"Business plan kasari banaune?" is the question I get most often from people starting a business in Nepal. Businesses hire me to fix their marketing, and this one comes up before almost anything else. So here is the whole thing: what a business plan actually is, what has to go inside it, and the exact way I build mine with AI.
Do you even need a business plan to start?
Honestly? My first business was never written down.
The plan was in my head. I had an idea and I had the urge to go and do something with it. I never sat down and put it on paper. And that is not unusual - most people running their first business are the same, and the reason is simple: entrepreneurs are not planners, we are executors. Everything sits in the brain and we get moving.
So when did I actually need a written plan? Three moments. When I went looking for investors. When I started working with other people instead of on my own. And when I thought about taking a loan from a bank. That is when it stopped being optional.
There was one more moment, and it is the one that changed how I think about this. Someone asked me to invest in their business, and I found myself asking them: so what is your plan? It is a little funny when you notice it. The person who never wrote his own plan is the one sitting there asking somebody else for theirs. That is when I understood - this needs to exist.
What is a business plan, really?
Here is the way I would put it: a business plan is a sales copy.
It is also a presentation. And the important part is who it is for. You hand it to your investor. You hand it to your potential partner. That is the person who is going to put money into your business, and this document is what brings the cash in. So it has to be built to make that person comfortable enough to invest.
Which is exactly why you cannot put fake things in it. No filler, no padding, nothing you cannot stand behind. A business plan always has to be factual - because if that investor is serious about putting money into your business, they are not going to skim it. They will read that document ten or twenty times.
What has to go in a business plan?
Anything connected to revenue and anything connected to how the business is operated. In practice that is four things, in this order.
Who the customer is. Where does the customer come from? Who are you actually selling this product or service to? This is the most important item on the list, and it goes first for a reason: it is the first thing an investor looks at. Who are you selling to, and what is the market?
Who the competition is. Who else is in this space, and how do you beat them?
How you grow, A to Z. What is the plan to grow this business? Today this, tomorrow this, the day after this. Step by step, how far does your plan go and how do you get there? What do you want to be doing in the future?
How it is managed. Rules, regulation, operations. What actually happens day to day, and how does the organisation move forward? The step by step procedure.
The shortcut version: everything needed to run your business and everything needed to grow it has to be in there.
That includes the money laid out plainly. We start with this much capital. We put this much into marketing initially. From that spend, we expect this much back. Then we take that capital and move forward like this. And in five years, we see the business here, with this much capital. That is business planning. Most of this is already running in your head - the document just takes it out and presents it.
Can AI write your business plan?
Getting the facts right is work you can do yourself, sitting down and checking. You can also use AI for it. Every business plan I have built so far, I built with AI's help.
But AI does not mean ChatGPT here. ChatGPT is not going to build this for you. For this you need AI agents - and if you have them, and you actually put them to work, they will produce a proper plan.
How do you get an AI agent to build a business plan?
The method is the reverse of what most people do, and that is the whole trick. You do not sit there asking the AI questions. You make it ask you.
Step one - tell it what your business is. This is my business, this is what I am like, this is what I am trying to do, and I need my business plan.
Step two - hand it the questions. Tell it: ask me whatever questions you need to ask in order to build this. The exact words I use are "Ask me as many questions as you need to ask me" and "Interview me." Until I am sure, this plan is not finished. Then it starts asking - about your business, about your vision, about everything around it. You answer, and then you tell it to build the plan.
Step three - stress-test what comes back. Once it has produced the plan, do not accept it. Ask it: are you sure about this plan? Ask what weaknesses it could have. Ask what an investor would think reading this.
Then read the output yourself, one more time, with a specific question in your head: if you were the investor, would you put money into this business plan? Only after that is the plan appropriate.
Is it still your plan if AI made it?
Yes, and this is the part worth being clear about.
AI helped you. The plan is still yours - because it was asking you the questions. It pulled the plan out of your own mind and presented it back to you. That is not totally AI's plan. That is your plan. You just got efficient about building it.
What else is a business plan good for?
If your company grows and more people come in, more managers get added, the thing gets genuinely big - the plan is what gives the company direction.
At small scale you may not need much of it. If you have it anyway, there is no loss in that. But at large scale it gives you internal direction: which way to move, and how to move.
And it is not mandatory. Banks do ask for a business plan, but they ask new businesses. An old business that is already generating revenue - they do not ask for it with anything like the same weight.
One last thing
What is written down is not necessarily what happens. A business plan can change at any moment.
It is a medium that gives you a guiding direction. It is not a fixed rule and it is not a law, and there is no "it has to be done exactly this way." That is worth understanding before you start writing.
So: where is your business plan right now - on paper, or still only in your head? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.