A practical guide

What to do after writing your business plan

Test the riskiest assumption in your plan with real people before you file anything, then work through the official steps in order.

Published November 3, 2026 · Updated November 4, 2026 · Luke F. Walton

Test the riskiest assumption in your plan before you do anything official. Then take the official steps in the order the SBA lists them, and keep the plan open while you go.

A plan is a set of guesses written down. The paperwork is easier to do well once one of those guesses has survived contact with a real customer.

What should you do first?

Find the one assumption that would sink the plan if it were wrong, and test it with the cheapest real step you can take.

Read your plan and ask which line you have the least evidence for. For a mobile bike repair service, it might be “commuters will pay for a visit to their door.” For a laptop consulting practice, it might be “a small clinic will hire an outside person for this.” For a small shop with a lease, it might be “enough people will walk in to cover the rent.”

Pick the one that matters most, not the one that is easiest to check.

Then test it with people, not with more writing. How to validate a business idea covers how to do that without spending much. How to get your first customer covers asking for a real commitment, such as a deposit or a booked time, instead of a polite yes.

Some official steps are slow to undo, and a lease is the clearest example. Find out whether your riskiest assumption holds before you sign one.

What does the first 30 days look like?

Choose a few actions you can observe, and write each one so you could tell whether it happened.

A short list for a month might look like this:

• Hold ten conversations with people who have the problem, and write down what each one did the last time it came up.
• Put a price on your first offer and say it out loud to at least five of them.
• Ask two or three for a deposit, a booked time, or a place on a waiting list.
• Deliver the service once, even for a discount, and time how long it takes.
• Write down what it cost you to deliver, including your own hours.
• Rerun your numbers with what you learned.

“Research the market” is not on the list because nobody can tell when it is finished. “Ten conversations” is, because you can count them. Scale it to your life: evenings if you have a day job, two weeks if you have the month free.

What are the official steps, and in what order?

The SBA’s launch your business pages list eight steps. This guide describes what each one is and why it exists. It does not state what you must do, what it costs, or when. Those answers depend on your state, your structure, and your kind of work, and they change.

1. Pick your location. Where you work decides which local and state rules apply to you, and what a space costs. For a business run from home, the question is still worth asking.
2. Choose a business structure. The structure is the legal form of the business, and it affects how you are taxed, what you are personally responsible for, and what paperwork follows. The Learn page on picking an entity explains the options.
3. Choose a name. The name is what customers, banks, and the state will know you by. It is worth checking before you print anything with it on.
4. Register your business. Registration is how the government records that the business exists. What it involves depends on your structure and location.
5. Get tax ID numbers. Tax IDs let the federal and state governments identify the business for tax purposes. Which ones you need depends on how you operate.
6. Apply for licenses and permits. Some kinds of work and some places require permission before you start. Whether yours does is a question for the official source, not a guess.
7. Open a business bank account. A separate account keeps business money apart from your own, which makes your records easier to keep. The Learn page on bank accounts and bookkeeping covers it.
8. Get business insurance. Insurance exists to cover losses you could not absorb yourself. What kind fits depends on what you do.

Surmado Learn also has a step-by-step hub that walks through these. Surmado Learn is published by Surmado, which Luke F. Walton founded.

Your state’s official page is the final word on what applies to you. USA.gov lists every state government, and from there you can find the state agency that handles business registration. If a guide, including this one, and the state’s page disagree, follow the state.

Some steps will be quick for you and others slow. A consultant working under their own name and a person opening a smoked-fish market stall will spend their time in different places. Do them in order, but start thinking about the next one early.

What might a lender or landlord ask for beyond a lean plan?

They may ask for more detail than a lean plan holds, and the right move is to ask what they want before you write it.

A lean plan helps you decide. A lender, landlord, or partner is deciding something else and may want different material. Do not guess and expand the plan. Ask what they need and in what form. Often the answer is shorter than you feared.

If they ask for a traditional format, the SBA describes it in its guide to writing your business plan. Build that version from your lean plan, and keep the lean plan as the working copy.

How do you keep the plan alive?

Open it after every surprise, and rerun the numbers when the inputs change.

A surprise is any moment where what happened differs from what you wrote: a customer who wanted something else, a job that took twice as long, a supplier who raised a price. Change the plan, and mark which lines are now evidence and which are still guesses.

Two checks are worth putting on a schedule.

Rerun the break-even calculator whenever your price or the time per job changes. If a repair visit used to take 45 minutes and now takes 90, your cost per job has moved, and the number of jobs you need has moved with it.

Check the runway calculator once a month. It takes your cash on hand and your monthly costs and shows how many months they last. With $12,000 on hand and $2,000 a month going out beyond what comes in, that is six months ($12,000 divided by $2,000). The numbers are an example. Use yours.

If you have not updated your plan in a month, that is a sign to open it, not a sign the plan is fine.

When should you go back to the plan instead of forward?

Go back when what you learned changes who the customer is, what you offer, or whether the numbers work.

Some signs:

• People say yes to talking but no to paying, even a little.
• Your costs per job come out higher than your price after you count your own time.
• The people who do buy are not the people you planned for.
• A step on the official list turns up a cost or a limit you had not priced.

Going back is not failing. It is cheaper to revise the plan at customer three than to find the same problem after a lease, a van, or a year of effort. Change the offer, the price, or the customer, then test again.

If the evidence says the idea does not work, stopping is a legitimate result. You learned it in a month, cheaply.

Where to go next

If you have not tested your riskiest assumption yet, start with how to validate a business idea. To work out your monthly numbers, use the break-even calculator. If you want to revisit the plan itself, how to write a business plan walks through the lean version.

Once you are running, the questions change: wage rules, loan programs, tax deadlines, and what regulators are doing. Small Business News reports those for owners. It is published by Luke F. Walton, who also runs this site.

Common questions

Do I need to finish every official step before I get my first customer?

That is a question for your state and your kind of work, not for a guide. Some businesses need permission before they sell anything, and others do not. Check the SBA launch page and your state’s official page before you take payment.

Should I form a company before I test my idea?

Often the test comes first, but whether that is safe for you depends on what you are doing and what you are personally exposed to. The Learn page on picking an entity lays out the questions, and a local advisor can answer them for your case.

Can I skip the business plan once I start doing the work?

You can stop writing a long one. Keep a short one that you update, because the numbers and assumptions in it are what you will check when something changes.

Where can I get help with these steps from a person?

The SBA lists local assistance near you, and it describes the counseling and training as free or low-cost.

Put this in your plan