Reddit reviews Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Don’t have a food truck related business plan. Bit I’ve written several in different industries including for a restaurant.

You can use any general template for a business plan but you can probably skip some chapters or only spend a few words to fill in those chapters.

The most important thing will be you financial planning. The numbers must make sense. I’ve posted this spreadsheet I use for food truck planning before. Hope it helps.

Now to be able to complete the financial planning you will need to have a pretty good understanding of your product, market, competitors and business/revenue model. Those are also your key chapters in the business plan.

The product chapter should detail what you plan to offer (the menu), details on the car, etc. The goal is for the reader to better understand what you idea is all about.

The market chapter will highlight numbers that are important for your business. Are you primarily going to be serving the public? You’ll need population statistics down to the neighborhoods you are interested in serving. Serving businesses or festivals? Get some numbers to see where the biggest demand will be. A good practice here is to look at things from all perspectives and rank neighborhoods or business areas or festivals by attractiveness. The numbers should look good or the business is probably not viable in the area (no faking numbers though!)

The competitors chapter will build on the previous two. Here you detail how many food trucks or restaurants are in each area. The goal is to identify market segments that are not heavy with competition but still have potential for good demand. Are all of you competitors aiming for a specific area? No indian mexican fusion truck in Area 1? Here you’ll get the sense for opprotunities. If you don’t have a specific truck idea you could make a truck that fits the gaps in the market (and make the product chapter reflect this research you’ve done). If you have a specific concept then you’ll need to discuss your unique value proposition in the market segments you are interested in. Would you be the only truck with this type of food? Will you be cheaper? Faster? Etc.

Finally, the last important chapter is the business model. This will build on all the research you’ve done so far. Perhaps you’ve identified that the public market is way saturated but there is potential in the B2B market and festival market. You’ll need to develop a pricing strategy to meet the market demands but also meets your needs to run the business. Here you essentially lay out your plans for making money. As part of this chapter (or as separate chapter) you will discuss your go to market strategy.

As a result of doing the above research you’ll be able to do the financial planning. You will need to get more specific when adding numbers to the spreadsheet, but you’ll have a better understanding of what numbers are required. Market and competitors will influence the demand for your truck. Product will affect your startup costs and variable costs and fixed costs. Adding this all together you can start setting up a profit and loss statement to test if you revenue model is actually going to be viable!

This is a lot to digest. But all those chapters are readily available in BP templates and examples. You’ll need to weed out the unimportant stuff. The goal with any business plan should be first be for the owner to see which strategy makes sense and have a plan if things don’t go as expected (which happens often).

As a final note there are also alternative forms of creating a plan or coming up with a great business model. My personal favorite is the Business Model Generation book It’s a quick read and a fantastic approach to quickly develop and validate different business models!

Hope this helps :)

michael porter has classic books. Also try business model generation.