What this is, and what it is not

The honest comparison

A business plan consultant does four things. We do two of them well, one of them partly, and one not at all.

They interview you. Two calls, fifty to a hundred questions, and — this is the part that matters — *follow-up* questions. "You said 320 repair orders a month with five technicians. That's two per tech per day. Walk me through it." That challenge is where a plan gets its credibility, and we do not do it. We ask five screens and bound your answers against published industry ranges. That catches an impossible margin. It does not catch an optimistic volume.

They write. So do we, and here we are arguably better: our text is built around figures a deterministic engine computed, and every draft is scanned so that no number can appear unless the model produced it. A tired consultant at 11pm can transpose a digit. Our writer structurally cannot.

They build the financial model. Ours balances to the cent — checked across 1,500 randomly generated businesses — and ships as a live Excel workbook whose formulas are verified to reproduce the same numbers as the document. A surprising number of consultant spreadsheets do not balance, and many hand over a PDF with no model at all.

They chase your documents. They will call you about the missing lease and the seller's tax returns until you send them. We give you a personalised list of exactly what to gather and why the lender wants it — but nobody is going to ring you.

When you should pay a professional instead

• The deal is unusual. A partial partner buyout, multiple entities, a franchise resale with an assignment, seller financing with an earn-out. Structure is where advice earns its fee.
• The numbers are marginal. If your coverage lands near the floor, a professional who has structured fifty of these knows which lever your specific lender will accept.
• You are buying a business and the seller's books are messy. Recasting earnings from disorganised records is judgement work, not arithmetic.
• It is an immigration filing. An E-2 or EB-5 plan is one document in a legal filing. You want an immigration attorney, and they will want a plan to work from — that part we do well and cheaply.

What you actually save

Not the thinking. The assembly: the section structure a lender expects, five years of statements that tie together, the market data pulled and cited, the ratios computed, the downside scenarios run, the document list drawn up for your specific transaction. That is where the fortnight goes.

You keep the Word file and the live Excel model. If you then pay a professional to review it, you are paying for their judgement on a finished draft rather than for typing — which is a much better use of their hourly rate, and usually a much smaller invoice.

On the loan itself

No plan gets a loan approved, and anyone who implies otherwise is selling you something. Lenders weigh your credit history, your collateral, your experience, the industry's condition and their own appetite that quarter. Most of that lives outside any document.

What a good plan does is remove the reasons to say no that a document *can* control: numbers that do not tie, a market section with nothing local in it, a coverage ratio nobody computed, a balance sheet that does not balance.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the U.S. Small Business Administration or any lender. Nothing here is financial, legal, tax or immigration advice.