Free Business Templates for Entrepreneur and Startups
Preparing a business plan can be essential for any business entrepreneur who is looking for funds for his projects. However, having a business plan document can also be useful to define the goals of a business project even if we are not looking for investors and we want to bootstrap the business. A business plan can help entrepreneurs to answer the core questions about what is our business model, who are our clients, what are our services/products, and how we will make money from these clients.
Here we will summarize some documents that can be really helpful for any entrepreneur or Lean Startup looking to be agile in their business definition.
1. Business Canvas Template
Experts says that a business canvas can be better than a 100 pages business plan document because it helps to summarize the core concepts in a single canvas or one page document. We can create a business plan document in a canvas by using free canvas document templates for businesses but also free tools online like Lean Canvas. The people of Lean Canvas offers a free tool that helps entrepreneurs to make an online business canvas. Lean Canvas is free to use with only 1 collaborator, but there is also a paid version.
2. One Page Business Plan Template
The One Page Business Plan is another alternate idea that we can use to summarize the business plan and ideas in a single page document. There are many different free templates and documents that we can use to fill the business ideas, one of these is the following One Page Business Plan from The $ 100 Startup.
Alternatively, you may rely on the One-Page Plan PowerPoint template provided by SlideModel.com, which will help you to describe your business plan in a 1-slide page.
Source: 1-Page Business plan template by SlideModel
3. Ash Mauray and Spark 59 ideas for Business Canvas
“How I Document my Business Model Hypotheses” is the question that Ash Maurya answered in this post (he is the creator of Lean Startup that we previously reviewed). Here he explained how to prepare a business plan document from data, learning experience to ideas and then to build, code, measure it. The validated learning loop is the fundamental feedback loop that drives a lean startup and it can be summarized in this business diagram.
The outline helps to figure 3 big questions:
- What is the problem you are trying to solve
- Who are the customers (or which is similar “who has the problem”)
- How do you solve the problem, how big is the market, how are you going to reach the customers, etc.
4. Business Model Canvas and Presentations
The same ideas shown earlier can also be combined in a PowerPoint presentation for example to display a business model in one slide business model presentation, which will be an adaption of the one page business model document but in PowerPoint slides. This same idea can be modeled in this free Business Model Canvas PPT template that you can download for free.
5. Free Business Model Canvas Template for PowerPoint
Another good template that we have made publicly and free for download is the business canvas PowerPoint template inspired in the business canvas created by Alex Osterwalder.
You can download this free business canvas template from this website and use it as an alternative to other canvas so you can describe your business model in a single canvas layout.