Like other business plans, the content of a car dealership business plan covers four main steps to success. These steps are “opportunity”, “capacity”, “activities” and “results”.

Chance

Analyzing the industry, the customer, and the competition in your business plan demonstrates the opportunity. This should identify that customers in your local market need a distributor of the type you have chosen because competitors are not fully meeting their needs or because their demographics are changing (more population, richer, poorer, more families, etc.) Opportunity could also be that a certain combination of services from your dealership could enhance what competitors are currently doing. The overall industry situation should look ahead to see how the auto sales market will be performing six months, a year or more into the future, when the dealership is actually open.

Ability

The experience of the management team, their license as a car dealer and the financial resources that the partners can bring together cover the entrepreneur’s ability to take advantage of this opportunity. Funders reading the business plan hope that an element of cash is also lacking in the entrepreneur’s ability at this time. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be reading the plan in the first place.

Activities

Marketing and operations plans cover the activities the business will engage in to attract car buyers (and car sellers if you are also a used car dealer) and run the business as efficiently as possible. As a small car dealer, consider how you can compensate for this lack of scale, and the cost savings it brings to dealer chains, through creativity and hard work.

Results

Finally, the business success projections and the financial section of the plan show the results that you and investors should expect. If the results take into account the total costs of the methods you have described and include adequate compensation for staff and key team players, readers will be less likely to question the cost elements. If your revenue projections are based on reasonable and researched assumptions about the car buying behavior of your local market, readers are more likely to accept this side of the projections as well.