Business Plans and Business Plan Resources

• Business Plan Basics:   This U.S. Small Business Administration site is an excellent source for information about starting or expanding a business. Its website includes a business plan outline or template. There is also a link from this outline to some sample business plans.

• Business Plans and Profiles Index:   This site, from the Business Department at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, provides an excellent index to business plans in a variety of sources, with links in some cases to online editions of plans. One of the print sources cited is the Business Plans Handbook, in the Foster Business Library reference collection, call number HD62.7 B865.

• Elements of a Business Plan:   The Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence is a joint business innovation center in Mobile, Alabama, with information on writing business plans, market research and marketing, raising capital and other elements of entrepreneurship.

• Business Planning:   This site, from BusinessTown.Com, offers tips for creating business plans and planning and financing a new business. There are also suggested web resources including a sample plan for a fictitious kite business.

• Moot Corp Business Plans:   The MOOT CORP competition "simulates entrepreneurs asking investors for funding. MBAs from the best business schools in the world present their business plans to panels of investors." This site provides links to over two dozen winning business plans from business plan competitions, in a variety of industries and covering such products as medical devices, a tourism company, drug screenning, athletic shoes, etc.

• Business and Marketing Plans:   MoreBusiness.Com is another site devoted to small business, billing itself as "by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs." This site offers some business plan examples from Palo Alto Software, including plans for hypothetical companies selling computers and software and providing consulting services. There is also a sample marketing plan.

• Bplans.com:   Maintained by Palo Alto Software, a company that sells business plan software, books and newsletters, this site offers an extensive amount of free information on business and marketing plans for small business including sixty sample plans for startups and for established businesses. The plans were developed by existing companies or new business start-ups as research instruments to determine market viability or funding availability but names, locations and numbers may have been changed, and substantial portions of text may have been omitted.

• The Global Network of Business Plan Competitions:   This site, provided by the M.I.T. $50K Entrepreneurship Competition, offers links to twenty-five U.S. business plan competitions, thirteen European competitions, and two Asian competitions. Some of the websites offer links to the top-rated business plans in their competitions. See their Resources section.

• The Center for Business Planning:   This site is maintained by Business Resource Software, Inc., a firm that sells business and marketing planning software. Their site offers links to general business planning resources and two dozen winning sample business plans.

• Entrepreneurship Education on the Web:   This site, from St. Louis University, ranks business plan sites from one to five stars, based on their utility to students, with seventeen sites including some sample business plan sites.

• Developing a business plan:   This site was developed by Prof. Vandra Huber at the University of Washington Business School and includes sections on approaching the business plan, the business plan outline, and writing the business plan.

Try searching under Subjects--Library of Congress, such as those below, or searching by Keyword, limiting the results of your search to the Foster Business Library location:

• Business Plans
• Business Planning
• New Business Enterprises -- Planning
• Small Business -- Planning