Each chapter is made up of essays whose titles complete the following:
Under no circumstances should you...

Chap 1 - Getting Started - Monday, August 10, 2009 10:43 - 13 Comments

…Write A Long Business Plan

One of my favorite parts about being in business school was working on business plans. I loved to write me a business plan. It really felt like I was creating something. I got to spend a bunch of time researching and learning, and then committing to paper the fruits of my labor. Better than the researching and the writing was the model building. Going into Excel and building a gigantic model clearly laying out the next five years of the business was something I loved to do. Finally, I could take the model and the business plan, roll it all together into a 60 page tome, and prove to everyone just how smart I was. Fail.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t proving how smart I was. I wasn’t proving that I was a business titan who could craft a business out of nothing. I wasn’t showing the world that you needed to get an MBA to be a successful entrepreneur. What I was showing was that I could waste a bunch of time doing a bunch of work about which no one would ultimately care, and in fact was making little progress in the actual building of the endeavor.

Anyone who tells you that you need to have a long and thoroughly written business plan is either a banker, a consultant, or has never been an entrepreneur. Why a banker? Well, if you do decide to go to a traditional bank for any kind of loan, they are going to want to see very exhaustive information about you and your business. They are not in the risk taking business. They are in the risk mitigation business. In theory, the more information you present to them, the more risk you are mitigating. Venture capitalists are ostensibly in the risk taking business, meaning you can get money from them with far less of a plan, but we’ll talk more on that later. VCs are actually some of the most risk adverse people on the planet, but they will certainly invest in your opportunity without you having to show up with a 60 page plan.

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