1. Stay focused - Stick to basic, do what you do best, make sure that you know what your goal is. Your goal should guide your actions.

2. Complete the business plan preparation before taking any action. Well planned business saves a lot of money and frustration.

3. Conduct a comprehensive market analysis that includes products, services, costs, prices, distribution, advertising and quality.

4. Make sure you can finance the business activities according to the business plan you have prepared and a bit more for unexpected expenses.

5. Quality of your product/service should be according to the requirements and needs of your target market.

6. Monitor and control financial aspects. You can catch financial problems while they are small.

7. Define in advance Key Successful Factors - make sure that you know to measure successful/failure activity.

8. Make sure that roles and responsibilities are clear within your business and with any interaction with customers/suppliers. The expectations of both sides should be clear to any of the parties.

9. Build network of contacts. All your connections, both business and social are your windows of opportunities, every window that you open is another building block in you success.

10.Periodic status evaluation of business plan's milestones with actual results. This will enable you to deal with small problems before they are getting bigger.

1. Executive Summary. The executive summary is so important. Stick it in FIRST, even before the table of contents.

2. Table of Contents. A table of contents is exactly what you'd expect. Make sure it is well-organized and correctly numbered.

3. Company Description. Now's the time to brag (factually) about how you transformed American Watermelon Ltd. from a booth in your garage to a strong local employer that's ripe to burst onto the national scene.

4. Product/Service. Describe the thing in jargon free-language.

5. Market Analysis. Market analysis includes your sagacious discussion of industry characteristics and trends, projected growth, customer behavior, complementary products/services, barriers of entry, and so on.

6. Marketing Plan. Be as detailed as you can, and give several different tactics (start off with the cheapest marketing tactic, and proceed to the most expensive).

7. Operations Plan. The nuts and bolts. You gave them vague assurances in your executive summary that you'd be able to run your business; now they want to understand precisely what's involved in running the show. Location, bricks and mortar, equipment needs, and labor requirements are laid out here in black and white.

8. Financial Plan. The numbers. Investors will expect you to be completely independent in this important area of knowledge; if they call you saying they'd like to set up a meeting with you, they will ask you questions about your financial plan and you will be expected to act intelligently.

9. Management. Never underestimate the importance of the collective genius of your management team. VCs will take a great management team with a mediocre business model over a great business model with mediocre management any day of the week.

10. Exit Strategy. Not all biz plans have one of these. The exit strategy is for the investor, not the entrepreneur. It's basically a plan for him/her to get out of his/her investment in three to seven years.

11. Appendices. Chuck into the appendices all those necessary extra bits, such as managers' résumés, promotional materials, product photos, and independent assessments.