Plan & Pitch

Here they are! The top ten of business plan do’s and don’ts:

TOP TEN DO’S
1. Prepare a complete business plan for any business you are considering.
2. Use the business plan templates furnished in each session.
3. Complete sections of your business plan as you proceed through the course.
4. Research (use search engines) to find business plans that are available on the Internet.
5. Package your business plan in an attractive kit as a selling tool.
6. Submit your business plan to experts in your intended business for their advice.
7. Spell out your strategies on how you intend to handle adversities.
8. Spell out the strengths and weaknesses of your management team.
9. Include a monthly one-year cash flow projection.
10. Freely and frequently modify your business plans to account for changing conditions.

TOP TEN DON’TS
1. Be optimistic (on the high side) in estimating future sales.
2. Be optimistic (on the low side) in estimating future costs.
3. Disregard or discount weaknesses in your plan. Spell them out.
4. Stress long-term projections. Better to focus on projections for your first year.
5. Depend entirely on the uniqueness of your business or the success of an invention.
6. Project yourself as someone you’re not. Be brutally realistic.
7. Be everything to everybody. Highly focused specialists usually do best.
8. Proceed without adequate financial and accounting know-how.
9. Base your business plan on a wonderful concept. Test it first.
10. Skip the step of preparing a business plan before starting.

…stolen from myownbusiness.org.

What’s the optimal process for writing a business plan?

Okay, good question. Fortunately for people like you and myself, business guru Guy Kawasaki gives a fair enough answer on his blog:

Grab whatever part gets your attention first and get going. Understand that it’s not sequential it’s iterative, and a good plan is never done. Some people do the numbers, then the concepts, most people do concepts first, but it doesn’t matter. Planning isn’t a waiting room where you sit until you’re done. Build it in parts, mix and match, choose items from a menu. If you like, do a sales forecast and see where that leads you.

In the same breath, he does share HIS favorite process:

- start with what you want for the business on the long term

- move to establishing a conceptual identify: what are you best at, how do you want the world to distinguish your business from all others.

- go to the marketing: what message, to whom, through what media.

- then go to sales forecast, costs, expenses, and last but frequently most important, cash flow.

That’s it but remember: a good business plan is never done.

Business plans are boring, usually.

David Svet has written a brilliant article on his blog how you can write a compelling business plan that people want to read and will be able to understand as well.

How’s that possible? Write your business plan as a story! As an adventure, a fairy tale, a fable… that’s right.

Give it a shot. Make 15-20 slides and retell your business plan as a story. It will give you a new frame of reference for your work. Embrace storytelling as a way to talk about your organization and you can rise above the competition reaching your full potential. It will make it more fun for your employees to understand what you do. It will inspire you to be bolder with your marketing and sales efforts.

Now go ahead and read his article.

And don’t forget.

Even if you don’t end up with a tidy story in the end, the process of looking through another lens will help you to see your business in a new light.

One tip when you want attention for your business plan – and there’s a good chance you do – is to win a prize.

Become number one!

There are plenty of business plan competitions out there. If you win, you often get some prize money but of course you get a lot of exposure and credibility which often prove to be a lot more useful!

Recently I joined the LinkedIn Group Business Plan Competitions.

Some competitions are:

http://www.oxfordentrepreneurs.co.uk/events/idea-idol/ (UK)

http://sgentrepreneurs.com/news-stop/2009/08/22/2c2p-only-singapore-finalist-nokia-competition/ (Singapore)

http://www.injaz.org.jo/Default.aspx (Jordan)

http://www.ameinfo.com/194101.html (Bahrain)

http://www.injaz-kuwait.org/press0801.html (Kuwait)

Shared with me by Greg Hill, Program Manager for the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards.

Thanks Greg!

When you buy a car, you take it for a test ride. Why not do the same for your business idea?

No matter how talented you are and how much capital you have, if you have not given your idea a rigourous, critical examination before starting out, you could be heading for a disaster. And if you are fundamentally in a lousy business, you will not get very far, no matter how much effort you put in.

Read the book ‘The new Business Road Test’ by John Mullins. 15 reviews on Amazon, every single one 5 stars!

Take a look at this presentation from Slideshare if you want a simple yet effective business plan.

A business plan is a simple representation of balancing and gaining edge over the weaknesses of a business with the strenghts.

Make futuristic but realistic goals…

A key ingredient of your business plan is of course your business model. How are you going to make money?

The world is changing and so is the way entrepreneurs should approach their business model, according to www.businessmodelgeneration.com.

I found this presentation on Slideshare very insightful:

Wanna build a succesful startup in 2009? Why don’t you spend 295 dollars and come to The Perfect Pitch 2009, ‘The Entrepreneur & Investor Event of the Year’.

Hundreds of influential entrepreneurs and investors will converge for a day of learning and dealmaking. Powerful speakers and panelists will show you what it takes to build a successful startup in 2009.

Say Hello to Richard for me.

What’s the optimal process for writing a business plan?

Okay, good question. Fortunately for people like you and myself, business guru Guy Kawasaki gives a fair enough answer on his blog:

Grab whatever part gets your attention first and get going. Understand that it’s not sequential it’s iterative, and a good plan is never done. Some people do the numbers, then the concepts, most people do concepts first, but it doesn’t matter. Planning isn’t a waiting room where you sit until you’re done. Build it in parts, mix and match, choose items from a menu. If you like, do a sales forecast and see where that leads you.

In the same breath, he does share HIS favorite process:

- start with what you want for the business on the long term

- move to establishing a conceptual identify: what are you best at, how do you want the world to distinguish your business from all others.

- go to the marketing: what message, to whom, through what media.

- then go to sales forecast, costs, expenses, and last but frequently most important, cash flow.

That’s it but remember: a good business plan is never done.

Guy Kawasaki, amongt many other things he is writer of the wonderful book The Art of the Start – is a smart and down-to-earth entrepreneur/investor. So when he writes on his blog what the common mistakes are when starting entrepreneurs write a business plan you do good to read carefully:

The worst by far is focusing on the plan instead of planning. This generates the idea that you create a plan as a document, and the related misunderstanding that the plan is for somebody else. You don’t postpone life while you’re developing a plan; you’re always developing the plan. In the meantime, “Get going.”

Here are some other common mistakes as seen by Guy:

• Blue-sky blurry: lots of strategic thinking without any hard facts. Planning requires specifics: dates, deadlines, responsibility assignments.
• Trying to do everything. I use the rule of displacement: everything you do rules out something else.
• Thinking that being the lowest price option is important. It isn’t. The price and volume thing they talk about in economics classes is for 200-year-old lumps of coal, not your business. Use price as a statement of quality. Leave the low-price strategies for Walmart and Costco.
• Mistaking profits for cash. Profitable companies go broke all the time. You don’t spend profits. Plan your working capital well.

There is a lot of other lenghty but well-worthy advice from him on his blog: blog.guykawasaki.com