What goes wrong
Why do business plans get rejected?
We are asked to rescue plenty of plans that were turned down once. The failures cluster into five patterns.
The narrative and the model disagree. The text opens in March; the spreadsheet books revenue in January. Easy to find, and a reviewer who finds one stops trusting the rest.
Revenue appears without a mechanism. A curve that triples in year two is not an argument. Capacity, footfall, list size, conversion, churn, something has to produce the number, visibly, in the model.
The costs are too clean. No ramp, no seasonality, no working capital gap, no owner's compensation, no contingency. Straight-line costs read as a forecast nobody stress-tested.
The market section is about the industry, not about you. National market size says nothing about whether your unit fills. What earns attention is the slice you can reach, named local competitors, and sources cited in the text.
The ask does not reconcile. Use of funds must sum to what you requested, and the model must draw and service that money. Going through an SBA lender? Read our note on what the SBA's SOP actually says about feasibility studies, which quotes the rulebook directly.