when your business will be commercially viable.
Communicate your ideas to any partners or staff.
Predict your future and show the pitfalls and address them before they threaten the success of your Vintage Clothes Shop Business.
Set out the strategy for the business.
Explain your marketing strategy and how it will be implemented.
Set out your targets and objectives, including sales and financial targets, so you can monitor your business' performance on a continuing basis.

Your Vintage Clothes Shop Business must stand out from the crowd, so make it as easy to read as possible, and leave out jargon. You must ensure that there is no contradiction. The figures in your plan for expenditure must be the same amounts as you put in your financial forecasts; if they do not then your business plan loses credibility.

The plan must be realistic and so you must show evidence to back up any claims you make, and the plan will need to show that the business will be able to support you and any borrowing requirements you may have.

And you need to show how investors get their money back!

The Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan

Include a table of contents listing the main sections and page numbers in the plan. If it is difficult to find key information among a mass of text that has no logical index the person assessing the business plan will be frustrated, and so less likely to consider the plan positively.

Executive summary

Briefly summarize the Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan in less than two pages. It is the first, maybe the only, thing that an investor will read and so

Make sure it is well written,
Ensure it excites and
It must stand out from the many other Vintage Clothes Shop Business plans an investor or lender will receive.

To make your executive summary different just list 4 things

Why is your business, your products, your service different? Why are you different?
What is your experience? What is your experience of the Vintage Clothes Shop industry?
Why does all of this make your Vintage Clothes Shop Business profitable? Have you demonstrated this in your plan?
How, and when, will investors get their money back?

Make sure you also list

The business name, its owners and address.
Details of the products and services you are going to sell.
A summary of your target market and competition.
The amount of finance needed, for what purpose and over what term.
The amount of money you are personally investing.

Vintage Clothes Shop Business description and purpose

What exactly will your Vintage Clothes Shop Business do?
What are the exact products and services?
How will your products and services differ from those offered by your competitors?
Why should customers want to come to you and how will you differentiate your business to make it successful?

If you cannot describe your business in two or three sentences then you need to rethink your business idea, focusing on your business' core purpose, target audience and mission.

Legal status and licenses

What legal status will your business have?

Are you intending to be a

sole trader,
partnership or
limited company?

Investors may also be concerned about the legal status of the business and the impact on liability, and you need to be sure that you have chosen the most appropriate legal status to meet your future needs.

Do you need any licences before you can start trading? (If so, you need to demonstrate you are aware of what you need to apply for and that you have taken steps to do so.)

Management processes

How will you manage your business? Getting organised will make your business more efficient and ultimately enjoyable. Even if you are the only person involved, it is still worth looking at your key skills, responsibilities and management processes at this stage. Your plan will need to consider the following key areas:

Marketing and sales.
Finance.
Recruitment and staffing.
Product development or product sourcing.
General management.
Administration.

You will also need to set out how you plan to monitor your business' performance (against objectives and targets), and to co-ordinate the roles of any key staff.

Marketing strategy

To succeed in any business you will need to have a thorough understanding of your target market, including its size and the share you hope you can realistically achieve. Once you have developed a clear understanding of your market in terms of size, location, groups of potential customers and their profiles, potential competitors, trends and influencing factors, it's easier to define your overall marketing strategy clearly. You ca break this down into objectives and targets relating to the volume and share of the market (or market segments) you hope to achieve and when you intend to achieve them.

Who are your initial marketing targets (specific groups or market segments)?
What products, services or particular deals will you offer to them?
What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and how does this differentiate you from your competitors?
Is there a specific volume, value or share of these markets that you hope to achieve?
When do you hope to achieve these targets by?
Why are you choosing these markets first?
Who will you target next, for instance in six months' or a year's time?

Vintage Clothes Shop Marketing plan

How will you carry out your marketing? Once you have a clear marketing strategy, you need to be clear about how you are going to make it happen. A detailed marketing plan should explain how you will go about achieving each of your marketing targets and objectives (as defined in your marketing strategy above) either by particular target segment, by type of marketing activity, or both.

Such a plan will include some or all of the following:

The marketing methods you will use for each segment of your target market.
The specific action you are going to take to reach each segment.
A timescale or timetable for each marketing activity.
The people or organisations that are going to carry it out.
The estimated costs to undertake particular marketing activities (your marketing budget).
How you will monitor and review progress.
How you will handle the response to your marketing.
If it helps, think about the four 'P's, of product, price, promotion and place.

Sales targets and objectives

Your marketing plan, when implemented, needs to be converted into perhaps the most important business goal of all: your sales revenue target.

You should set out your sales forecasts in terms of:

Sales of different product or service types by volume and value.
Sales from different customer groups or territories.
Sales from different distribution or advertising channels.

Current financial requirements and financial forecasts

How much money do you need now and for what purpose? Your business plan should include a breakdown of your financial requirements, the sources of finance you have available to you and any additional finance you may need. This should include:

The cost of starting your business.
Your personal budget.
Details about your own finance that you intend to invest.
Details about any additional finance you have secured.
A table showing what you plan to spend the finance on (provide details of each piece of equipment or service you are buying and its cost).
A break-even analysis and timing calculation to help you understand how much of your product or service you need to sell at a given price to cover all your costs and contribute towards your profit, and when this break-even point will be reached.
A detailed cash flow forecast that will help you to estimate how much available cash you will have in any particular month.
A profit-and-loss forecast to help you estimate when your business will start to make a profit, which will be essential to your longer term success.
A balance sheet forecast to provide you with a snapshot of the trading position of your business, to identify what your business will owe, what it will own and how financially strong it will be at a particular point in the future.

Operational requirements

What do you need to do to turn your operational plans into action? In other words, how will you make everything happen in your business?

Details about your operational requirements will be essential when preparing your financial forecasts, while other information will be needed for basic operational planning. Outline your plans for the following aspects of your business and estimate the respective costs involved:

Premises - provide details of the premises and a sketch plan of the layout.
Equipment - list what you will need to buy and show prices you have identified.
Staff - indicate what roles you will need to fill and provide job descriptions.
Suppliers - give details of various suppliers and the credit terms they will offer.
Compliance - check compliance issues and show how you intend to meet the regulations regarding health and safety at work, and anything specific to your sector.
Licensing - provide details of any licenses you need to trade in your line of business.
Insurance - ensure you have the correct cover and include details of policies.

Business risks

What could go wrong, and what will you do if the worst happens? Your plan should include an honest assessment of the risks involved in your business, as well as how you will minimize them. Consider which of the following risks are relevant to your business:

Lack of management experience (address this risk by getting advice or mentoring from your business adviser, accountant or solicitor).
Little trading history (this will make it difficult to borrow money or receive credit, so you might need to make other plans to finance the business initially).
Economic uncertainties (if you are borrowing money and paying interest, for instance, make contingencies for interest rate increases).
Over-reliance on key staff.
Over-reliance on a few suppliers.
Over-reliance on a small customer base.
Customer bad debts leading to cash flow problems.
Partnership difficulties.
A sudden increase in competition.
Security issues.
Failure to meet your sales targets.
Lack of resources at key stages of development.

Appendices

This should include all the documents that support the plan, for example:

Your CV and those of your business partners and/or key employees.
Certificates for any qualifications or relevant training courses.
Copies of the lease for any business premises you will be renting.
Market research data.
Financial information.
Details of any professional advisers, key suppliers or insurance providers you have engaged with, if applicable.

Further Vintage Clothes Shop Business Plan Writing resources:

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