Business plan: Brightwater Bakery
Owner or founders: Maria Silva and Sean Murphy
Legal form: Limited company, owned equally by the two founders
Location: Cork, Ireland
Date: 18 January 2027
This plan describes Brightwater Bakery: what it sells, who it sells to, how it earns money and what it needs in order to grow. It is written for owners, partners, lenders and investors who want to understand the business in about fifteen minutes. Every figure is an estimate built on the assumptions stated in section 10, and none of it is a promise of results.
1. Executive summary
Brightwater Bakery makes sourdough bread and pastries for shops and cafes in Cork. We started in 2024, sell about 2,000 loaves a week and want to open a second shop in the city centre in 2027.
The business in one line: Fresh sourdough bread and pastries, baked daily and delivered to Cork cafes before they open.
We wrote the plan for two purposes. It is our own working tool, so that the owners agree on where the business is going and how they will know when it gets there. It is also the document we give to a bank, an investor, a landlord or a key partner who wants to judge whether the business is sound. For that reason the plan states its assumptions openly, separates what we know from what we expect, and says plainly where we are not yet sure.
The sections that follow set out the problem we solve and our offer, the size of our market and our customers, how we compare with others, how we earn money, how we reach customers, how we run the business and who works in it. They end with our targets, the three-year numbers, the funding we need and what could go wrong, and how we plan to deal with it.
2. The problem and our offer
Many people want fresh, real bread made with local flour, but supermarkets sell factory loaves. We bake daily with a 24-hour fermentation and deliver to cafes by 7:00.
We describe needs that we can show with real conversations with customers, real sales or published data. Where we have such evidence, it is listed in the appendix.
A good offer does three things. It solves a problem that the customer feels strongly enough to pay for. It is easy for the customer to understand, buy and use. And it is hard enough for others to copy that we can keep our customers once they have tried us. In our case the strongest parts of the offer are those that come from how we work every day, such as the quality we keep, the speed with which we answer and the care we take, rather than anything a competitor could copy in a week.
Products, services and prices: Sourdough loaves (EUR 4.20 wholesale), pastries (EUR 1.80 wholesale), weekly bread subscription for households (EUR 18 a week), and bread for events on request.
3. Market and customers
The market
Cork has about 220,000 people and 400 cafes and restaurants. Spending on artisan bread in the region grew about 12 percent a year over the last three years, according to the local trade association.
We size the market in two steps. First, the total demand for this kind of product or service in the area we can serve. Second, the share we can realistically win in the first three years with our capacity, our sales channels and our budget. We prefer figures from public statistics, trade bodies or our own sales over round guesses, and we name the source next to each figure so that a reader can check it.
The whole market: About 400 cafes and restaurants and 90,000 households in Cork; local spending on bread and pastries of roughly EUR 38 million a year.
The part we can reach: About 120 cafes within a 30 minute drive and about 8,000 households near the shop. Winning 15 percent of the cafes gives about 18 customers.
Our customers
Cafes and restaurants that value quality (60 percent of sales), and households who buy in our shop or by subscription (40 percent).
We treat each group of customers separately, because what they buy, what they pay and how we reach them can differ. When a single customer is a large share of sales, we say so in the risks section.
For each group we want to know who the buyer is, what makes them choose us over the alternative, how often they buy, how much they spend in a year, and why they might leave. We keep records of these facts from the first sale, so that each year's plan is based on what customers actually did and not on what we hoped they would do. We also ask customers directly, at least once a year, what they would change.