You're just starting a small home based business. Do you really need a business plan?

The answer is yes, definitely! But before we get into why you should write a business plan, let's explore a few of the reasons that many home-based business owners don't.

• I’m too busy running the business
• My business is still small – I'll do a business plan later
• Writing a business plan seems way too complicated

Is your "to do" list running your business?

A situation that I see time and time again is people who are working really hard in their business, but not really getting anywhere. They often have a wonderful business concept that they feel inspired by. They also have a daily “to do” list that would keep anyone busy for months. Everything seems equally urgent and so they run around madly trying to do it all. Soon a year or more passes and the business is still not launched.

What's going on here?

Michael Gerber author of classic business book, The e-Myth Revisited, describes this trap as working in your business rather than on your business. This means that if you don't plan your actions according to a bigger picture of what you want for your business, you'll fail to get the results you want.

A lack of planning is one of the top three reasons businesses fail, according to the Small Business Development Center. So the old saying, “Failing to plan is planning to fail” turns out to be true.

If you don't know where you're going...

Don't make the classic mistake of assuming because you are just starting out, a business plan isn't necessary yet. Every business needs a business plan, not just big companies.

Every business starts at the beginning and every business starts small. But what separates the successful business from the struggling business is a vision.The founders of a visionary company have a broad and deep understanding of what they are building. Walt Disney was not creating a cartoon character, he was fulfilling a vision.

Some of the biggest benefits of a business plan are its ability to create focus, to encourage big picture thinking and to help you make decisions for the long-term and the short-term in a way that consistently moves you forward.

There's more than one way to write a business plan

The classic outline for a business plan is not designed for small business owners who are financing their own business. It’s too long and requires too much extraneous information. If you're not trying to get a bank loan, you do not need to write one of those long business plans.

A one page business plan® is a simple solution for including just the information you need and no more. This cuts the writing time dramatically.

More importantly, forcing yourself to discover and summarize the important information onto one page provides a laser focus on what is most important to the management and growth of your business. Parts 2 and 3 of this series will describe the components of a one page business plan®.

You can read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

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This post was written by guest blogger Amy Grossman, MBA. Amy is a One Page Business Plan® Certified Consultant who makes it easy for solo-preneurs to write a business plan. For more information, get Amy's free 7-part e-course "Top 7 Business Plan Myths Exposed".