Guides
Auditing a handyman business plan: the tests each section must survive
A section by section audit of a handyman business plan: the question each part must answer, the test that proves it did, and the five ways plans fail.
What to take away
- A plan is not a document. It is a set of claims, and every claim needs a test that could fail.
- Audit your own draft by asking, for each section, what evidence would change the sentence. A section no evidence could change is decoration.
- Handyman plans fail in the same five places. They are listed below with the test that catches each one.
- The section almost every plan omits is the one describing what the business will refuse to do.
- Write it for the reader who will argue with it, even when that reader is you in six months.
Who is actually reading this
Three audiences want different things: a lender asks how the loan gets repaid if the optimistic case does not arrive. A partner or spouse asks what happens to the household in a slow quarter.
You want a record of what you believed, so in six months you can tell a bad assumption from bad luck.
Write for the first two and the third takes care of itself. The Small Business Administration's guide to writing a business plan sets out both the traditional and the lean formats, and either is fine. What follows is not another outline. It is the audit you run over whichever outline you picked.
The audit table
| Section | The question it must answer | The test that it did |
|---|---|---|
| The business | What do we sell, in units a customer would recognize | Read the sentence to somebody outside the trade. Can they say what they would be buying and roughly how long it takes |
| The market | Who buys this, here, and who currently serves them | Does it cite something you did, such as calls made and appointments quoted, rather than a national figure |
| Services | What is included, and what is refused | Is there a written refusal list, with the licensed trades you refer to by category |
| Pricing | How a price is arrived at, not what it is | Can two people price the same job from the document and land in the same place |
| Operations | What happens between the phone ringing and the money arriving | Can you name who does each step, including on a day you are sick |
| People | Who does the work as volume grows | Does it distinguish a helper from a technician, and say what each is allowed to decide |
| Equipment | What the business must own to sell what it says it sells | Does the list come from jobs you actually quoted, and does it match the opening equipment checklist |
| Compliance | Which authority decides what, and what has been confirmed | Are there dated notes of calls to the state licensing board and the local building department |
| Money | What it costs to run, and what has to be true to survive | Is there a sensitivity run where the main assumption is wrong by a factor of two |
Nothing on that list is unusual. What is unusual is treating the right column as the point. A plan whose sections cannot fail their own tests has not been written, it has been filled in.
Business plan audit table
- Businesswhat do we sell, in customer units
- Marketwho buys here, who serves them
- Serviceswhat is included, what is refused
- Pricinghow a price is arrived at
- Operationsphone ringing to money arriving
- Peoplewho does the work as volume grows
- Equipmentwhat the business must own
- Compliancewhich authority decides what
Five tests handyman plans usually fail
- The market section cites no phone calls. If the evidence is a search result rather than something you did, the section is a summary of the internet. The countable version is in the local market reading: who answers, how far out they book, what they refuse.
- Pricing states a rate instead of a method. A rate is an output. A method survives a change in your costs and a rate does not. The plan needs the rule for minimums, travel, and materials, not a number to be argued about later.
- Operations skips the drive. Handyman work is a routing problem wearing a repair problem's clothes, and a plan that models only working hours will overstate capacity every time.
- Compliance is written in the passive voice. "Appropriate licenses will be obtained" is not a plan, it is a hope. Name the board, name the categories you asked about, date the answer. Registration and tax obligations that follow from your structure are set out by the IRS for anyone starting a business.
- There is no failure case. Every plan should contain a paragraph beginning with the sentence "this stops working if". If you cannot finish that sentence, you have not found the assumption the whole thing rests on.
The section most plans leave out
Almost no handyman plan contains a refusal list, and it is the single section that most reduces the risk a lender is worried about.
Refusal list decision
Does the job need a license you lack?
Refer to a licensed electrician
Check height and system safety
In categories, not examples, say what the business will not take on. Do not take work needing a license you lack or work at a height or on a system you are not equipped to make safe. Do not take work inherited from another's failed attempt.
Next to each category, name what happens instead, and put a licensed electrician referral in the plan as an asset.
Safety fits here too, as a program rather than a promise. OSHA's recommended practices for a safety and health program frame it as finding and fixing hazards on a schedule, which is a thing a plan can commit to and be measured against. "Safety is our priority" is not.
The staffing consequence follows directly: the refusal list is what you hand a new technician on their first morning, and it is the backbone of how people are hired and trained. A business that has never written down what it refuses cannot delegate anything.
Common questions
How long should the plan be?
Long enough that every section survives its test in the table, and no longer. A tight document that names its assumptions beats a long one that does not. Length is not evidence of thinking.
Do I need a plan if I am not borrowing money?
You need the claims and the tests. Whether they live in a formal document is a separate question. The parts that pay for themselves without a lender are pricing method, the refusal list, and the failure case.
Should the plan include the equipment I want or the equipment I need?
Neither, on its own. It should include the equipment that the work you have described requires, which is a derivation rather than a wish list. Once the service list is settled, how the van and kit are set up follows from it.
When should the plan be rewritten?
When one of its tests fails, act then, not on a calendar. Surprises are useful triggers: a job type that keeps appearing, a cost that proved structural, or a referral source that produced nothing. Each invalidates a claim, and that claim is what you go back and fix.
Working through the opening sequence usually surfaces two or three in the first ten jobs.
