# Business plan template — 16-section structure

The canonical structure used by `01-narrative/business-plan.md`. Every public-facing artefact (deck, prospectus, term sheet) derives from this file. Apply the internal-workings scrub (see `internal-workings-scrub.md`) on every revision.

## Section-by-section skeleton

### 1. Executive Summary
One paragraph each: what the company is (legal entity + Companies House identifier + substrate description), what is being raised (size, pre-money, post-money, runway, Round 2 follow-on), demand evidence (numbers with dates), market size + structural tailwind, competitive set in three failing categories + the architectural inversion, bottom-line P&L summary.

### 2. Vision and Mission
Three blocks. **Vision.** Where the company ends up at full execution. **Mission.** What the company gives to its customer day one. **Doctrine.** The structural belief that everything else derives from.

### 3. The Company
Legal entity table (legal name, Companies House number, incorporation date, registered office, SIC, PSC status, sole proposed director on IN01) + pre-investment cap table (sourced from the IN01 verbatim) + post-investment dilution pointer.

### 4. The Market
Subsections: Size of the addressable market (TAM with citation per figure, bottoms-up construction; geography-tier floor — **late pre-seed TAM is expected to clear $1B US / $500M UK / $500M EU**, flag if the named geography sits below its floor); Market growth rate (single CAGR figure with citation + a one-line 3-year market-expansion thesis stating why the market gets bigger and why this company captures more share as it does); Market-share trajectory (path to 3-8% of SAM within 5 years, reconciled line-by-line against the ARR target in Section 12); Structural tailwind (margin squeeze, regulatory tailwind, or equivalent); Self-employed wedge or analogous high-growth segment; Domestic adjacency (next-vertical expansion); International upside (channel partner enabling it); Pricing and TAM (per-customer ACV × addressable count = TAM number).

### 5. The Product
Subsections: What it is (substrate description, CRM-agnostic / data-sovereign positioning); The wedge product (narrowest unit of value, public-by-default if applicable); The upsell path (wedge → high-value output → full substrate); The substrate moat (operator-data + ontological graph + flywheel); Conversation ingestion (or equivalent lock-in mechanic); The network (federation thesis); Asymmetric-capture position (the LLM-binary wrap argument, with commercial-practice insurance); Human-services layer (training, support, white-glove, anti-fragile-against-frontier-AI).

### 6. The Business Model
Revenue streams (subscription tiers + future network-effect revenue). Unit economics — each metric is a named line: **ACV**, **CAC**, **LTV**, **LTV:CAC ratio** (target ≥ 3:1 by Month 12), **gross margin** (target ≥ 70% steady-state), **burn multiple** (net burn ÷ net new ARR; target ≤ 2× during wedge, ≤ 1× post-PMF), **churn** (logo + revenue). Compute-mark-up doctrine ("never mark up the LLM compute; customer pays the LLM provider directly").

### 7. Go-to-Market
Wedge → Beachhead → Blitzscale framework (with months and funding source per phase), demand evidence (40+ EOIs, paid intents, founder dogfood, partnership status — every number cited), GTM partners (one row per named partner with role and source), horse-before-cart logic (public-first wedge that earns trust for the private high-value upsell), geography.

### 8. Competition
Three failing categories: (a) cloud-CRM-bolted-AI incumbents, (b) horizontal-AI providers inaccessible to ICP, (c) new-build cloud-SaaS replacements requiring full migration. RANL differentiation paragraph. Most-direct-competitor counter (CRM-agnostic vs migration-required is the headline rebuttal).

### 9. Operations
Technology stack (foundation model, graph store, hardware tiered by workload, network, hosting), data sovereignty paragraph, IP ownership chain (deed-of-assignment commitment), compliance posture operational summary (pointer to Section 10 for full treatment).

### 10. Compliance and regulatory positioning
Three regulatory regimes: UK consumer protection (DMCC Act for estate agency / equivalent for the vertical), UK data and AI regime (UK GDPR + ICO ADM Articles 22A–22D), EU AI Act (relevant only to international expansion). Adjacent UK obligations (Estate Agents Act / equivalent + AML + sector membership bodies). Closing: "Why compliance is the moat, not the tax".

### 11. Team
Founders (foregrounded) with role + concise career summary + key credentials + pre-investment shareholding. Strategic shareholders from incorporation (advisors, family, JV partners on the cap table from day one). Hiring plan table with month-triggered roles + salary + trigger condition.

### 12. Financial Plan
12.1 Opening balance sheet (M0 after capex). 12.2 Year-1 Income Statement (revenue + COGS + every opex line + depreciation + EBIT + corp tax + net loss). 12.3 Year-1 cash flow summary table (period-by-period opening, net flow, closing cash). 12.4 Closing balance sheet (M12). 12.5 Two-round funding strategy (timing, size, pre-money, purpose, gating evidence per round) — **valuation per round cites `03-cap-table/comparables.md`** (recent comparable rounds: company / pre-money / post-money / multiple / source). 12.6 Contingency levers. 12.7 Use of funds (this round) by bucket.

### 13. Risks and Mitigations
Two-column table: risk + mitigation. Cover Loop / Anthropic / competitor-ships-earlier / wedge-fails-to-convert / founder-transition / counsel-delays / Round-2-market / investor-structure.

### 14. Milestones (the N-month thesis)
Month-by-month table: M0 close + closing conditions; M1 first paying customer; M3 product-engineer hire + ~10 customers; M6 wedge phase complete; M7 Round 2 raise opens; M9 Round 2 closes; M12 break-even.

### 14b. Exit thesis
Target exit value (£m), horizon (5–8 years), exit routes considered (strategic acquisition, PE rollup, IPO) with a one-line view on which route is most likely and why. **3–5 named acquirers**, each with a one-line rationale (why they would buy: distribution gap, technology gap, defensive play, vertical entry). Sourced from `08-market/sources.md` and `03-cap-table/comparables.md` (recent exit comparables: company / acquirer / multiple / year / source). Body references "Appendix B" by title.

### 15. The bottom line
Summary table of headline numbers (raise size, pre-money, post-money, dilution, runway, Y1 revenue/loss/cash-burn/closing-cash/ARR, break-even month, Round 2 timing/size). Closing paragraph.

### Appendices
Cited documents listed by title only. Each available to a serious investor on request; internal-only working documents are not listed.

## Writing rules

- **Numbers cite their source.** Every figure in the body links to an Appendix entry that is itself a publicly-shareable document.
- **No internal commentary.** See `internal-workings-scrub.md`.
- **No em-dashes between alphabetic words** in user-facing prose. Use colons, parentheses, semicolons, or rewrites.
- **Even-page-count parity** if the document is printed; add a supporting page if a section change breaks parity.
- **One pre-investment cap table source: the IN01.** Reconcile the nominal-value discrepancy (e.g. £0.001 vs £0.01) before writing the balance sheet.
