Industry
Part of What to Include in Operations Plans for a Business Plan
What a serious operations plans checklist covers
An operations plan checklist in three timed passes: arithmetic against the model, the physical world a reader will test, then the document itself.
This is a checklist for a section you have already drafted. It is not a prompt list for writing one. Work through it with the draft open and a pen, in three timed passes, and mark every item as confirmed, unconfirmed, or not applicable. The unconfirmed column is the useful output.
Nothing here asks whether a topic is covered. Coverage is easy and worthless. Every item asks whether a specific claim in your draft can survive a question.
What to take away
- Check the section against arithmetic first and against prose last. Wrong numbers cannot be fixed by better writing.
- An item that is not applicable should be marked so, not deleted. A reader notices absence and assumes an omission.
- Anything you mark unconfirmed goes into the plan as an open question with a name and a date beside it, or it comes out.
Pass one: arithmetic, twenty minutes
Work with a calculator and the financial workbook open beside the draft.
Twenty-minute arithmetic checks
- Capacity figure equals maximum monthly revenue
- Labor hours per unit times full capacity
- Every named equipment item has a cost line
- Rent, insurance, minimum staffing equal fixed costs
- Supplier and customer terms match cash flow
- Capacity step-up cost in the same month
Pass one: arithmetic
- The capacity figure in the operations text and the maximum monthly revenue in the forecast are the same claim expressed two ways, and you can do the multiplication that connects them.
- Labor hours per unit, times units at full capacity, is a number of hours that the staffing plan actually provides.
- Every named piece of equipment appears somewhere as a purchase, a lease payment, or an existing asset.
- The rent, insurance and minimum staffing you describe add up to the fixed cost line used in the break-even calculation.
- Supplier payment terms and customer payment terms both appear in the cash flow, on the timing you described, not on the month of sale.
- Stock levels implied by lead times and minimum orders are reflected in the working capital requirement.
- Any month where you said capacity steps up has the cost of that step in the same month.
If a line fails here, fix the model before touching a sentence. The prose is downstream.
Pass two: the physical world, twenty-five minutes
Read as somebody who has run a business like yours and is looking for the thing you have not done.
What an operator looks for
- Order-to-payment steps each have an owner
- The constraint named in one sentence
- Premises hold equipment, stock, people
- Shift patterns covered including absence
- Every input has lead time and second source
- Licenses listed with authority and status
- Single biggest day-stopping failure addressed
Pass three: the document itself, fifteen minutes
Pass three: the document itself
- The section describes a process before it describes categories. Readers follow a flow more easily than a taxonomy.
- No sentence would still be true if you swapped in a different business in the same industry.
- Every number carries an origincounted, quoted, tested or assumed, with a date where it matters.
- Detail that a reader would not act on has moved to an appendix.
- Terms specific to your trade are defined the first time they appear.
- The section is under three pages, or you can say why it needs more.
- Names, dates and figures agree with the team section and with the offer described in the product and service section.
Items that only apply to some businesses
Mark these not applicable rather than skipping them, and say so in a line, because a reader who expects one and finds nothing assumes you forgot.
Conditional items to mark
Do you hold stock?
Turnover, shrinkage, storage stated
Do you employ licensed staff?
| If you | Confirm |
|---|---|
| Hold stock | Turnover assumption, shrinkage, and where it is stored |
| Employ licensed staff | Which license, who holds it, and cover when they are absent |
| Handle food, health or children | The inspecting authority and your current standing with it |
| Take deposits or prepayments | How the money is held and what a refund costs you |
| Depend on one site | What happens if it becomes unavailable |
| Ship physical goods | Carrier terms, damage rate, and who pays for returns |
| Run on a single software platform | What the manual fallback is for a day without it |
What this checklist deliberately does not ask
It does not ask whether you have a mission statement, an organizational philosophy, or a paragraph about quality being a priority. Those pass every check and change nothing. A reader treats them as filler because they are.
It also does not ask you to predict. The section's job is to say what you can do, how you know, and what would change the answer. Where the honest answer is that you will find out in the first quarter, write that, with the date you will know by.
Sign-off
Write three lines at the end of your working copy, not in the document you send.
Three sign-off lines
- Capacity number, date calculated, who checked it
- Unconfirmed items, each with a name and date
- The assumption that does most damage if wrong
- The threshold that triggers reopening the section
If you can write those three lines, the section is finished for now. Reopen it when a lease is signed, a supplier changes terms, a license is granted or refused, or actual volume departs from the capacity assumption by enough to matter. Set that threshold now, while you still remember why you chose it.
Federal guidance on writing the plan as a whole stays current on the Small Business Administration's planning pages. This includes how operating detail sits beside the rest.
For the safety obligations behind several items above, the practical starting point is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's guidance on safety management. It explains how a small operation builds a program, not what any particular rule requires.
Then run the same discipline over the rest of the document, starting with the operations pillar and the financial projections the numbers above feed.
Common questions
How is this different from reviewing the section?
A checklist confirms specific claims against evidence you already have. A review asks whether the section is the right section at all, whether the constraint is really the constraint, and whether a reader would believe you. Do the checklist first; it is faster and it removes the errors that make a review pointless.
What if most items come back unconfirmed?
Then you have learned the section is a draft rather than a document, which is worth knowing before someone else finds out. Work the list in order of what a reader will test first: capacity, cash timing, and permissions.
Do I need to keep the completed checklist?
Keep it with the plan. When you update the document in six months, the unconfirmed column tells you exactly what to reopen, and the sign-off lines tell you what you believed and why.
Can somebody else run this for me?
Yes, and it is better if they do. Give them the draft and the workbook, and ask them not to fix anything. Their job is to mark items, not to improve prose, and a fresh reader catches the arithmetic mismatches you have stopped seeing.
