Business Plan

Business plan is the English term for what is sometimes translated into French as: plan d'affaires, plan de développement or dossier prévisionnel. In this article, we'll use this term because of its widespread use in France.

The business plan is a "file presenting a quantified project for the creation or development of a company" (according to the definition proposed by the Association pour l'emploi des cadres, APEC). To clarify the content of this file, let's present the definition of the Association française des investisseurs pour la croissance (AFIC, formerly the Association française des investisseurs en capital): "strategic development plan for the company over 3 to 5 years, with detailed comments on sales, competition, products, techniques, means of production, investments, human resources, IT, finance...". This non-exhaustive list of topics shows that the content of such a document is not standardized, and can take different forms depending on the author and the context.

In practice, a business plan is drawn up for a project to set up or take over a company, or for the development of a new activity within a company. In the body of this article, we'll deal with all three of these circumstances, but in our examples, we'll focus on the case of a business start-up project.

Why produce a business plan? Who is it for? How should it be drawn up? These are just some of the questions we'll be answering in this article.