How to Write a Lean Business Plan (With Template and Examples)
When you decide to start a business, at first you may just have an idea: a product you’ve imagined, a problem you want to solve, or people you want to help. But turning that idea into a viable business requires you to think through the specifics. What will your business model be? How will you turn a profit? How will you grow? Who do you need on your team? What do you actually need to do? This is the kind of information you need to provide in a business plan.
Your business plan is the blueprint for your company, mapping out the specifications you’ll follow to build a successful business. It should also assure stakeholders — like partners, employees, regulators, or investors — that you’ve thought through the challenges and opportunities, that you have all the ingredients for success, and that your idea will work.
Altogether, a traditional business plan can amount to dozens of pages, and the visualizations, research, and financial information can take months to prepare. But not every business calls for that level of formality or comprehensiveness. In some situations, a traditional business plan requires more work and detail than is actually beneficial. That’s where you’ll want to write a lean business plan instead.
A lean business plan is a concise summary of your company’s key details. It briefly outlines how your business works and the path you’ll follow to become profitable. Think of it like an MVBP: a minimum viable business plan.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of writing a lean business plan, and we’ll provide a template with examples. First, let’s discuss how a lean business plan differs from a traditional one.
A lean business plan vs. a traditional business plan
A lean business plan gives someone the idea of what your business looks like and how it works, but unlike a traditional business plan, it’s not designed to convey all of the nuts and bolts of your operations. It may be the only business plan you ever create, or it may be a placeholder or building block you develop into a more detailed business plan down the road.
A lean business plan is a brief overview, not a comprehensive guide
A traditional business plan should contain everything you need to preemptively answer basic questions potential investors and/or cofounders would have, especially regarding your financial information, relevant expertise, market research, and operational details. Investors want to know how their money will get spent, the potential market share, and the founders’ experience. Hence, traditional business plans tend to be loaded with numbers, graphs, and charts, and can take months to create.
You can still use a lean business plan to court investors, but the greater the stakes, and the less familiar people are with you, the more thorough they’ll expect you to be. For major investment pitches, a lean business plan should be considered more of an at-a-glance overview that supplements other resources, while a traditional plan is more of a tome covering everything about your business.
Thanks to its condensed and informal format, a lean business plan is far more approachable than a traditional plan, which can make it extremely helpful in the onboarding process for new hires and keeping employees on the same page about the company’s direction, purpose, and goals.
A lean business plan helps you get started faster
The main person a lean business plan will help is you, the entrepreneur. This is especially true if you’re bootstrapping. You don’t need to spend months doing exhaustive research on competition, ad budgeting, market demographics, and financial projections. A lean business plan strips this process down to the bare bones and gives you something lightweight to work with and adjust as you progress.
You’ll distill the main components into a plan that outlines your business idea, what market problem you’re solving, how you’ll solve it, how much money you need, and when you’ll break even. This makes your idea feel concrete and tangible, giving you steps to get your business idea out of the “someday, maybe” phase.
This accelerated planning process helps you validate your idea before you spend a great deal of time and resources. It’s easier to get mentors, friends, family, and potential collaborators to review a one- or two-page overview of your business idea than it is to get them to read a 40-page business document. And when they’re done, it’s a lot easier to address feedback, too.
A lean business plan tends to focus on smaller milestones
Depending on your intended use, a lean business plan may also involve smaller, more short-term goals and milestones, whereas a traditional business plan should specify all of the milestones you need to achieve in order to become profitable, including a timeline for reaching them.
Mature businesses tend to have more traditional business plans
A business plan for a small niche tech startup is going to look very different from a business plan for an international retailer expanding into new countries. The more mature your business is, the greater the stakes are, and the more complex your business plan will inherently be.
Traditional business plans require far more work
With a greater level of detail, a traditional business plan is clearly going to be significantly longer than a lean business plan. You may dedicate entire paragraphs (or even pages) to describing how various aspects of your business will work, while a lean business plan will usually be more of a summary of each component.
There are no hard-and-fast rules about lengths for either of these documents. The goal is just to convey all of the information necessary for its intended audience and purpose. But a traditional business plan can easily amount to dozens of pages, while a lean business plan may require as little as a single page of writing.
Now let’s dig into the process of actually writing your lean business plan.
How to write a lean business plan
Writing a lean business plan is a lot less intimidating than spending weeks on a traditional plan. And it doesn’t have to be nearly as formal — it can be as simple as a basic Word document, a slide deck, or a spreadsheet. Whatever format you choose, the point is that your lean business plan needs to succinctly describe what your business is, how it will make money, and how you’ll make it work.
You’ll cover a lot of the same information as a traditional business plan, but you don’t need to be nearly as thorough. Similar breadth, far less depth. Here’s what the writing process looks like:
- Identify your audience and use case
- Summarize essential business components
- Add additional elements as useful and relevant
- Plan to make adjustments
Identify your audience and use case
A lean business plan that you write for your cofounder may look different than a plan you share with employees, mentors, or peers. While there are some pretty standardized components, like your business concept, product or service, and target market, what you decide to include will likely depend on your intended audience.
A cofounder or partner, for example, will need to see the big picture, clearly and succinctly communicated, with goals and next steps that align with your shared vision. Employees, however, will get the most from a lean business plan that includes details related to their roles. Depending on what they do, that might look like more focus on marketing plans, sales channels, or product development. Your scale may also affect how specific or generalized your plan is. If you have a small team (or intend to have one), your plan may name specific roles or even individuals. But with a larger company, it may refer more broadly to the types of work that needs to be done.You don’t necessarily need different business plans for different audiences, but your plan should be informed by who will see it and what you intend for them to gain from it.
Summarize essential business components
Generally speaking, a lean business plan should include the same (or similar) components you would provide in a traditional business plan, but with far less detail. What would be pages and paragraphs in a comprehensive plan may be reduced to a sentence or two — just enough to communicate the main point.
Here are some of the elements you may want to include, but note that this isn’t an exhaustive list, and some of these components have enough overlap that you don’t need them all. Just pick the ones that best convey what your business does, how it works, and what you intend to accomplish.
Business concept
This should be a brief overview of your idea. What is your business? A specialty shoe store? A niche social app? A commercial plumbing service? In a sentence or two, describe what your business does.
Business model
Your business model is essentially how you plan to make money. Are you manufacturing a product you’ll sell in bulk to resellers and wholesalers? Is it a retail business? Direct-to-consumer, or business-to-business? Are you generating a user base that you’ll sell advertising to?
Business goals
These are specific milestones you intend to achieve. Before you start listing goals, consider the scope of your plan and how long you intend this document to be current. With a lean business plan, you’ll likely include some smaller, more incremental steps you intend to accomplish in the short term. This might look like starting operations in the next six months, hiring particular roles within a year, reaching production or sales targets, becoming profitable, or accumulating a certain number of users.
Whatever goals you include in your lean business plan, make sure they’re measurable and connected to a schedule.
Target market
Who are your customers? Defining your target market helps clarify your focus and the size of the opportunity. Identify the specific segments of businesses, consumers, or organizations your business will serve or appeal to.
Competitive landscape
Understanding your competition is vital to evaluating the opportunity your business represents. Name specific competitors and the categories of businesses you’ll be up against, and describe any competitive advantages you plan to leverage.
Go-to-market strategy
Your go-to-market strategy describes how you’ll solve a problem or address a need within your target market. What actions will you take to engage and acquire customers? What resources will you utilize?
Financial state
Your current financial state and projections will be most valuable to investors, but it’s important that your lean business plan includes some details about your income and expenses so employees, partners, and other stakeholders can get a broad understanding of your financial position and what you’re expecting in the near future. What assets do you currently have? What are you spending on payroll, leases, utilities, and materials? What does your budget look like?
Add additional elements as useful and relevant
Sometimes adding components to your lean business plan can help convey useful information without requiring significantly more work. You may cover some of these details in other components, but if it feels appropriate, you may want to dedicate a couple sentences to one or more of these as well. Note: These are all optional in a lean business plan, but may be more expected in a traditional business plan.
Mission and vision statements
Mission and vision statements distill your company’s purpose and broad, long-term plan into a couple succinct sentences. Your mission is why you exist, and your vision is what you want your business to become. While you don’t have to include these in your lean business plan, they can be useful components to help give employees and other stakeholders an overview of your company.
Product or service description
Your lean business plan should clearly articulate what you actually offer your customers or users. If your business concept and other overview information doesn’t already cover this, it’s worth writing a couple sentences about what differentiates your product or service from competitors.
Sales channels
Depending on your business and how you intend to use your lean business plan, it may be worth specifying the channels you’ll use to actually sell your product or service. Will you have a direct-to-consumer online store? Will you send sales people door to door? Are events a major sales opportunity? This may be covered by your strategy or business model, but adding specificity will help people understand more about your operations and organizational structure.
Marketing plan
Similarly, including a marketing plan shows where you’ll focus your efforts to grow awareness and acquire leads. What marketing channels and tactics will you use? How will people hear about your business and learn about your offerings?
This may appear to be a lot of components, but remember that you won’t use all of these. You’ll likely only choose about five or six total, including optional ones. Going beyond that will run the risk of creating redundancy, and you want every component of your lean business plan to feel like it makes a unique contribution.
Plan to make adjustments
Lean business plans aren’t set in stone, and as your goals change, you reach new milestones, and your financial state changes, this document will need to be updated. You may also find that you want to add new sections, or expand on existing ones over time. Since a lean business plan doesn’t have the same scope and level of detail as a traditional plan, it’s easier to modify as needed, and making changes is a much smaller commitment.
Lean business plan template
Here’s a template you can use to create your own lean business plan. You can download a PDF version below.
[Insert company name]
Business Concept or Business Model
[One or two sentences summarizing your business idea and/or how your business will generate revenue.]
Business Goals
[One sentence per goal or milestone you intend to achieve, with each goal attached to a timeline.]
Target Market
[One sentence describing who your customers are.]
Competitive Landscape
[One to three sentences naming specific businesses your company will compete against and describing the competitive advantages you will leverage.]
Go-to-Market Strategy
[Three to five sentences explaining the actions you will take and resources you will use to acquire customers and grow your business.]
Financial State
[One to three sentences describing your current financial position, including income, revenue, and expenses. One to three sentences describing your financial projections for 12 months from now.]
Lean business plan example
Here’s a fictional example of what a lean business plan might look like using our above template.
Topher’s Loafers
Business model
Topher’s Loafers is an online marketplace for consumers to buy and sell lightly used slip-on shoes. TL provides templated product pages for sellers to list their shoes, facilitates the transaction, and coordinates shipping with a third-party carrier. TL receives 15% of every sale made on TophersLoafers.com.
Business goals
By the end of 2024, Topher’s Loafers will have 6,000 established sellers (with complete selling profiles and at least one sale) distributed across 40 states. By June of 2025, we will have developed partnerships with three additional major retailers.
Target market
Topher’s Loafers primarily targets men aged 25–50 with a household income of <$100,000 living in the continental United States.
Competition
Topher’s Loafers’ main competitors are online marketplaces including eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and Poshmark. TL will take on these established marketplaces by offering built-in rewards for repeat purchases, creating a more relevant in-store search experience, and enabling top sellers to earn better margins.
Go-to-market strategy
Topher’s Loafers is licensed to sell in 49 states and currently has sellers established in 17 of them. The business will primarily increase penetration in these states with a combination of digital and print advertising, and will expand into new states by partnering with national shoe influencers (we have deals with three of them already). We’re also working to secure slots at local loafer conventions. Most importantly, we’ve established a relationship with a major apparel store to sell shoes returned in an “unsellable” state, which occurs often due to their generous return policy.
Financial state
To date, Topher’s Loafers has generated $50,000 in revenue and just over 5,000 sales. Our expenses include $2,000 per month in ad spend, $4,000 for slots at loafer conventions, $1,000 per year on software subscriptions, and $200,000 on compensation for five employees. By the end of H1 in 2025, we'll be on track to generate $100,000 per year. We expect to break even by the end of 2026 and reach profitability by 2027.
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