Whether you’re building a business plan to raise money and grow your business or just need to figure out if your idea will work, every business plan needs to cover 6 essential topics. Here’s a quick overview of each topic. There are a lot more details and instructions for each step later in this guide.

1: Executive summary

2: Opportunity

3: Execution

4: Company and management summary

5: Financial plan

6: Appendix

Meals-to-go businesses prepare home-cooked food for customers, and sell these meals (often with a delivery service). In any food preparation business, there is a markup on ingredient costs and labor costs with some allowance for waste. For example, if the ingredients for a meal cost $10 and the labor to prepare it costs $4, and then we add in a contribution to overhead and allowance for waste the meal should sell for about $24 to include some profit for the business owner. This is a great price for a quality gourmet meal for two people.

The successful businesses in this sector spend 32% for the materials, 33% for the labor and about 5% for overhead. Typical prices for two people are in the range of $24 to $28 dollars, depending on the area. Naturally, an operation in New York City will charge more because the cost of overhead is higher than in other parts of the country.