You must set up reasonable business plans to lay a strong foundation for your organization. It will help you develop and understand your business strategy, enabling investors to see your company's potential. 

When working on a proper business plan timeline, it’s essential to consider both the big picture and more minor details to stay on schedule. 

So, if you are seeking funding, set up your timeline with business milestones and your projected dates for accomplishing future ones. You will need to gain their confidence to execute your plan successfully.

A business plan timeline lays out major milestones you achieved or hope to get in the future in your business. 

Having a timeline that lists your key goals will make you spend more time each day, week, or month working on key growth activities. It will help you to prioritize your time and hire the right people at the right time.

All of this helps to create more confidence in future investors and your current stakeholders as you lay out your business plan while you can back it up with your previous milestones.

Many entrepreneurs have a wide array of frameworks to map a venture trajectory through the economic landscape. 

However, choosing a timeline format to create a business plan has multiple advantages.

You can visualize the data, define each task, and assign the team or individual behind it. Also, you can measure the strategy's effectiveness using linear time progression.

You can mark critical deadlines and evaluate the progress of the venture in real-time against the prediction—all in an easy-to-understand format that you can present to non-technical stakeholders and investors.

Furthermore, creating a business plan timeline example allows you to discover things you may overlook. This way, you will avoid pouring funds into fixing issues and allow you to create a much more robust plan to present in front of your investors.

Before we focus on creating our business timelines, we must prepare all the necessary materials. That not only includes our future business plan but every important event since the beginning of our services. 

We will need to dig up our historical data and work backward before moving forward with our proper timeline.

Identify Your Key Milestones

When you are getting your business off the ground, there are many things to do. To determine how to create your timeline or schedule, it’s critical to identify your milestones. Some of them are things that you need to launch your business. 

You may include legal procedures, acquiring all the licenses and permits, securing your office location, developing your product for sale, hiring employees, launching your marketing campaign, and, finally, the official opening of your business. 

After you schedule the significant milestones, you can begin diving into the smaller details you need to hit.  

Merge Past Achievements with the Present

The milestones that you have already achieved should be part of your timeline. This information helps your investors understand the steps that you have already taken and how much further you have to go. 

Merge these important events with the present and start creating a timeframe for each key milestone. Include a start date and an end date for items that require weeks or months of planning and execution. Maybe some of them will require a due date.

Future Plans

Your business should not only be concerned with the immediate future. Include milestones you intend to hit in one, three, or five years. 

A recommendation, especially for a starting small business owner, is to set up a risk-mitigating list of milestones first, if necessary. These will help you eliminate the risk of your company failing. 

The goal should be approximately six major milestones in the next year and repeat until you reach five years. Use it as a “To Do” list and ensure you achieve your objectives.

Next, you should prioritize them. Decide on which milestone you should get with the initial funding if needed. 

Ideally, these will get you to the point where you are generating revenues or profit and reduce the risk of your venture, as it proves to stakeholders that customers want your product or any of the services you offer.

By setting up your milestones, you’ll figure out what you can accomplish for less money.

Now it’s time to schedule your milestone list and convert it into a timeline format to give you a quick visual reference.

You can choose from Gantt charts to Excel spreadsheets or any preferred format. However, keep in mind that it’s not how pretty it looks. It’s about functionality and makes it easy to track the progress of all tasks completed or to be done.

You will find many template examples which you can choose at your preference. And even create one of your own. 

You can get a key for the complete Office 2021 package at a low price and choose which way you prefer to do it.

Create Your Timeline Template with Microsoft Word

We know that Word is not a graphic design tool, but it does provide a couple of ways to create simple timeline templates in your documents. 

You can do it with a manual process, which will take longer. But Office 2021 offers the SmartArt add-on, which provides a pair of timelines in its stock gallery. This makes the creation process shorter than a custom one and leaves good results.

• Open a new document and write the title in the style and format you like.
• Go to “Insert,” select “SmartArt,” and choose from the gallery of available options.
• At the top-left of the SmartArt tab, pull up the text pane and write all your bullet points. 
• From there, you can adjust according to what you are looking for.
• If you want to put your own icons and logos, you can’t delete the ones that come with the pre-established timeline. However, you can modify them in a way that may look invisible (like reducing their size) and then insert yours on top of them.
• Under the Insert menu, pick the icon drop-down and search for appropriate entries. You can change their colors and how they are aligned.

This is an option if you are familiar with the program and don’t want to jump into another software. 

As a second option, you can download a free template, insert it right into a new document, and start making your own from there.

Create Your Timeline Template in a PowerPoint Slide

These kinds of timeline templates are perfect for making information visually engaging by using landscape orientation and big, bold text. 

Creating a timeline in PowerPoint is a simple process:

• Open a slide, click “Insert,” and select “SmartArt.”
• Hover over the process tab and choose a type. You don’t need to stick only to timelines. You can use any graphic from the gallery.
• Double-click the one you want and begin inserting your entries.

Once the basic structure is created, you can add dates and change the text, colors, or layout as you like. We recommend using a gradient color scheme to create a flow from the beginning of your timeline slide to the end. 

You can also look for free templates for PowerPoint. If you are in a hurry or don’t want to spend much time, you only need to download them and import them into your slide.

Create Your Timeline Template in an Excel Spreadsheet

It falls in between previous examples. A good middle ground as it mixes formality with a visual style. As we saw with the Office software, Excel also uses SmartArt to facilitate your job of creating a timeline.

• Open a new spreadsheet, go to the “Insert” tab and click “SmartArt.”
• In the “Choose a SmartArt Graphic” gallery, click “Process” and double-click any you like. There are only two specific timelines, but you can choose any from the gallery.
• Click on “Text” and write your text in the SmartArt graphic. You can also open the “Text Pane” and type it there. You can find it in the “SmartArt Tools Design” tab.

If you want it even more straightforward, you can look for free templates on the internet, download anyone you like, import it into your program and edit it to fit your needs.

A reasonable timeline helps to develop your business plan. It’s a creative way to overview if your business has a solid foundation and gives you ideas for your following strategies and what to expect. 

By outlining your business's different activities and events, your investors can see what you accomplished and build a trusting relationship to bet on your business success. 

So consider saving time to prepare a proper timeline for your project, highlight every significant moment and plan your business’ next few years.