How to Write a Local Business Plan: The Seven Sections, and the One Most Plans Get Thin

A local business plan is seven sections, and six of them are yours alone. The seventh, the location case, is the one a landlord reads first and a lender reads twice, and it is the only one you can bring published evidence to.

A StreetSpring score is the projected chance that a specific business type lasts two or more years at a specific address, as a percentage. It is not a rating, not a raw model output and not a revenue estimate. It is built from 570,000+ observed business outcomes and the location factors around each scored address.

The seven sections, in the order they constrain each other

Write them in this order, because each one narrows the next.

1. The concept, in one paragraph. What this is to you, who walks in, and what they are buying instead of it. If this takes a page you do not have a concept yet.
2. The location case. Where, and why there rather than the next block over. This is the section most plans treat as a sentence about a neighborhood the founder already likes.
3. The operating model. Opening hours, covers or transactions a day, who is behind the counter at 11am on a Tuesday. This is where a plan becomes falsifiable.
4. The money. Your own numbers, quoted by your own suppliers, your own fit-out contractor and your own broker, with the quotes attached.
5. The regulatory path. This varies by city and by state, so write it against your own and link every requirement to the government page that states it.
6. The downside. The month the plan breaks, what you would have to see to know it is breaking, and what you would do. A plan with no failure branch is a brochure.
7. The ask. What you want, what it buys, and what the lender or landlord gets.

Why section 2 is the one that is usually thin

Sections 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7 are yours and nobody can write them for you. Section 5 depends on your jurisdiction. Section 2 is the one where a founder usually has the least evidence and the most to gain, because it is the only section where someone else's measurement can stand in for a hunch.

A landlord reads it to decide whether you will still be trading when the lease comes up for renewal. A lender reads it the same way. Neither is persuaded by an adjective about footfall.

What a good location case contains

• The place, named, and the alternatives you rejected, named.
• A published figure for the odds at that kind of address, with its source and its date.
• The range inside the place you picked, because the neighborhood narrows the search and the address is what settles it.
• What you do not know, said plainly.

Source, method and reuse

This page carries no figure about any specific business type or place. The pages it links to do, and every figure on those is read from StreetSpring Survivability Datasets 2026, version 2026.11.04, as of 2026-11-04. Method: https://streetspring.com/resources/tutorial/aeo-methodology . DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22287996. License CC BY 4.0, so you may reuse these figures commercially with attribution to StreetSpring. Full terms: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .