Business Planning for Creatives: Write Your Business Plan and Elevator Pitch

Faye Brown's class does one narrow thing and does it without padding: it walks a solo creative through a simplified nine-part business plan and ends with a 60-second elevator pitch built from that plan. At 24 minutes across seven lessons, it is closer to a structured worksheet with narration than a traditional course, and it is honest about that scope from the first lesson.

Structure and method

The backbone is the accompanying 14-page template, and the teaching method is consistently brainstorm-first. Rather than asking students to write polished paragraphs immediately, the course pushes keyword dumps and spider-diagram style mind maps for each section, then a second pass to turn those fragments into sentences. This is a reasonable response to a real problem: blank-page paralysis is often what stops people from ever finishing a plan, and lowering the bar to "write down words, not paragraphs" is a practical unlock for anyone who freezes at formal business writing.

The nine sections themselves cover the why behind the business, the product or service, target market, marketing and social strategy, competitor research, a lightweight SWOT-style threats exercise, finances, and personal goals. Each is treated briefly, in the range of two to four minutes, so depth is traded for coverage. Financial planning in particular is reduced to setting revenue targets at six-month checkpoints, with an explicit acknowledgment that a bank or investor would need far more detail than this course provides.

Throughout, the teacher uses her own printable-activities shop as a running example, showing an actual attempt at a one-line pitch, a target market description, and a finished elevator pitch built from a hook, an inspiration story, an audience mention, and a closing goal. Walking through one complete example end to end, rather than treating each of the nine sections as isolated theory, is the course's clearest strength: students see how the same business gets described differently at each stage and can copy that pattern directly.

What it does not do

The course is candid about its own ceiling. It flags more than once that its financial and competitor sections are simplified and that anyone pursuing funding needs a much more detailed plan, pointing students toward external resources rather than pretending to cover that ground itself. That honesty is a credit to the course, but it also means the "business plan" in the title is really a goal-setting and clarity exercise, not a document that would survive investor scrutiny.

There is also no live workshopping of a plan gone wrong or a weak elevator pitch corrected in real time, so students get one strong example and general advice, not contrasting cases to sharpen their judgment. For a beginner who has never articulated their business in writing before, that single worked example is probably enough to get unstuck. For anyone who already has a rough plan and wants to pressure-test it, there is little new territory here.

Given its length and aims, the course delivers exactly what it promises: a fast, low-friction way to produce a first-draft business plan and pitch, useful mainly as a starting point rather than a finished asset.

What you will learn

• ·How to break a business plan into nine manageable sections instead of one intimidating document
• ·A brainstorm-first method for drafting each section using keywords before full sentences
• ·How to write a one-line pitch and business overview as the seed for an elevator pitch
• ·How to run a basic SWOT-style threat analysis and simple competitor research for a small shop
• ·How to set short and long-term financial and personal goals tied to specific checkpoints
• ·How to structure and deliver a 60-second elevator pitch tailored to different listeners