I have to admit, for years I was a sloppy student. I never learned to write beautifully by hand and it  seems that with every passing year my hand writing is becoming uglier. Lucky for me there are the  computers (I never used a type writer) so when I was in college professors didn’t have to know how  ugly my hand writing actually was. As funny as it may seem to you now, ten years ago I was one of  those people who would first write my project on paper, the old fashion way and then I will go to the school’s library and type it. Most times I was in such a time crunch having just 15 -20 minutes before my class starts that I never paid attention to the formatting of my paper and how it looked visually. I thought that it would be unfair to be graded based on the visual appeal of the cover page of my work and I believed that as long as I have covered all the necessary information I should get a good grade. Besides, who has the time for nice little pictures and colorful graphs?

Boy, was I wrong. My projects were repeatedly marked down. No body said to me that the reason for this was their lack of visual appeal, but the explanations that I got were not satisfying to me. Confident in my knowledge I knew that it had to be the fact that my documents were not very attractive looking, at best they were plane, most times they were plane ugly.

I learned quickly that professors are suckers for good looking papers. They are impressed by little pictures on the cover page, colorful graphs, beautiful pie charts and neatly organized and structured text.  So much so that I dare to say that sometimes it seems that this was more important to them in giving me a good grade than the actual content.

“Why do I care about this?”, you ask. Because the same is true for investors and anybody else who reads documents  of any kind, be it business plans, grand proposals, school papers, or a magazine. People are visual beings, in some areas men more then women, but when it comes to the look of  a business plan, women are just as attracted to good looking, easy to read, well organized business plans as are men.

Want my 2 cents?

Take the time to beautify your business plan, it will pay off. Here some points to consider when you take your business plan for a spa treatment:

• Make sure your cover page is attractive, by including your company logo, a picture or just writing the name of the company in a way that looks good. Click here to read on what information you should include on your ‘Cover Page’.
• Bullet points are my favorite. They help the readers easily find the main points that you would like to emphasize.
• Use of charts and graphs should be simple and easy to read.
• Font type and size changes should be limited and subtle.
• Make sure your plan prints well in black and white. Consider using shading and texture for graphs and charts.
• If you have many contributors developing the business plan, make sure you have one writing voice.
• Make sure a third party proofreads your business plan before you submit it anywhere.
• Support assumptions whenever possible.
• Always use positive word choices. Avoid “might”, “maybe”, “probably”,  etc.
• Don’t overstate and exaggerate.