Plan FastStart your Reality Check

For first-time owner-operators

The business plan an SBA 7(a) loan officer will read

If you are asking a bank, credit union or CDFI for $25k–$500k, you have been told to bring a business plan with projections. Nobody hands you the template for the version that survives underwriting. Here is what lenders actually look for, and the two sentences that kill most first files.

The two sentences that decline a file

Ask a loan officer why a plan got rejected and the answer almost always comes back to one of two things: the projections are not supported by market research, or there is no credible path to repayment. Both are quiet failures. The plan looked complete — it had all the headings — but the numbers were invented, or the repayments were never traced back to the revenue. The applicant usually never learns which sentences killed the file, so the second attempt repeats the first.

What the file needs, section by section

  1. A one-page summary the officer can hand upstairs

    Loan amount, what it buys, what repays it. If your first page cannot stand alone, the rest of the file never gets read.

  2. A business description in plain trade language

    What you sell, to whom, and the operating experience you bring. Lenders fund operators, and this is where they check you are one.

  3. Market analysis with named, priced competitors

    The section most plans fail. "The market is large and growing" tells a lender nothing; a list of the three competitors you will take customers from, with their prices, is the beginning of an argument.

  4. Financial projections that tie together

    Revenue, expenses, cash flow, and breakeven built from one set of assumptions. A lender checks whether your revenue assumption survives your own cost structure.

  5. A credible path to repayment

    Debt service shown against projected cash, month by month, with the cushion stated. This is what the loan decision actually rests on.

The honest part

Not every idea is fundable as first described — most are not, on the first pass, and a plan that hides that only delays the conversation with the lender. The useful move is to find the objections before the loan officer does, rework the numbers, and hand in the version that answers them. A scored checklist with links you can open beats a flattering template every time.

Where to start

Plan Fast reads your idea the way the loan officer will: a free Reality Check scores it, shows the demand and competition picture, and names the objections a lender will raise — every claim carrying a source you can open. If the idea holds, the paid Dossier writes the full plan to this section list, with financials that tie to each other and a one-page summary for the banker.

Start your Reality Check

Plan Fast itself is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is why the guidance on this page gets revised as lending requirements change.