When people ask me for a bed and breakfast business plan template, they’re usually expecting forty pages, a SWOT analysis and a five-year forecast. I never wrote one of those in 17 years of running my own B&B, and I’ve never needed one in more than a decade of coaching owners since 2014.
What I did write, in January 2010, was a plan on one sheet of paper. We had just come back to our house in Champagne after losing everything in the 2008 crash, and a couple of months later the bailiffs knocked on the door with the papers to repossess our home. Until then my little two-room B&B had never made more than around €10,000 a year. My plan was to make €40,000 in the first year, and to grow from there. Nine months later the B&B had made €51,195, and the following year €103,495, with no listings on Booking dot com, Airbnb or any other third-party site.
That plan worked because it answered a handful of real questions. So here is the template I now use with my clients, question by question, and I’ll point you to my free B&B Income Calculator for the numbers part so you don’t have to do the maths by hand.
Why most B&B business plans gather dust
A business plan isn’t a document you write once to satisfy a bank. It’s the design of your business, and your design decides both your income and your lifestyle. The model most owners run, without ever choosing it, has them working morning till night, doing everything themselves, discounting their rates and taking anyone who will pay. I ran exactly that model for years, and no spreadsheet would have fixed it.
So the plan below starts with you and your guests, and only then gets to the numbers. If you get the first part right, the numbers follow. Get it wrong and you’ll be busy, tired and wondering why the figures never add up.
The template: eight questions, one page each
1. Who am I, and who can I best serve?
Everything else in your plan flows from this. Take an honest inventory of your own passions, skills, knowledge and what you love to talk about. Then decide WHO exactly you would most like to welcome, WHY they would choose you and WHAT unique experience you’ll offer them. In my case, I was an Englishwoman in the middle of the French champagne vineyards, and there were more than 300 other B&Bs in the area. My guests were international visitors who wanted the hidden gems of Champagne that they’d never find on their own. Once I was clear on that, almost every other decision made itself.
Write a short paragraph describing your ideal guest: where they come from, what they come for, what they’d love you to know and arrange for them. If you can’t describe them, you can’t attract them. I wrote more about this in Why it’s easier to start a bed and breakfast when it’s about YOU.
2. Where am I, and what do people come here for?
Location matters, but the question isn’t “is it a busy area?” It’s “do the people who visit here care about the same things I do?” If you love the outdoors, don’t buy near the beach. List the six to eight things people genuinely come to your area for, and note which of them you can talk about with real enthusiasm. That list becomes your content, your emails and your extras later on.
3. What is the experience, not just the room?
Guests are not looking for great bed linen or a delicious breakfast. Those are a given. They’re looking for a deeper experience that meets their needs for connection, discovery and feeling looked after. In your plan, describe a stay from booking to departure: the pre-arrival email with your tips and directions, the welcome, the one thing you do that nobody else in your area does. At my B&B that was a champagne tour to small producers who only open by appointment, offered before guests even arrived.
4. The numbers: rooms, rate, occupancy
Now, and only now, the numbers. Your plan needs just three figures to start with: how many rooms you’ll sell, what you’ll charge per night, and how many nights a year you expect to sell them (your occupancy rate). Put the three together and you have what the hotel world calls revenue per available room, which simply means the amount of money you can realistically make in any given period by each room.
Of those three figures, the only one that’s hard to change is the number of rooms. Your rate is the one most owners underestimate. I put my rates up three times in my first year back, and nobody noticed except me and my bank account. So write down the rate you’d charge as the specialist in your area, not the rate the B&B down the road charges.
Rather than doing this on the back of an envelope, use my free B&B Income Calculator. It’s a free spreadsheet that I’ll email straight to you. You enter your rooms, your rates and your expected occupancy, and it shows you what your B&B could make over a year, so you can try different rates and occupancy levels and see what each one does. Spend 20 minutes with it before you write anything else in this section. If you want a sense of what’s realistic, my post on the earning potential of a properly running B&B walks through an example.
5. How will guests find me?
This is the section almost every plan leaves out, and it decides whether the numbers in section 4 ever happen. You need three tools: a website that speaks to your ideal guest and leads to a Book Now button, an online booking system that takes deposits, and a customer relationship (CRM) system that holds your guests’ details so you can stay in touch. Then decide how much of your business you want to come directly to you, and how much, if any, you’ll hand to the online travel agents, who take between 15% and 30% of every booking. Plan for direct bookings from day one and treat the booking sites as a top-up, not a foundation.
6. Who is on my team?
Yes, even with two rooms. The most expensive decision I ever made was deciding to do all the cleaning and laundry myself “until I could afford help”. When I finally hired two cleaners and sent out the laundry, I freed up the time to do the high-value work of getting bookings and looking after guests, and that is when the income changed. Write down who will clean, who will do the laundry, and what you will do with the hours that gives you back. Start as you mean to go on.
7. What else will my guests love to buy?
A room is one thing to sell. Dinner, a picnic, a tour, a tasting, a celebration package: these make a stay memorable, and guests are delighted to pay for them. List three extras you could offer in your first season, built from the list in section 2. I added mine within my first six months, and they made a real difference to what the B&B took.
8. The first 90 days
Finish with a dated list for the first three months: website live, booking system connected, first blog post about the area written, pre-arrival email drafted, cleaner hired, first three extras priced. A plan without dates is a wish list.
Check your plan against my five questions
Before you call it finished, rate yourself from 1 to 10 on the five statements I use in my book:
- I have a clear idea of who I can best serve with my own knowledge, skills and talents.
- I have outsourced (or plan to) the low-value tasks so I can focus on bookings and guests.
- I have developed (or plan to) other products and services my guests will love to buy.
- I charge (or plan to) higher prices than the average in my area.
- I am known (or plan to be) as the “go to” B&B in my area.
If your plan gives you a confident answer to each one, you have a business plan I’d be happy to put my name to. If one of them made you wince, that’s the page to go back to.
Where to go next
If you’d like the full version of this thinking, my book How to Start, Run and Grow a B&B Business that You and Your Guests Love takes you through the whole formula step by step, and it comes with its own built-in AI assistant so you can ask it questions about your own plan as you go. And if you’d rather talk it through with me, book a free 15-minute call and bring your one page. I’ll tell you honestly what I think.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a bed and breakfast business plan be?
As long as it takes to answer the eight questions above, which for most of my clients is a few pages. The plan that turned my B&B around was one sheet of paper with a number on it.
Do I need a business plan if I’m only opening two rooms?
Yes, and arguably more so. With two rooms there’s very little room for error, so the decisions about your rate, your ideal guest and your extras matter even more. I had two rooms when I made my plan in 2010.
What numbers do I need for my B&B business plan?
Three to begin with: your number of rooms, your nightly rate and your expected occupancy. My free B&B Income Calculator turns those into an annual figure, and lets you test what happens when you change your rate or your occupancy.
Should my plan include Booking dot com and Airbnb?
Decide deliberately rather than by default. The booking sites take between 15% and 30% of each booking, keep the guest’s details, and control your position on their pages. Plan to attract direct bookings from the start, and treat the sites as a top-up if you use them at all.