Like other business plans, the content of a car dealer business plan covers four main steps to success. These steps are “opportunity”, “capacity”, “activities” and “results”.

Chance

The industry, customer, and competitive analysis in your business plan demonstrates the opportunity. This should identify that customers in your local market need a distributor of the type you have chosen because competitors are not fully meeting their needs or because their demographics are changing (more population, richer, poorer, more families, etc.) The opportunity It could also be that a certain combination of services from your dealership could improve on what competitors are currently doing. The general situation of the industry must look to the future, what the car sales market will be like in six months, a year or more, when the dealership is really open.

Ability

The experience of the management team, its license as a car dealer and the financial resources that the partners can contribute cover the ability of the entrepreneur to take advantage of this opportunity. Funders reading the business plan hope that there is also a cash element missing from the entrepreneur’s capacity at this time. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be reading the plan in the first place.

Activities

Marketing and operations plans cover the activities the company will engage in to attract car buyers (and car sellers if it is also a used car dealer) and run the business as efficiently as possible. As a small car dealer, consider how you can make up for this lack of scale, and the cost savings it brings for dealer chains, through creativity and hard work.

Results

Finally, the business success projections and financial section of the plan show the results you and investors should expect. If the results take into account the full costs of the methods you’ve described and include adequate compensation for staff and key players on the team, readers will be less likely to question the cost-related items. If your revenue projections are based on reasonable, researched assumptions about your local market’s car buying behavior, readers are more likely to accept this side of the projections as well.