Making sense of product and service plans format

This section is read by somebody trying to work out your gross margin and how many things you sell. Format decides whether they can do that quickly or have to reconstruct it from prose.

The material below is presentation only. What belongs in the section is a separate question, and a beautiful layout over an undecided offer helps nobody.

What to take away

Where it sits and how long it runs

It follows the company description and comes before the market work, so a reader knows what is sold before being told who buys it. Two pages is generous for most small businesses. Where an application supplies headings, use theirs exactly, and where none is supplied the order in the federal planning guidance is a safe default.

One block per line, in the same shape

If the business has three revenue lines, the section has three blocks.

Repeating the shape lets a reader compare lines without hunting, which is exactly what they want to do, and it is the proportion discipline the plan guide applies to every section. Variety in structure looks like effort and reads as evasion, because the reader cannot tell whether a missing element was omitted or simply moved.

Where a business has more than four or five lines, group them into families that share a cost structure and a customer, describe the families, then treat the two or three items that carry most of the revenue individually.

The table that does the most work

One table, with a row per line and these columns: unit of sale, price, direct cost per unit, contribution, and how often a customer buys.

That table is what a reader would otherwise build themselves on the back of an envelope, and building it for them is the single most useful format decision in the section. Keep the figures identical to the ones in the projections, and state the unit and the period in the header rather than in a footnote.

If a value is a range because pricing is being tested, show the range and mark it. A range with a stated floor is honest. A midpoint invented to fill a cell is not.

Prose, and how much of it

Each block needs a paragraph a non-specialist can follow, describing what the customer gets and what delivery involves. Assume no technical background at all where the reader is a lender.

Define trade terms the first time they appear. A reader who meets three undefined terms in a paragraph stops reading for meaning and starts reading for the end of the section.

Keep adjectives out. Every one of them occupies space that a fact would use better, and the reader is trying to reach the margin table.

What to move to the appendix

Specifications, drawings, photographs, full price lists, sample contracts, warranty terms and testing results. Number them and reference the numbers from the section, so a reader can check one without leafing.

Photographs earn their place for anything physical, because they answer questions faster than paragraphs, but they belong behind the section rather than inside it. A page of product images in the middle of a plan reads as a brochure, which is the register this section most needs to avoid.

What to leave out entirely

A business plan circulates. It goes to a lender, then to a credit committee, then into a file, and sometimes to a reader who also knows your competitors.

Keep out of it anything you would not want read by all of those: process detail that is genuinely secret, source code, formulations, and unfiled inventions. Public disclosure can affect what is still available to protect, which is one reason the patent basics is worth reading before you describe an invention in a document you hand out.

Describe the effect rather than the method. A reader needs to know what the thing does and why it is hard to copy, not how it is made.

Print, accessibility and files

Print the margin table at document size and check that no column has wrapped into an unreadable stack. Use real headings rather than bold text so the block structure survives a screen reader and a table of contents.

Where a portal sets character limits, write the shortest field first. Keep your own full version. Save the mapping between your blocks and their fields for next time.

Keep each line's name identical across the plan, including the sales plan and the company description. Two names for one product make a reader conclude there are two products.

Common questions

How many products is too many to list?

More than five individually. Group beyond that, then break out the ones that carry the revenue.

Should prices appear in the section or only in the appendix?

In the section, in the table. A plan that hides its prices invites the assumption that they have not been decided.

Do I need a specification sheet for a service?

Something equivalent: what is included, what is excluded, and what a customer has to provide. Exclusions are the part that prevents arguments, and they are usually missing.

Can I reuse my website copy here?

Not without rewriting it. Website copy is written to persuade a buyer; this section is written so a reader can compute a margin. The registers are different and the mismatch is obvious.