Skip to content
mif-docs

Skill reference: business-plan

Skill reference: business-plan

Section titled “Skill reference: business-plan”

The business-plan skill authors one document genre: a full investor- and lender-ready business plan — a comprehensive, standalone planning document that states what the business is, who it serves, how it competes, how it operates, and how it makes and spends money, written so a lender, investor, or partner can decide whether to fund or work with it from this document alone. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

Property Value
Authors A full SBA/SCORE-style, Lean-Canvas-informed business plan
Purpose group Business planning
MIF conceptType semantic
Target MIF level 3
Primary source SBA/SCORE business-plan convention (guidance and checklist, not a certifying format standard) plus Lean Canvas problem-solution framing

What this document type is

Section titled “What this document type is”

A business plan is a standalone deliverable that states a business’s identity, market, competitive position, operations, management, and financial plan in one document, written so a lender, investor, or partner can decide whether to fund or work with it without needing any other source. Its defining trait is the Financial Plan & Projections section’s disclosed assumptions: a 3-statement projection (income statement, cash flow, balance sheet) over a 3-year horizon, a break-even analysis, and every material assumption behind the projected figures (pricing, unit volume, growth rate, cost basis) stated explicitly. A plan that presents projected revenue or profitability without those assumptions is not a conformant business plan, no matter how polished the narrative reads.

The genre follows the widely-used SBA/SCORE-style structure — Executive Summary through Appendix — as conventional practice among lenders and business counselors, not a single codified format standard: the SBA publishes guidance and a checklist, not a certifying format, and the document must say so rather than claim an “SBA-approved format.” Lean Canvas contributes the Problem/Solution/Unique-Value-Proposition/Unfair- Advantage framing used within the Company Description, Products & Services, and Competitive Analysis sections, particularly for early-stage ventures.

This is distinct from a document that scopes a single feature’s build (a prd or feature-spec), a fieldwork-and-sampling study of a market at a point in time (a market-research-report), and a pure technical trade-off evaluation (an engineering report).

How the skill produces one

Section titled “How the skill produces one”

business-plan is a genre skill: it carries the eleven-section SBA/SCORE pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a lender-readable plan and a machine-conformant unit.

  • Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes Executive Summary, Company Description, Products & Services, Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Marketing & Sales Strategy, Operations Plan, Management & Organization, Financial Plan & Projections, a genre-conditional Funding Request, and Appendix. It treats the Financial Plan’s assumption disclosure as mandatory, not optional matter, requires every external market or competitive claim to trace to a cited source or an explicitly labeled assumption, and keeps the Funding Request section conditional on whether financing is actually being sought rather than stubbing it with invented numbers.
  • Mermaid by default, svg-charts when it isn’t enough. Revenue, use-of-funds, and simple market-segmentation charts within Mermaid’s documented range are rendered as fenced mermaid blocks (xychart-beta, pie) directly in the skill’s own instructions — the same convention already used by market-research-report, competitive-quadrant, trend-analysis, and c4-model-diagram. For charts that exceed that range — more than roughly five competitor/segment slices, or a specific brand color palette a plan needs to match — business-plan cross- references the new svg-charts helper, which generates a standalone .svg file and the <img> line to embed it, since GitHub strips inline <svg> markup from rendered markdown.
  • Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the Level-3 target), bad.md (a counter-example missing the Financial Plan assumption disclosure), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at Level 3.
  • MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of semantic, reflecting that a business plan is declarative planning knowledge — what the business is, how it competes, its financial plan — not a time-bound event or a step sequence. mif-validate proves the Markdown ↔ JSON-LD round-trip is lossless before the document is considered done.

When it is beneficial

Section titled “When it is beneficial”

Reach for business-plan when the deliverable must justify business development, financing, market planning, market research synthesis, or strategic planning decisions with a disclosed financial plan — a founder or operator who needs a single document a lender, investor, or internal decision-maker can act on without other context.

Do not use it to scope a single feature or product’s build — that is a prd (problem, goals, requirements) or feature-spec (the build-ready slice), not a whole-company plan. Do not use it for a fieldwork-and-sampling study of a market at a point in time — that is a market-research-report, which can be commissioned first and then cited as a source within a business plan’s Market Analysis section rather than substituting for the plan. Do not use it for a pure technical trade-off evaluation — that is engineering. Do not use it as a short, standalone decision brief — that is exec-summary; a business plan’s own Executive Summary section fills this role within the plan, not as a separate genre invocation. The cost is discipline: a plan that presents financial projections with no disclosed assumptions, or stubs a Funding Request with invented numbers when no financing is sought, is not a conformant business plan.

Example

Section titled “Example”

A business plan titled “Meridian Cold-Brew Coffee Co. — Second Location & Wholesale Expansion (2026)” opens with an Executive Summary stating the $150,000 SBA 7(a) financing request and the company’s first-year traction ($310,000 revenue, 58% gross margin). Company Description frames the Lean-Canvas Problem (no mid-price, high-quality grab-and-go cold-brew option in the target market) and Solution (an 18-hour slow-extraction process at grab-and-go speed). Financial Plan & Projections discloses pricing, volume-ramp, and cost-basis assumptions behind a 3-year revenue projection ($340K / $480K / $640K), rendered as a mermaid xychart-beta bar chart, plus a break-even month and a note that the year-3 figure is a lower-confidence extrapolation. Funding Request states the $150,000 amount, use of funds (rendered as a mermaid pie chart), and the 10-year SBA 7(a) term sought.

Provenance & citations

Section titled “Provenance & citations”