Calculating Business Plan Costs: How Consultants Determine Your Price
Calculating the costs of business plans is a multifaceted undertaking
If you analyze search behavior with certain Google tools, you can immediately see that the demand for cheap or free business plans is high. Service providers who calculate low business plan costs are in demand. Many founders are surprised by the hurdle of the business plan and are looking for a simple solution that is easy on their wallet (PS: If you find yourself here, maybe take a quick look at our business plan calculator and our handy price table to see which Requirements your plan must meet).
This essay analyses precisely what the business plan advisor's various responsibilities are and that under typical situations, it is very complicated to construct a professional business plan (a written part + a financial portion) at the cost of less than $600. For our illustration pricing scenario, we expect a marketing strategy for a small restaurant funded with about $ 100,000. In most cases, the printed portion of the business plan includes around 15 net pages at 300 words per document (with covers, overviews, and graphs we speak of approx. 18-20 pages gross volume) as well as about 8 pages for a financial plan.
Training as a business plan consultant and marketing, administration, and communication
For a business strategy consulting to be effective at a high stage, you first need a lot of experience. It should concern traditional university preparation and realistic knowledge in a very special field of corporate management, market planning/policy/modeling. You will need to study in Germany for at least 4 years to accumulate that one. To obtain this degree of skill, 4 years of realistic experience.
The opportunity costs (i.e., the costs of lost alternative consultancy work) for the business plan consultant are also relatively high since someone who is qualified as a senior business plan consultant is usually also qualified for certain company positions, which are endowed with between 90,000 and 120,000 euros per year are. As a rule, a senior business plan consultant chooses to work in a business planning consultancy because he enjoys this specific line of advice and start-up help for founders, not because of the money.
Building a business plan consultation involves a lot of expenses, especially in the area of marketing. At BrainHive, for example, we spend around $ 3,000 a month on marketing. Other business costs amount to around $ 2,000, for example, rent, insurance, IT and telecommunications fees and office supplies, transport costs, and a whole basket of other expenses. Personnel costs are a whole story in themselves that are associated with high costs.
We expend a lot of time on management and coordination with both prospecting and project management. These costs must also be considered.
Creation of the business plan: time-consuming work at every level
Professional creation of business plans is associated with a considerable amount of time in various phases of the business plan creation process. First, we need to go through the business concept questionnaires that our customers fill out and give us. We often find gaps in the information, or there are paradoxical statements that need to be clarified. This phase alone can take 2-3 hours, depending on the complexity of the business concept. For our example hospitality business plan, let's be optimistic and say it's an hour.
Then we generate all the business plan sections and do not include an external market review with an experienced business plan writer who uses resources such as speech recognition and access to our business plan library for around three hours. I can say that the period would be around four times faster for an untrained individual without resources.
For our sample business plan, I think it is right that around 1.5 hours go into pure research to provide all the information for market analysis, competition analysis, location analysis, etc.; Developing the relevant components of the business plan based on the research material will take another two hours.
It takes our business plan financial analyst about an hour to create a three-year financial plan for each business plan. To do this, we use our sophisticated Excel financial planning template (which, if you wanted to create it yourself, would require training and, even then, would certainly require more than a full day of work). Once the financial plan is ready, the business plan writers will complete his draft and subject it to quality control that should not take much longer than 45 minutes.
The draught business plan is then submitted for analysis to our quality improvement unit. The quality management of the model business plan we mentioned will take 1-1,5 hours. Because we at BrainHive have corrective loops as part of consumer reviews in our business strategy bundles, we charge an extra budget of half an hour to fix this follow-up job.
Calculate business plan costs by considering profit margins
For a simple business plan, which is described in our example, we calculate around 970 euros, of which I, as the owner, have around a third as profit, around 60-70% go to employees who are involved in the project management and creation process of the business plan. When carrying out business planning projects, our analysts achieve between $ 40 (e.g. secretary) and $ 80 (e.g. financial analyst) per hour, depending on their qualification and specialization. A large number of freelance consultants with a similar level of qualification who work in areas of business development or strategy for larger companies charge between $ 800 and $ 1,500 per day, which means they earn around $ 100 to $ 200 an hour. Here, too, you can see that our analysts are not business plan consultants because of the money, but appreciate the relative freedom and entertainment factor of this type of consultancy work.
Conclusion: look benevolently at your affordable business plan writing service
In the future, if you ask me or my sales reps about discounts, installment payments, or charity, it helps to remember that none of us are in this consulting branch for the money. I created BrainHive because I enjoy helping start-ups and entrepreneurs, and I like to serve as a senior partner in business strategies worldwide. It's fun, two ventures are never the same, and I believe the business strategy obstacle for both financial and regulatory reasons is breaking down.
Business plan consultants are flooding the market: what about the low-cost providers?
We are not particularly concerned that our advisory line will have less demand at the price level we are at because it is an art to write a top business plan. Look at the business plan costs as a worthwhile investment in the future of your start-up. In cooperation with BrainHive, you can be sure that we will develop an architecture for corporate planning that will give you valuable ideas that you have not even thought of.
On the other side, whether you choose the cheapest contractor or attempt to draw up a business strategy of your own, you are most likely unlikely to wind up with a completely functional business plan. Or, your efforts were considerably better than if you had selected a standard price plan operation.