US statesman Benjamin Franklin has given the world this timeless piece of wisdom, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” 

 

Yet, many entrepreneurs leap into initiating their business plans without having a solid business timeline. 

 

Writing a business plan timeline can sound boring, complex, and a waste of time when you're a busy entrepreneur with so much on your plate. However, for many businesses, the timelining phase is a make-or-break step that could save you time, money, resources, and energy in the long run.

 

Let's talk about what a Business Plan timeline is.

 

A business plan timeline is a flexible roadmap to the business's accomplished and pending goals. Any startup or new business must use a business plan timeline to track its achievements, milestones, and failures. In simple terms, a business plan timeline is a guide that outlines and tracks the progress of your business to date. It features the effectiveness of business strategies to track productivity, such as digital marketing tasks, market research projects, and organizational operations activities.

 

You’ve created a strategic business plan — now what? You need some additional planning documents to help map out your long-term strategy by outlining your daily actions. Stay on track with our carefully structured Top 10 Business Operational Plan Templates with Samples and Examples!

 

Why do you need a business plan timeline template?

 

The thought of starting a business plan can be an exciting time. No matter how excited you are to start with your great idea, it pays to slow down and create a timeline that will help determine loopholes in your plan and identify structural weaknesses of your business at an early stage. A good timeline template presents a road map to structure, operate, and grow your business. Competitors are waiting to outshine, even ambush, you. Thus, a business plan timeline template helps identify your company's core strengths using a balanced combination of logic and strategy.

 

From business analysis to financial projections, our thoughtfully-designed business plan timeline templates will set benchmarks, proactively align your team around a shared objective, and help avoid getting off track.

 

The 100% customizable nature of the our business plan ppt templates provides you with the desired flexibility to edit your presentations. The content ready slides give you the much-needed structure.

 

Check these out now!

 

Template 1: 10-Day Timeline Information Technology Marketing Activities Business Planning

Initiating marketing activities with a clear plan leads to consistent achievements. Use this 100% customized 10-Day Timeline Information Technology Marketing Activities template to present your data in a clear, easy-to-understand format. The template includes 11 slides, including a 10-day timeline, information, technology, marketing, and activities.

 

10 Days Timeline

 

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Template 2: 3-year Planning Timeline Business Plan Achievement Innovation Development

Keep your audience glued to seats with this professionally designed 3-year planning timeline Template. The template revolves around a new product innovation timeline, including innovation, transformation, strengths, weaknesses, efficiency, and effectiveness of a product. This deck comprises ten slides with creative visuals and well-researched content with appropriate layouts, diagrams, graphs, icons, charts, etc.

 

3 Year Planning Timeline

 

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Template 3: Three-month Business Planning Timeline

A business plan is a set of actions or processes that describe how an organization plans and runs. This three-month Business Planning Timeline helps you demonstrate business plans essential for an organization to grow and accomplish its goals. The template helps in discussing approaches, techniques, tips, strategies, tools, and processes available with your team to achieve a target.

 

3 Months Business Planning Timeline

 

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Template 4: Monthly Business Plan Animation Timeline

Guide your team about theories and methods of the sales planning and selling with this impressive Monthly Business Plan Animation Timeline Template. Clearly share your organization's vision, mission, and milestones timeline with your team. Get an overview of the specific market segments which your organization is targeting. It also helps identify the areas for improvement, failures, and weaknesses.

 

Monthly Business Plan Animation Timeline

 

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Template 5: Business Plan Executive Summary Company Timeline

A company's executive summary is like the back cover of your book. Capture and hold interest with this well-crafted and engaging business plan executive summary company timeline template that can effectively display the organization's policy, description, financial information, project fund investment, and market analysis. The template helps decision-makers get the gist of the entire project with just a flip through the executive summary.

 

Business Plan Executive Summary Company Timeline

 

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THE TEST OF TIME

 

Multiple business plans come and go, but a business timeline has always stood the test of time. A business timeline is more than a bunch of numbers, scribbles, and buzzwords. It is a visual walkthrough of your business's journey and a roadmap to achieve key milestones while remaining useful and valued among competitors. Creating certainty, clarity, and consistency are the three foundations of a winning business plan template.

 

Don't wait! Grab your favorite business plan timeline template from the above set, prioritize your time better, and hire the right people at the right time for the right role.

 

 

FAQs on Business Plan Timeline

 

 

What is a timeline in a business plan?

 

The timeline is primarily a part of the Operations Plan of your business. However, you can also incorporate some key highlights from the timeline in the executive summary. 

 

A business plan timeline refers to a timeframe assigned against the established key milestones to show the expected duration to reach each of them. Your business plan timeline depends on historical and real-time data for it to be as practical and realistic as possible. An ideal business plan timeline includes the following elements:

 

  • Where do you want to reach?
  • When do you want to reach?
  • How do you want to reach?

 

How do you write a timeline for a business plan?

 

First, to create a timeline, schedule your milestone list and put it into a timeline format for a quick visual reference. Make sure milestones are sorted by priority. There are many ways to create a business plan timeline. Some of these are:

 

  • Gantt charts
  • Calendars
  • Excel sheets
  • Templates

Choose the format that works best for you, depending upon the functionality and the ease of use to track progress of completed tasks. However, you can always use our well-designed and researched business timeline templates to curate yours.

 

What are the seven steps of a business plan?

 

A good business plan provides direction to the company, attracts investors, and converts visitors into buyers. 

 

Now, how do you write a business plan?

 

  1. Research: To write the perfect plan, you must intimately know your company, product, competition, and market.
  2. Determine the purpose of your plan: Your plan is a road map that provides directions, steers the business towards gradual success, and helps avoid any bumps.
  3. Create a company profile: It displays the history of an organization, the products and services offered, the target market and audience, financial resources, and how you're going to solve a problem.
  4. Document business aspects: Investors want to ensure your business is profitable. Thus, they do in-detail research about your company. Document everything to help with this process, so you don't miss anything.
  5. Build a strategic marketing plan: A great business plan must include a strategic marketing plan that demonstrates your marketing activities and efforts.
  6. Make your plan adaptable based on your target audience: Each reader does have different interests. If you're successfully capturing these interests and data early, you can incorporate them while preparing a business plan for a particular audience.
  7. Explain why you care: Whether you're sharing your plan with an investor, team member, or a customer. Your plan must confidently present that you're passionate, dedicated, and care about your audience, business, and the plan.

 

What is a project timeline in a business proposal?

 

A business plan is just a wish list without a clear picture of what will happen. The best way to ensure the business plan stays aligned with the project requirements is by maintaining a project timeline.

 

A project timeline lays out the milestones of your business plan, employees' details, organization policy, locations, project fund investment, sales targets, net revenue expected and other targets, and the estimated time it will take to meet these.

 

A project timeline is a chronological list of plans, tasks, and activities that gives project managers a comprehensive view of the project plan. It is usually created in a template or bar chart, where each activity or task is allocated a name along with its start and end date.

 

Mainly, a project timeline provides an in-depth overview of the project, including its start date, due date, and task dependencies, if any.