A good business plan guides you through each stage of starting and managing your business. You’ll use your business plan as a roadmap for how to structure, run, and grow your new business. It’s a way to think through the key elements of your business.

Business plans can help you get funding or bring on new business partners. Investors want to feel confident they’ll see a return on their investment. Your business plan is the tool you’ll use to convince people that working with you — or investing in your company — is a smart choice.

Having a road map helps you reach your journey's end successfully. Business plans do the same for small businesses. They lay out the milestones you need to reach on your way to building a profitable small business. From finance to marketing, operations to sales, each part of a business plan helps you reach your goals.

What deters most small business owners from creating a business plan, however, is taking the time to write it all out. Many are afraid in that doing so, they'll find their idea isn't so brilliant after all. For those who take the time to research and write a plan, though, they often find that it helps them identify risks and possible roadblocks – and they can circumnavigate a detour that still lets reach their destination – a successful, thriving business.

While writing a business plan can be frustrating (especially when you're writing one from scratch), there are plenty of online templates available to take some of the pain out of the process. Small business owners can benefit from simple, easy-to-follow business plan tools so they spend less time writing and more time launching.