CQC Business Plan Template

The Care Quality Commission wants aspiring care providers to submit a business plan that adheres to five core components: 

• Executive Summary – An overview of the business plan
• Products and Services – What will your care business be delivering?
• Marketing: Strategy and Analysis – Why are you offering these services, how are you offering them, and what about market competition in your area?
• Financial Planning - Financial Commitments, Business Developments, Income, and Costs.
• Budget - Predicted figures regards client fees, your own capital, staffing, development, manufacturing, and marketing costs. 

These five components are standard expectations in any business plan model in any industry, so the CQC isn’t asking for the unachievable from prospective care providers. This is a fair expectation and a good starting indicator of professional standards for any organisation. 

The Care Quality Commission requires a Statement of Purpose by law. You should have this as a separate document for the CQC’s records, but you can quite literally copy/paste the same information into your business plan to add a little polish.  

The Statement of Purpose seeks the declaration of key information: 

• The name and address of your business
• Your business structure (sole trader, private limited company, franchise etc)
• Your experience/qualification(s) for running a care provider service 

In this case, given it’s an introduction page, you could also add things like your Companies House registration in the event of being a limited company, and you can link to additional files for CVs/resumes. This is common practice when applying for finance, and whilst unnecessary for the CQC, it can show a level of detail and commitment from a prospective business. 

Some organisations like to launch straight into their introduction on the front cover, whilst others prefer to direct the reader to it after the contents page, and in some cases – like that of Colne Valley Cooperative Care – they do it after the executive summary. Where you place the information does not matter, so long as it is present and delivered in a clear, concise and accurate manner. 

Below is a preview of Colne Valley Cooperative Care’s business plan from 2020, to illustrate how they have presented their introduction to their plan.

The executive summary and the introduction or background section of your business plan are interchangeable in their position, but both will need to be presented at the front of your plan. 

The reasoning is simple: the executive summary is a summary. It is a short overview of what your business plan is saying and what you hope to achieve by launching your care provider business. Things like: 

• Who’s the business for?
• Why are you starting the business?
• How will you provide the service/who will physically provide the care?
• How will you organise/manage these care professionals?
• Cost to the clients?
• Costs to your organisation? 

Quite literally treat it as recap of your business plan, but placed at the beginning of the document rather than at the end.  

In the case of our previous example Colne Valley, they have a little shy of a side of A4 on their ambitions and reasonings, a large quote about their vision, and a few bullet points about their mission statement to round things off. It’s easy to read, well spaced out, and has imagery to keep the content stimulating – all important points for a reader. The executive summary can be shorter than this, but it varies depending on how much you have to say. Just remember this is a summary. You can expand on points later in the business plan. 

Also don’t forget that the CQC official evaluating your plan is a reader first and foremost; they will have natural biases towards you based on your writing style, your presentation, and the values/goals you state. Think about the language used, the flow of your sentences. Good grammar and punctuation is a basic element but an easy area to make a mistake in. First impressions count, and a well-proofed business plan gives subconscious confidence towards other aspects of due diligence required from you.

The crux of this next section is to demonstrate to the CQC that you, as a company, know how to attract customers and how to keep them; crucial information that can make or break a business. 

The University of Arizona has a general guide about how to write a business plan step by step. In it they say the following: “A business needs to understand its industry and target market. The market analysis details the competition and plans on how to differentiate. It also explains how the company fits in with the industry and details its strengths and weaknesses. This section details the target market and the expected consumer demand for the product or service. Research should also show how easy or difficult it will be to grab market shares”.

This means knowing things including but not exclusive to: 

• The level of demand for your services
• The legal standards surrounding your service delivery
• Local and national care plans/policies/strategies
• The bidding process for care commissioning
• Marketing strategies (inc. channels and media used for campaigns)

Preparation is everything, and vital if your business is to gain approval from the CQC.

Sound financial planning is at the heart of every successful business, so it makes sense for the CQC to require a section on this in their business plan. 

This part of the plan template is where your projected income and costs will go. This part of the plan template is where your projected income and costs will go. As a new business, you won’t have the financial statements and balance sheets (amongst other fiscal documents) to display, but you can provide targets and estimates.  

You are required to do so for a minimum period covering the first two years of planned operation.

Income:

This is the cost of your services plus a little extra to be profitable. You have to demonstrate to the CQC how you worked out these costs and the extra (surplus) you intend to charge to generate profit. You may intend to pocket this profit, or you might intend to save that for future business developments such as investment in technology, to give an example. 

The CQC will want to see the figures for your expected cash flow and the profit/loss involved in the early period. We mention loss because it will take time for your organisation to gain traction within the local area. Good advertisement helps, as does accreditation, but a lot of these accreditations come with time – as does trust in your organisation from those in the NHS or local authorities sourcing care. 

Costs:

Also referred to as expenditure, running a business inevitably incurs costs. It’s on you to predict as many of these costs as possible and detail them for the CQC. 

Costs are things such as rent, energy bills, insurance (building, vehicles, staff, contents), hardware (kit and computers), software (programs for the computers), audits for your finances, and then the obvious outgoings for staff pay, uniforms, and your own salary/salaries.

This brings us on nicely to the final section, and arguably the most painstaking: the budget. The CQC requires every business plan to detail a budget for your organisation; a table of predicted figures, as well as your own capital and holdings, for the first two years of intended operation. 

This should be in a table format and should cover things like: 

• Income from clients
• Balance sheets
• Cash flow projections
• Expenditure on staff salaries, training & development
• Marketing & advertisement 

A lot of this may seem similar to the financial planning section, and you would be right, but this is the flip side of that coin; listing the figures out in a factual, evidenced manner rather than making a written statement.