Today’s economy of the European Union is statistically proven to be largely made up of startup enterprises. Startups, that has been and will be an essential part of the economy, be it present or future. However, it is a well-known fact that startup failure rates are quite high, both in the economy as a whole as well as the restaurant industry which is of focus in this paper. Therefore, there is a pressing need among both scholars and entrepreneurs to figure out how to reduce the micro-enterprise startup failure rates.   It is why; this paper was written with the purpose of studying the components of a traditional business plan model, to look for gaps and parts that are worth developing more. Primary concern was to find out the necessary steps a startup must take in the business plan to better avoid financial failure in the pre-established startup period – which is over 42 months.    Therefore the following research question was posed: “How can the components of the traditional business plan be adapted or complemented by contemporary research, and, entrepreneurs’ views and experiences in order to better avoid financial failure of a micro-enterprise start-up within the European restaurant industry?”   In order to answer this question a qualitative study was done; contemporary research was reviewed and compared with primarily collected data which was gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews with managers and employees of restaurants. The abductive approach allowed the authors to “enrich” the established theories used.     It was made clear that two prominent gaps were found in the traditional business plan models; networking and a red-thread strategy. The first gap, networking, includes the need to establish a “network identity” within the network that the startup operates in, and to plan how the network that the business operates in can be used, as well as clearly state what purposes and benefits it provides.  The second gap, red-thread strategy, emphasizes the need of a strong overall focus on the desired goals and visions of the organization in order for it to better operate and function, and specifically, how it is to be implemented to permeate throughout daily operations. It is to make the operational inferences of the vision clear, and how the startup will ensure that the aim will stay the same through their day-to-day operations.      To conclude, it was found that by allegedly filling up those two gaps by including them in detail in the business plan, the startup could have a bigger chance of avoiding financial failure within the startup period.