How to manage a multi product line Business Plan?

Handling a business plan with multiple product lines may seem a daunting task. However, in reality it can be done much simpler. Consider it as multiple small business plan that should be consolidated at the beginning (Executive Summary) and at the commercial section. The rest of the sections will have to be segregated as per the different business lines. Let us consider a company that offers medical interfaces service, aircraft/helicopter transportation, telemedicine, nursing assistance and insurance products. The ecosystem can look something like this which will give you a better idea of the different product lines. 

The user communities as we can see in the diagram above are communities, organizations, individuals and authorities. The first challenge that anyone faces while writing such a business plan is to understand the concepts of the different businesses. The business plan writing team that is writing the plan should interact very closely with the business owners to understand the different business models and how each of them work. Once, this is sorted out the next challenge is to understand the market. Something which is very clear here is that the overlap of customers in case of a multi product plan can be small or large depending on the offering. So there may be an overlap between a patient hiring an ambulance and then being moved to an air ambulance to be taken for treatment to another location. However, a telemedicine user may not use an air ambulance at all.

These plans may or may not be a startup level business plan because in some cases a large group may want to launch all these portals together which can be considered as a startup. In other cases a company which is into a related e-commerce sector may want to launch few more services. If it is a running business that wants to launch a few more services, it brings in further challenges because the existing financials have to be integrated into the forecasts. However another paradigm of looking at it is that there are certain benchmarks at hand which can be used to draw the financial forecasts. It makes the financials look more realistic because they have been drawn from an established benchmark. Investors find more confidence when they see the forecasts driven from actual numbers.

When driving the financials, the revenue and expenses for each line of businesses will have to be drawn separately and then consolidated at the group level. Once this is done, then the financial forecast template should take care of the income statement, cash flow and the balance sheet.

The trick of a large business plan like this is to manage the document very tight. It may look like a never ending road but that is not the case. If all the sections are limited by points and completed within a certain number of pages, such business plans are easily doable. There should be a 2-3 member team from the business plan writing services provider working on such plans with differentiated skill sets of research, finance and a project manager with responsibilities of quality check, consolidation and final delivery. It is important that we commit a realistic timeline to the client based upon the actual volume of work that is estimated. This will avoid any unnecessary confrontation in the later stages of the project.

There can be a greater challenge if the businesses are all unrelated. Consider a startup business plan wherein the entrepreneur wants to so a B2b wholesale, B2c, real estate, car sales right at the beginning to draw a large investment from the investor. In such cases also the approach that needs to be taken is as I mentioned above. Always ask the client to provide a listing of products and their pricing that needs to be put in the plan to draw the revenue. This can save a lot of time, otherwise you need to create the catalog for all the products which is not exactly within the scope unless otherwise specified. In most cases, clients work closely with the business plan services company working on the project to ensure that all inputs are provided correctly and there is no overshooting of the timeline.

Rather than starting from scratch, it is always better to take a base for complex plans. When the plan is set-up, check your existing repository to see if there has been similar work done in some of these areas, if the financial forecasting that have been done earlier matches any similar work  that has been done before or if there is a market research done on a similar subject. Check whether the market research is dated and make the necessary changes required to update the research. That will take off more than 70% of your work on the market research.

Similarly, if there is a financial forecast structure that is similar to the work at hand that can be used by doing some customization to it. Reusability of different segments helps to significantly reduce the effort and at the same time it enhances the quality of the final output to a great extent.

Every other section of the plan needs to have a differentiated approach because in some there may be a requirement to work on the sections separately while in others a common approach may work. Consider the example of technology risks for the online business example as mentioned above. However, the business risks will be different for each business. I want to close out with a cautionary note that timelines need to be set at first and second, the program management should be very tight so that the timelines are adhered to.