Distribution and Marketing Strategy: Describe how you will go to market, how you will price your products, etc.
Risk Analysis: Identify major sources of risks, and describe how you are mitigating them.
Milestones: Showcase a strong past track record, and describe key checkpoints for the future.
Company and Management: Provide the basic facts about your company - where and when you incorporated, where you are located, and brief biographies of your core team.
Financials: Provide summaries of your P&L and cash flows, and the assumptions used to come up with these. Also describe your funding needs, how you will use the proceeds, and possible exit strategies for investors.
As stated earlier, there is no "right" structure - you will need to experiment to find the one that best suits your business.
Your business plan is very often the first impression potential investors get about your venture. But even if you have a great product, team, and customers, it could also be the last impression the investor gets if you make any of these avoidable mistakes.
Financial Model Mistakes
Forgetting Cash
Revenues are not cash. Gross margins are not cash. Profits are not cash. Only cash is cash.
For example, suppose you sell something this month for $100, and it cost you $60 to make it. But you have to pay your suppliers within 30 days, while the buyer probably won't pay you for at least 60 days.
In this case, your revenue for the month was $100, your profit for the month was $40, and your cash flow for the month was zero. Your cash flow for the transaction will be negative $60 next month when you pay your suppliers.
Although this example may seem trivial, very slight changes in the timing difference between cash receipt and disbursement - just a couple of weeks - can bankrupt your business.
When you build your financial model, make sure that your assumptions are realistic so that you raise sufficient capital.
Lack of Detail
Your financials should be constructed from the bottom-up, and then validated from the top-down.
A bottom-up model starts with details such as when you expect to make certain sales, or when you expect to hire specific employees.
Top-down validation means that you examine your overall market potential and compare that to the bottom-up revenue projections.
Round numbers - like one million in R&D expenses in Year 2, and two million in Year 3 - are a sure sign that you do not have a bottom-up model.
Unrealistic financials
Only a very small handfull of companies achieve $100 million or more in sales only five years after founding.
Projecting much more than that will not be credible, and will get your business plan canned faster than almost anything else.
On the other hand, a business with only $25 million in revenues after five years will be too small to interest serious investors.
Financial forecasts are a litmus test of your understanding of how venture capitalists think.
If you have a realistic basis for projecting $50-100 million in Year 5, you are probably a good candidate for venture financing. Otherwise, you should probably look elsewhere.
Insufficient financial projections
Basic financial projections consist of three fundamental elements: Income Statements, Balance Sheets, and Cash Flow Statements. All of these must conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP.
Investors generally expect to see five years of projections. Of course, nobody can see five years into the future. Investors primarily want to see the thought process you employ to create long-term projections.
A good financial model will also include sensitivity analyses, showing how your projected results will change if your assumptions turn out to be incorrect. This allows both you and the investor to identify the assumptions that can have a material effect on your future performance, so that you can focus your energies on validating those assumptions.
They should also include benchmark comparisons to other companies in your industry - things like revenues per employee, gross margin per employee, gross margin as a percentage of revenues, and various expense ratios (general and administrative, sales and marketing, research and development, and operations as a percentage of total operating expenses).
Conservative assumptions
Nobody ever believes that assumptions are conservative, even if they truly are.
Develop realistic assumptions that you can support, refrain from using the words "conservative" or "aggressive" in your plan, and leave it at that.
Offering a valuation
Many business plans err by stating that their company is worth a certain amount. How do you know? The value of a company is determined by the market - by what others are willing to pay - and unless you are in the business of buying, selling, or investing in companies, you probably don't have an acute sense of what the market will bear.