Executive Summary
[Name of the Company] is a credit repair company that is committed to assisting clients in raising their credit scores so that they may take advantage of more favorable financial prospects. By providing individuals with information and efficient solutions for repairing their credit, we want to provide them the ability to reclaim control of their own financial life and realize their ambitions.
Your executive summary is the first part of your business plan, but you usually write it last because it’s a summary of all the important parts.
The purpose of your executive summary is to quickly grab the reader’s attention. Tell them what kind of credit repair business you own and how things are going. For example, are you a new business, do you have a credit repair business that you want to grow, or do you have a credit repair business that is already well-known and you want to sell it?
Next, give a quick summary of each part of your plan.
- Describe the credit repair business in a few words.
- Talk about what kind of business you have to fix credit.
- Detail your direct competitors. Describe your ideal customers.
- Briefly describe your marketing plan. Find the key players on your team.
- Describe in general terms how you plan to handle your money.
Company Overview
In your business summary, you will say what kind of credit repair business you have.
For example, you could focus on one of the following kinds of credit repair businesses:
- Credit bureau disputes: This type of credit repair company looks at the customer’s credit report and files credit bureau disputes on their behalf to get mistakes like late payments, bankruptcies, and foreclosures taken off.
- Legal services: This kind of credit repair business is run by lawyers or paralegals. They help people whose credit has been damaged by things like identity theft, medical bills, and student loans.
- Full-service credit repair: This type of business offers its customers a full range of credit repair services, from consultations to stop-and-desist letters and identity theft protection.
- DIY Credit Repair is a type of business that helps people fix their own credit by giving them software.
In the company overview, you should say what kind of credit repair business you will run and give some background on the company.
Include answers to questions such as:
- When and why did you start your own business?
- What are the most important steps you’ve taken so far? Milestones could include the number of clients served, the number of cases with positive outcomes, making $X in revenue, and so on.
- Your legal business Do you run your business as an S-Corporation? An LLC? A business with just one person? Tell us about your legal structure.
Industry Analysis
In your industry or market analysis, you should describe the credit repair industry as a whole.
Even though this seems useless, it can be used in more than one way.
First of all, learning about the business of credit repair makes you smarter. It helps you understand the market better.
Second, market research can help you come up with a better plan for marketing, especially if you use it to find market trends.
The third reason is to prove to your readers that you know what you are talking about. You do that by doing the research and putting it in your plan.
In the industry analysis part of your business plan for credit repair, you should answer these questions:
- How much money does the business of fixing credit make?
- Is the stock market going up or down?
- Who are your biggest competitors on the market?
- Who are the main sellers in the market?
- What are the changes in the field?
- How quickly do experts think the industry will grow in the next 5–10 years?
- What matters is how big the market is. That is, how big could your business’s target market be for credit repair? You can get such a number by figuring out how big the market is in the whole country and then applying that number to the number of people in your area.
In the customer analysis section of your business plan for credit repair, you must explain who you serve and/or who you want to serve.
Customer segments include people, schools, families, and corporations.
As you might expect, the type of credit repair business you run will depend a lot on the type(s) of customers you choose. People would react to marketing campaigns differently than, say, businesses.
Try to figure out who your best customers are based on how they look and what they think. In terms of demographics, you should talk about the people you want to serve’s ages, genders, locations, and income levels.
Psychographic profiles explain what your ideal customers want and need. If you can understand and define these needs well, it will be easier to find and keep customers.
Competitive Analysis
In your competitive analysis, you should find out who your direct competitors are and then focus on them.
There are other credit repair businesses that directly compete with us.
Indirect competitors are other things that customers can buy besides your product or service that aren’t in direct competition with it. This includes credit consultants, other types of credit advisers, and people who help people with their credit for free. You should also talk about competitions like this.
For each of these competitors, give an overview of their business and a list of their strengths and weaknesses. You won’t know everything about your competitors unless you have worked for one of them. But you should be able to learn important facts about them, such as
- What kind of clients do they work with?
- What kind of a business do they have to fix credit?
- What is the price range (high, low, etc.)?
- What are their strengths?
- What do they not do well?
Try to answer the last two questions from the point of view of your customers. Don’t be afraid to ask customers of your competitors what they like and dislike about them.
The last part of your competitive analysis is to list the ways you are better than your competitors. For example:
- Will you make it easier for people to use or buy your product?
- Will you sell or do things that your rivals don’t?
- Will you give your customers better service?
- Your prices will be better, right?
In this part of your plan, you should think of ways you can do better than your competitors and write them down.
Marketing Plan
Usually, a marketing plan includes four parts: the product, the price, the place, and the promotion. In your credit repair business’s marketing plan, you should include the following:
Product: You should say again what kind of credit repair company you talked about in the “Overview of Your Company” section. Then, explain what goods or services you will be selling. For instance, do you offer goodwill letters to creditors, credit monitoring, or services like those of a paralegal?
Price: Write down what you’ll be charging and how it compares to what your competitors are charging. In your plan, you list the products or services you offer and how much they cost in the “Products and Prices” section.
Place: is the location of your credit repair company. Write down where your business is and how it’s location will affect your success. For example, is your credit repair business in a busy shopping area, a business district, a separate office, or is it only online? Talk about why your website might be the best place for your customers.
Promotions: In the last part of your credit repair marketing plan, you write down how you will bring potential customers to your location (s). Here are a few ways you could promote your business:
- Advertise in local newspapers, radio stations, and/or magazines
- Get in touch with sites
- Distribute flyers. Engage in email marketing
- Put ads on social networking sites
- Improve your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) for specific keywords
Operations Plan
You wrote about your goals in other parts of your business plan. In your operations plan, you talk about how you will reach these goals. Your operations plan should have two different parts.
Short-term daily processes include everything you need to do to run your credit repair business, like answering calls, meeting with clients, talking to creditors, billing and collecting payments, etc.
Long-term goals are the things you want to accomplish in the future. These could be the dates you think you’ll get your Xth client or when you hope to make $X. It could also be when you want to open a new location for your credit repair business.
Management Team
To show that your credit repair business has a chance of being successful, you need a strong management team. Showcase the backgrounds of your key players, focusing on the skills and experiences that show they can help a company grow.
You or someone else on your team should have run a credit repair business before. If so, talk about your skills and experience. But you should also talk about any experience you have that you think will help your business succeed.
If your team is missing something, you may want to form an advisory board. A two-to-eight-person advisory board could help your business by giving advice. They would help answer questions and give suggestions about how to plan. If you need to, look for advisory board members who have run a business that helps people fix their credit.
Financial Plan
Your 5-year financial plan should start with a monthly or quarterly breakdown for the first year, then switch to an annual breakdown for the next four years. Your financial statements include your income statement, your balance sheet, and your cash flow statement.
Income Statement
A more common name for an income statement is a P&L, which stands for “Profit and Loss.” It shows how much money you made and then subtracts how much you spent to show if you made a profit.
To make your income statement, you need to make some assumptions. For instance, will you work with 5 clients a day and/or offer discounts for referrals? And will sales grow each year by 2% or 10%? As you might expect, the assumptions you choose will have a big impact on the financial forecasts for your business. Try to find out as much as you can about your assumptions to see if they are true.
The Balance Sheet
Balance sheets show what you own and what you have to pay back. Balance sheets can have a lot of information, but try to get down to the most important parts. For example, if you put $50,000 into building your credit repair business, you won’t start making money right away. Instead, it is an asset you can use to make money for years to come. Also, you don’t have to pay back a $50,000 check right away if someone gives it to you. You will have to pay that back slowly instead.
Flow of Cash Statement
Your cash flow statement will help you figure out how much money you need to start or grow your business and make sure that you never run out of cash. Most business owners and entrepreneurs don’t know that you can make money and still go bankrupt if you run out of money.
When making your Income Statement and Balance Sheet, be sure to include some of the most important costs of starting or growing a credit repair business:
- Cost of supplies and equipment for the office
- Payroll or salaries that are given to workers
- Businesses need insurance.
- Taxes
- When you start a new business, you will also have to pay for legal fees, permits, computer software, and equipment.