Not a document.
A set of commitments.
There are two kinds of business plan and they have almost nothing in common. One is written for somebody else — a bank, a landlord, a visa authority — and its job is to be plausible. The other is written for you, and its job is to stop you re-deciding the same thing every week under pressure. Only the second kind affects whether the school works. It is much shorter, it contains no market-size paragraph, and it is mostly a list of decisions with the consequence of each written next to it.
Writing the consequence down is the part that does the work. "Minimum class size: six" is a preference. "Minimum class size: six, which means we will cancel a class of four in week one and offer those students a different slot or a refund" is a decision, because you have already accepted the thing that will otherwise make you break it. Every entry below is worth the same treatment: the answer, and what you are agreeing to when the answer is inconvenient.
The shape
of the school.
Decision four is the one founders skip, and it is the one with money attached. Almost every school sets a maximum class size, because quality obviously requires it. Very few set a minimum and hold it, because cancelling a small class feels like turning away income when you have none. It is the opposite: a class of four that costs more to teach than it brings in loses money every week it runs, and it will run for a whole term because nobody wants to make the call in week two. Decide the number before you are emotionally involved, publish it in your terms so cancellation is expected rather than a betrayal, and decide now what you offer the students in a cancelled class.
Decision five deserves a warning. Fixed terms give you a clean cash rhythm, full classes and a natural renewal moment. Rolling enrolment fills seats the week someone enquires and suits adults who will not wait six weeks to start. Both are defensible; trying to run both simultaneously in the same classes is where the administration becomes unmanageable, because a group whose members all started at different points cannot be taught as a group or billed as one.
The economics
and the ceiling.
Decision six is where new schools most often copy rather than decide. The school down the road charges what it charges because of its rent, its class sizes, its teacher costs and a history you cannot see. Matching its price without matching its cost base is how a school ends up working hard at a loss it cannot locate. Price from your own arithmetic — the break-even calculation in the costs article — and then decide separately whether you are cheaper, dearer or the same, and what the student gets for the difference.
Decision eight is the quiet one. Placement is usually treated as an administrative formality and it determines retention more reliably than teaching quality does, because a student who is bored or drowning leaves within a month and tells people why. Placing students by what they say about their own level is the default and it is unreliable in both directions — confident learners overestimate, careful ones underestimate. A short written task and a five-minute conversation beats any self-assessment, and it is the cheapest retention intervention available to a new school.
Decision ten is about restraint. The commonest failure of planning in small schools is not planning too little but building for a school that does not exist yet: a second site in the model, an app nobody asked for, processes designed for fifty staff. Write down the ceiling you actually intend — a number of students, or sites, or nothing beyond one full timetable — and let it tell you what not to build this year.
Decision nine
outranks most of the others.
Of the ten, the one that most reliably separates schools that survive from schools that struggle is when the money arrives relative to the teaching. A school selling a term in advance covers its costs before it incurs them. A school invoicing monthly in arrears is permanently one month of teaching out of pocket and one bad month from being unable to pay staff — and because teachers must be paid on time, that shortfall is real money the school has lent its customers without deciding to.
The objection is real, and it has a designed answer rather than an improvised one: publish an instalment plan as a product — a first payment at enrolment and the balance spread across the course — rather than agreeing arrangements family by family over text. A school platform should let you configure that once and sell it repeatedly; ours carries a pricing model and a billing cycle per product, with a monthly plan holding the number of months it runs for, which is what makes a deposit-plus-instalments offer a thing you set up rather than a spreadsheet you maintain. The billing cluster works through the whole decision.
Ten answers,
reviewed once a term.
A plan that is never revisited becomes folklore — everyone half-remembers a rule and nobody can say what it was. Put the ten answers on one page, date it, and read it at the end of each term against what actually happened. Which classes ran below the minimum, and did you cancel them? Did the price hold, or did you discount quietly? Did students arrive at the level the placement predicted?
Change the answers when the evidence says so; that is what the page is for. What matters is that a change is a decision with a date rather than a drift nobody noticed. Most of the schools that lose their way do it gradually, by making one sensible exception at a time until the exceptions are the policy.