How to Write a One-Page Business Plan

Why short plans outperform long ones

Long business plans are mostly produced because someone asked for one, usually a lender or a programme application. They are valuable for that purpose and genuinely useless for running a company, because the decisions they contain are buried in prose and cannot be checked quickly.

A one-page plan has two advantages. First, it is short enough to reread before a decision. Second, the constraint forces honesty. You cannot write three paragraphs about four different customer segments on one page and pretend they are all the target. The page makes you choose.

The ten sections

Section	What it must answer
1. Problem	What specific, expensive or painful problem exists today?
2. Customer	Who has that problem, precisely enough to find them?
3. Offer	What exactly do you sell, and what makes it different?
4. Revenue model	How do you get paid: one-off, subscription, usage, commission, retainer?
5. Route to market	Which one or two channels bring customers, and what do they cost?
6. Unit economics	Price, variable cost, contribution margin, acquisition cost
7. Break-even	Fixed costs ÷ contribution margin, in units and in revenue
8. Capacity	What limits how much you can deliver, and when does that limit bite?
9. Risks	What would most likely kill this, and what is your mitigation?
10. Next actions	Three actions, each with an owner and a date

A worked example

Consider a mobile bike repair service.

• Problem: People will pay to avoid dropping a bike at a shop and waiting four days.
• Customer: Commuters within a six-kilometre radius who ride three or more times a week and earn above the local median.
• Offer: Same-day repair at home or work, fixed price list, no diagnostic fee.
• Revenue model: Per-job service fee plus an annual maintenance plan.
• Route to market: Local search plus partnerships with two office buildings and one cycling club.
• Unit economics: $110 average job, $30 in parts and consumables, $80 contribution margin.
• Break-even: $4,000 monthly fixed costs (van, insurance, tools, phone, software) ÷ $80 = 50 jobs a month, or about 12 a week.
• Capacity: Realistically four jobs a day, five days a week, so roughly 85 jobs a month. Above 40 jobs a week you need a second technician.
• Risks: Insurance cost rising faster than price, one competitor undercutting on jobs you cannot discount, and seasonality in winter with a 40% volume drop.
• Next actions: Quote five insurers by 30 September; run a two-week pilot with one office building; publish the fixed price list.

Read together, this reveals the real constraint. The business is not short of demand at 12 jobs a week; that is a modest target. The binding issue is seasonality, because a 40% winter drop takes the business from comfortable to below break-even for three months. That insight, which came from putting fixed costs and volume on the same page, is worth more than the whole document.

Numbers to include, and where they come from

Five figures do most of the work. Price and variable cost you already know. Contribution margin is the difference. Fixed costs should be monthly and complete, including insurance, software, and an honest figure for your own time. Expected volume should come from capacity and evidence rather than optimism, ideally a pilot or pre-orders.

If you cannot state those five numbers, you are not ready to spend money. Go and get one real data point instead. A single paying pilot customer is worth more than a page of projections.

Keeping it alive

The reason plans die is that they are written once and treated as settled. Make it a working document instead.

• Monthly: compare actual volume and revenue against the plan. Update the numbers, keep the original so you can see the trend in your own forecasting accuracy.
• Quarterly: rewrite the assumptions. Prices move, suppliers change, and the customer segment that mattered six months ago may have shifted.
• When a big assumption breaks: rewrite the page that day. Discovering that a channel costs twice what you assumed is exactly the moment the plan is most valuable.

Lastly, write it for yourself first. A plan written to impress a lender tends to contain a market size and a hockey-stick chart. A plan written to make your own decisions contains a break-even volume and three risks. Only one of those plans will stop you from making a mistake you can still avoid.