And I mean that, literally, you can click here for a preview of my one-hour talk on marketing plans that will be available next week. The preview, the audio of a conversation between me and Erin Verbeck, is about the longer audio to be released next week.
New research on business and business plans shows that people who finished business plans were about twice as likely to grow their business, get financing, or get a loan, when compared to people who didn't have a plan.
I emphasize setting the review schedule as part of your business plan, and, in general, recognizing that the real win for your business isn’t just a business plan, but a planning process that includes regular plan-vs.-actual review, keeping your plan alive, using your plan as a tool to manage your company.
I’m glad to see it: Seth Godin, one of the best thinkers of the post-Internet age, suggesting we should rethink the formal business plan assumptions we’ve been using, without change, for far too long. He suggests what he calls the modern business plan and I, for one, like the suggestion.
Having been through several hundred business plans and several dozen pitch presentations in the last three months, I hope I don’t see another pie-in-the-sky ROI projection for a while.
I like reading business plans, and I like listening to business pitches. I do it on purpose. I like judging business plan contests and I do it a lot. And I like being an angel investor (in a group, the Willamette Angel Conference). But Jeez! Where are the entrepreneurs getting the idea that their ROI projections matter to investors?
I'm looking forward to being both judge and presenter at Princeton's competition next week on Friday May 28. The winner gets a one-hour meeting with Silicon Valley venture capital legend Sequoia Capital; plus two round trip tickets from the East Coast.That's in addition to free marketing plan consulting, business planning consulting, and legal services. Plus of course the prestige of winning at Princeton.
Which is better: aiming at something from a great distance and committing to that without flexibility; or setting a general direction and moving towards it in smaller flexible increments?
The second is better. Of course. The first is like the myth of the business plan, the way it's frequently misunderstood. The second is business planning, the way it is supposed to work.
I’m still long-term frustrated with how many people lose the potential steering and management benefits of business planning because they focus on the plan as document instead of the planning as management. With that in mind, and in honor of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009, I did a webinar Nov. 19 on the theme in the title of this post. This is the recording:
