Registering a company takes half an hour. Building a business takes years. And the difference between the two, most of the time, fits in one word many people find boring: a plan.

I know "business plan" sounds like a college assignment, that 50-page document nobody reads. That is not what I am talking about. The plan that matters is the one that answers, on paper and with real numbers, the questions that will decide whether your company exists in the coming years. Here are some questions that need to be in your business plan:

  1. What is your business about?
  2. What is your main product?
  3. Who is your audience?
  4. How big is your market?
  5. How big is your operation?
  6. How do you manage cash flow to always operate in the positive?
  7. Who are your main competitors, and how big are they?
  8. Where do your leads, your future customers, come from?
  9. How will your sales process work?
  10. Is your main product seasonal, or does it sell all year round?
  11. Who will deliver the service: you or a contractor? And how much will that cost?
  12. What is the average time between selling and finishing the whole service?
  13. Who can you partner with in order to grow?
  14. What other products can you create, so you do not become a one-product company?
  15. Which social networks will you invest in to grow your brand?
  16. How much investment will you start with? That says a lot about the size the company will have from day one.
  17. What is your company's personality? The person and the company are different things, even though one helps the other a lot.
  18. What will the brand's color palette be, and why?
  19. Which system will you use to track your leads?
  20. And, for me, the most important of all: do you want a job or a company? That one is yours to define.

Most people skip this step because they have no idea how important this document is, or out of hurry. And in the dream everything works: on paper the shop is full, the product sells itself, the partners never fight. The plan exists precisely to pull the dream out of the dream and put it on the table: if the idea cannot stand on a sheet of paper, it will not stand when the bills arrive.

More than 10 business plans in 7 years

NEW Intercambio was born in January 2020: Business Number opened, company registered in Canada. Shortly after, the world closed for travel. And here is a truth few people expect from an international education company in that period: the pandemic did not nearly break me. Since I was still setting everything up, expenses were low, and that stopped world became room to grow. Time to study the market deeply, understand the customer and build the foundation calmly. What could have been the end became my preparation period.

It was in that period, in 2020, that I also started writing a book: "How to open a study abroad agency". I stopped at chapter 7, and the reason is simple: I had a newly created agency and almost no experience as an agency. It was too early to teach what I had not lived yet. But let the record stand: that book goes back to being written in 2027, and it will launch with plenty of content, because now the story exists.

And the business plan is the reason I used that room instead of just waiting. From day one it was never a document in a drawer: I have built more than 10 business plans in these 7 years, 3 of them in 2025 and 2 in 2026. And when I say built, it is not changing a comma: it is redoing the entire strategy, because of internal changes in the company or changes in the market, which in my industry never stops moving. A business plan is not a crystal ball. It is a map and a compass: the drawn route changes all the time; the habit of knowing where you are, never.

A promise

And speaking of NEW: 2026 is the seventh year of this story. And I have decided to tell here on the blog, in detail, everything that happened along the way. The whole truth about NEW and about how we got where we got:

  • the partnerships that worked, the ones that went wrong, and the reason for each;
  • the wrong decisions I made, and the right ones too;
  • how the international education world changed over these years, and how I adapted at every turn;
  • the behind the scenes that never left the building.

It will be the full story, the way it happened, without the pretty social media version. This series will come out here on the blog, for my readers. If you do not have access yet, signing up takes a minute and I approve each request myself.

The one-page plan

To finish with something you can use today: if the 20 questions I selected as the start of the plan paralyze you, make yours even more basic. One page, 8 lines:

  1. My business is about...
  2. My main product is...
  3. My audience is...
  4. They pay me... and that needs to happen... times a month.
  5. Staying open costs me... a month.
  6. My leads come from...
  7. My main competitors are...
  8. I want to have: ( ) a job ( ) a company

Whoever answers these eight lines honestly is already ahead of most people who open their doors on enthusiasm and close them on bills. And whoever cannot answer them does not have a business yet: they have an idea, and that is fine too, as long as you know the difference.

What business do you want to open, or have you opened? The comments are yours.