Business Plan for Starting a Business: The One-Page Version I Use

For years I got paid to build products for startups. Some of them had raised a Series A, so obviously somebody had seen a deck and a plan and liked it. And still, most of them didn't have one paying customer. I was charging them to build the product anyway, so I'm not going to pretend I was smarter.

Then I exited my own company and sat down with my notebook to figure out what was next, and I caught myself doing kind of the same thing. Pages of "I could help small companies build their MVP in 30 days", "I could help IT companies hire from LatAm"... Lots of "I could". Exciting, for about an hour, until I realized every one of those was only potential. I'd have to go out there and find someone who pays.

"Out there... damn." And the dreamer in me said: "you'll do it anyway." And I agreed.

A business plan for starting a business really only has 4 parts: what you sell, to who, how you reach them, and the numbers. The banks and the investors want the formal document with the sections; a one-page plan is the same four things without the padding. So if you googled "business plan for starting a business" hoping for a 20-page template, I'm going to give you something shorter, and be honest about when you need the long one. To actually start you need one page—and its only job is to get you to your first paying customer. The rest you can write later, when it's actually true. Not before.

Do You Need a Formal Business Plan to Start a Business?

Sometimes, but not for the reason people think. Nobody at the registry asks for it; in Canada and the US you can register a sole proprietorship or incorporate without any business plan. You need it when someone is deciding whether to give you money, a bank, a grant program, an immigration program, an investor. They expect a format, okay, give it to them in that format. Ask them for their template, a bank or a grant program almost always has one, and it tells you how long they want it, so you don't have to guess. The sections of a formal business plan, usually 7:

1. Executive summary: one page, written last because it summarizes everything under it, what the business is, who the customer is, what you'll make in year one, what you're asking for.
2. What you sell and who you sell it to: line 3 of my one-pager, with more words.
3. Market and competition: who else serves those people and why they'd move to you.
4. How you'll get customers: line 5 below.
5. Operations and team: who does the work and what it costs.
6. Financial projections: usually three years of revenue, costs, profit, and when you expect to stop losing money. More on these below, most people make them up.
7. The ask: how much money, and what it buys.

If somebody is asking, write it, but after the one page and a few real conversations, so the numbers come from a person who actually paid you and not from a spreadsheet you built at 11pm. The person at the bank has seen enough of those. And the five lines below become parts two, four and six of the long version, so nothing you write today is wasted. And if nobody is asking, skip it. Nobody is going to read it. Not even you. And... that's completely fine.

First Decide Where You Want to End Up

Start with the end in mind, as the saying goes. A business is a car, it takes you somewhere. Most people jump in the car and start driving without writing down how much money they want to make in a year, and two years later they're tired, in the middle of nowhere, and they say they are still figuring things out.

When I sat down with that notebook, the first thing I wrote wasn't an idea. It was a number: $250,000 a year, money home. I knew what a $1M company looks like, I knew 25% net margin is doable, so $250k felt reasonable. Then a second number. My last company took a 10 out of 10 in effort from me, and this time I wanted a 3, maybe a 5.

2 numbers and you have a destination. $100,000 a year, you can do it with almost nothing, a bicycle. $100 million is another thing completely. So decide which one you want before you buy the car.

The One-Page Business Plan for Starting a Business

5 lines. The only rule is you answer with what's true today and not with what sounds good when somebody asks you at a dinner. I did that version for years, it doesn't count.

1. Income and Effort

How much do you want to take home per year? I mean the money that lands in your personal account after everything. Revenue is not what you keep, profit is also not what you keep, there is still stuff to pay after. In my case I wrote $250,000. Write yours, even if it looks stupid right now.

Then score the effort you're willing to give, 0 to 10. A 10 is "this is killing me", a 0 is money coming in without you even noticing. Write that one down as well—you'll need it the day a client shows up who pays very well and consumes your soul.

2. Your Bricks

I don't ask what's a good idea. I ask what you have already, today. I call them bricks, and I stole the word from Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers, from the exercise where he asks in how many ways you can use a brick. Skills, yes, but also professional experience, the way you are as a person, hobbies, the people you know, the languages you speak, the hard stuff you've been through, your education, what you believe in. Write everything, including what looks irrelevant. Say you speak two languages and you did recruiting before, okay, that's a brick. Or as a teenager you were running your parents' restaurant, also a brick. Or you know 40 HVAC owners by first name. With that one you don't need much more. That's a business already, right there.

3. The Seed Sentence

One sentence: I help [audience] achieve [outcome]. No product, no pricing tiers, no name, nothing else yet.

Don't write "small businesses". I can't send a message to "small businesses". Write something like "solo dentists opening a second location this year", now I know who to call. And the outcome, write it the way the dentist would say it, not the way you'd put it on a website. He doesn't want "bookkeeping", he wants to know exactly how much he can pay himself this month.

The test I use: can you name 3 real people who fit, and could you message one of them this week? If not, go back to the bricks.

Your bricks will give you dozens of these sentences, write all of them. Then pick one: how fast could this make money, do I want to do this work, could it grow beyond my own two hands. Keep the rest of the list, you'll come back to it.

4. Who Pays First

Write down who you're going to ask (a real person, someone who already knows you), how much you're going to charge, and the day you'll send the message, inside the next 30 days. This is the line that matters most; if you can't put a name here, something is missing on line 2 or 3.

And "ask" means ask for the sale, which is super uncomfortable, I know. Don't ask "would you pay for something like this?", everybody says yes to that, especially here in Canada, people are too polite to say no, and then you end up building for polite people. Ask "it's $500, can we start Monday?". That's an answer you can actually use. The other one is just people being nice—it doesn't count.

Max, who used to run sales at my previous company, gave himself two weeks after his contract ended: find a client or take the job offer he had. He landed two clients in 14 days, one paid $400 and the other $800. Not much money, but okay, there was a business there.

5. Where the Next Customer Comes From

The hardest problem in any business, mine included and the ones I advise: a reliable way to get new customers on a regular basis. Referrals will get you started, and that's great, that's income, but referrals plateau, and when they do you have a little less work every month and no idea why.

So pick one channel, and pick it by how fast it puts you in a conversation. Direct 1:1 outreach to a short list is the fastest I know. A meetup your people already go to also works, or a partner who is already talking to them. Which one is right for you I can't tell you from here, it depends where your people are. Content and social media work too, but the warm-up is months and right now you need feedback in days. The personal brand you can do later, with money from the customers you found the boring way.

The Four Numbers I Check

Once money starts moving this is the whole dashboard, I still don't have anything more sophisticated: revenue, costs, profit, effort. Is revenue up, are costs down, is profit up, am I working less. That's the whole check. If what you did this week didn't touch any of these 4 numbers, it probably just felt productive. And... it wasn't. I've done that too many times. Redesigning the landing page goes in this bucket, I rebuilt mine four times.

About those projections the bank wants: without customers they're fiction. With one paying client the math is simple, price, times clients per month, times twelve, minus costs. For three years, same formula, change one number at a time and say which one. Put your monthly costs on the same page and mark the month where the two lines cross, that's the break-even the bank is really looking for.

What's Not on the Page

You don't need a website yet. No logo, no name, no incorporation, no business cards, no pricing page with the 3 columns.

My wife Marcela started her business this spring with the sentence from line 3 and nothing else. She turned it into a daily routine of under 15 minutes. Two weeks later she had coffee scheduled with three of the artists she wanted to help and had just met a potential client about a series of events. None of those people asked for a website or a track record.

She didn't even have a corporate email, and the total cost was a $6 coffee.

The first thing I offered at The Execution Lab was a four-month cohort. There was no content. We didn't have the name yet even. We ran it anyway.

The founders who spend a year building before talking to anyone lose the year the day the market says no, and it usually says no. Marcela could change her audience in one afternoon, she had nothing built. Keep it that small until people are coming to you every week, after that you build the nice things and the customers are paying for them.

Incorporate when there's income to protect. Here in Canada you don't even have to register for GST until you make $30,000 in a year, so the paperwork can wait.

Your First Draft Will Be Wrong

Your seed is not going to survive the first ten real conversations. You change the audience, or the outcome, or the price. Sometimes everything. 10 no's and 1 yes, move to the next sentence on your list. Can't get anyone to talk to you 1:1, change the audience.

None of that means the plan failed. A plan's job, as I see it, is just to get you in the market fast so it can correct you while it's still cheap. It works for services, and for anything where somebody can pay before the thing exists.

Which is why I don't say "idea" anymore. An idea you can keep in a drawer for 10 years and it's still a good idea. If I call it the first draft of my business plan, then I already know it's wrong somewhere, I just don't know where, and the only way to find out is showing it to somebody who can pay me.

Do This Today

Take a sheet of paper. 5 lines. 1 hour, not a weekend. Filled in, it looks something like this (made up, but this is the shape):

1. $120,000 home. Effort 4 out of 10.
2. Eight years doing books for contractors, knows 25 of them, speaks Spanish.
3. I help trades contractors who just hired their first employee get payroll and taxes off their plate.
4. Mike from the old job, $600/month, ask on Thursday.
5. Two calls a day to the contractor list, for 30 days.

And tomorrow, not next week, you message the person on line 4.

Remember: 1 page, and 1 real person you ask to pay you. That's Income First, at least the way I do it. If some bank later wants the long version, okay, you write it then. Take what resonates with you and try it—or not!