I have a confession; I don’t like business plans.
Don’t get me wrong. Planning is crucial: What are you doing? Why is it good for customers? How does your business get to the next stage and make money doing it?
I also know many entrepreneurs who love writing business plans. I suspect that the key word there is “planning”. Planning is great and, done right, very productive. But a 40-page document with five graphs covering the history of shoes? Maybe not so much.
Here are some of the problems:
– Too often, people just write down all the “maybes” and “coulda’s” ricocheting around in their head. There’s value to this. Seemingly brilliant thoughts often looks a lot less compelling written down. (You should have seen the first draft of this post 😜 ), but all too often, you still end up with a hodge-podge. And what a good plan needs is focus.
– A business is about doing things effectively, making sure the pieces pull together. Transcribing your thoughts in no way insures that your sales strategy makes sense with your customer growth targets or that either lines up with spending plans.
– Most importantly, it’s not a plan. I’ve read far too many plans (could stop there, actually – I HAVE read far too many plans) where I’m left with no idea what the entrepreneur intends to do next or why.
I say this not just to rant (although that’s always fun), but because it was particularly heartening to hear the feedback from our founder interviews. Here’s what they said:
– Just start
– In any small capacity, just start doing it
– Start gradually; don’t bite off more than you can chew
– Experience is the best teacher; you’re going to learn more from that little business than from all the books you can read
– Start now!
As Robert Petti said, “It was really, really not fun. It was an utter disaster. But it still gave us a bit of an idea that we had something we could build on”
And building is what entrepreneurs are here to do, right?
