Business Plans: How Long Should They Be?

I’ve worked with a couple of thousand entrepreneurs to help them with their business plans and fundraising.  Here’s a couple of quick points I’ve learned:

1. Way too often the entrepreneur has not yet really developed any “go to market” or realistic implementation strategies and tactics.  Too often this part is 50% arm waving and 50% enthusiasm = 0% drilled down execution plan.  Trust me when I say:  prospective investors will notice the jive. Exactly how are going to drive sales?  How much will you spend on advertising to rise above the noise level?  Where, exactly, will those advertising dollars be spent? What is your W Cubed?  Who? Will do What? When?  Until you know this, you won’t know what resources you will need or the costs to reflect in your financial projections.
2. Financial projections are hugely important – massively so.  Yet, way too often entrepreneurs want them done because they have heard they have to be in a plan…without really caring if they are a real prediction of the future.  Here’s a clue: not only do they need to be your very best prediction of the future – you need to be prepared to answer drilled down questions on every one of your major driving assumptions. If you don’t have good answers on each of those assumptions, the prospective investor will probably NOT stroke a check for your venture. And, oh by the way, you get your good driving assumptions from having previously defined your realistic strategies and tactics.

Your business plan needs to discuss the above in detail – and not be filled with useless motherhood and apple pie filler.  

Your business plan needs to be long enough to grab a prospective investor’s attention, show them the pain you will solve and then show them the strategy and tactics to accomplish it with your unique business model – with genuinely believable financials that show a motivating ROI opportunity.  

If you have a need help with your strategies and tactics – or developing meaningful driving assumptions, check out my Deviled Details Action Planning Service.

Startup Company – New Product Roll Out – Now Or After Raising Investor Capital?

“Should I start selling my products and services now – or should I wait until after I have raised my angel investor capital from my private placement?  I want to do the roll out in a big way before tipping off my competition.”

This question came up yesterday – and it’s one I often hear.  The answer is:  it depends.

Like most things with start up and emerging companies, there are always exceptions to every rule.  However, in this case, if your company is a true start up with no sales and no experience in the marketplace AND you have already finished one or more products and services, then, in my opinion, there is only one answer:

Get Traction – Now!

Even if you have a great business plan produced by yours truly or by yourself or anyone else…you are still predicting the future with unknown and unestablished products and services.  And, prospective investors know it.  Think about it:  you are asking them to believe your projections are realistic when none of them are actually based on reality.

If you and your team have already gotten even one of your products and services ready for prime time – so that it can be delivered to a real customer with an outstanding customer experience, then start selling now…and sell as many as you can afford prior to raising investor capital.

Your Competition

Generally speaking, if you are a start up, you are so far down in the noise that most of your competition won’t even notice you until you start spending real money on your advertising and PR. 

If you really have a new product or service to sell today, one that is really ready for prime time, then your competitors will need time and money to catch up to you.  During that interim, you drive sales, gain traction in the market place, impress prospective investors, get your capital raised and then do your big roll out – all before they can even get past the design stage. 

Besides, if you are never able to raise your money, you probably will never have that big roll out that you anticipated – so your bootstrap sales approach to gain traction may be the only option you have – and the only way you will generate cash flow.

Seven Reasons – And More

Besides the obvious benefit of generating cash flow, which is almost always a premium for every start up company, selling now has several immediate benefits:

1. It shows that you can actually get wallet-share by selling your products and services to real human beings or to real companies at the price point your business plan shows.
2. It gives you a chance on getting real customer testimonials – for your web pages and for the eyeballs of prospective customers and investors. Remember:  pioneers are the one face down in the dirt with arrows in their backs. Many prospective customers usually don’t want to be pioneers – they want to see what other customers have to say about your products and services. 
3. It shows what your direct cost of sales really are.  You guessed what the cost would be for each incremental sale – this way, you know for sure.
4. It shows you what needs changing.  This includes everything from your flow of work processes to your fulfillment procedures to your after sale customer support.
5. It shows you what needs to be improved.  Your customers will tell you what changes they want, what works well and what does not.  If you can make the changes on this side of the funding, then do so in order to already have an improved product or service for today’s customers and tomorrow’s prospective investors. If those changes take more money and time than you currently have, then you have a feature and benefit list for version 2.0 to show prospective investors.
6. You can start to calculate what your customer acquisition costs are.  In other words, how much on average does it cost you in advertising, marketing, AdWords, etc. for each customer who ends up giving you wallet-share?  Is it $10?  $100?  $1,000?  Once you have this number, you can at least approximate how much you REALLY need to spend on marketing and advertising to drive the sales forecast in your business plan.
7. Even with a meager roll out, you can start to see where your constraints to growth will be.  Is it back office support? Fulfillment? Sales force limitations? Advertising? Enough of You? Or, is it just enough money to go do what you want to do?  My guess is that it will be more than one thing if you project out even one year.  The more constraints to growth you can anticipate now, and plan for now, the more insights you will have for your business plan.

These are just the Lucky Seven benefits of selling now and not waiting until after the investor funding.

Update Your Plan With Your Newly Gained Reality

Another key benefit:  Take all you learn from these seven – and go back to ALL of your driving assumptions for your financial projections and tweak and tune them to better reflect reality. 

Drill down on every assumption and question if it best reflects the new reality after chasing real wallet-share.  If not, change the numbers for your assumptions and generate new projections based on your real life experiences.  Then, update your plan’s narrative to discuss what you’ve learned and why you think the newly generated financial projections are better.

Not only will your projections end up much more realistic, you will be smarter about your customers and your costs – and your prospective investors will get better answers from you when they start asking you the hard questions. 

And, the revenue traction you show them might, just maybe, be enough to get them to stroke that check for your funding.

All the best,

Robert

PS:  This is just one of many pivotal strategic and tactical decisions you face with your new company.  Check out my Deviled Details and my Kick Start Planning Services for more information on how I can help accelerate the implementation of your vision.

Business Plans: The Second Biggest Mistake Entrepreneurs Make With Their Business Plan For Their Start Up Company

This one mistake is so critical that it jeopardizes the immediate survivability of your start up company – even before you get started.

What IS The Second Biggest Mistake?

Many cost-sensitive entrepreneurs depend on number crunchers, bean counters and newly minted MBAs for their projections – just to save a few dollars.

New start up CEOs doom their new company by pinching pennies in the wrong place. Instead, what they need are pivotal insights from experienced consultants who can provide the guidance the entrepreneur needs for producing a realistic, genuinely implementable business plan.

Your business plan is not some academic document – instead, it is your crucial road map to successful implementation of your vision for your new company.

The Driving Assumptions

The most important part of any business plan is the detailed financial projections that are the basis for the entire business model of every new start up company. There are four sets of underlying assumptions that drive all the projections:

1. Start up costs – what will you need to spend up front to get the company going?
2. Sales forecast – the single most important set of assumptions for your whole plan – how many of what, will you sell, for how much, at what costs, when?
3. Personnel – how many, of what kind of employees, will you need at what cost, when?
4. Operating costs – what will it really cost to be in business, generate sales, give necessary sales support and exemplary customer service and cover all back office expenses?

Every part of your financial projections is just arithmetic – based on those four sets of driving assumptions. Because it is just arithmetic, many entrepreneurs make the often fatal mistake of assuming it is trivial and can be done easily and cheaply.

But – if you guess wrong on any of these assumptions, then most of your projections are wrong – including two of your most important projections: your cash flow and your capital needs. If you guess wrong on your assumptions that impact these, then you will probably run out of money and your new company will fail.

Number Crunchers and Bean Counters

Number crunchers and bean counters are great at arithmetic. So are newly minted MBAs. And, they can be relatively cheap to hire. But this cheap hire may be the most expensive mistake you will make as a start up CEO.

These cheap hires almost never have any experience base or expertises that help entrepreneurs make meaningful assumptions. So, entrepreneurs who use this approach for their business plans end up with GIGO: garbage in, garbage out projections that are misleading at best – but more often, fatal in the end.

As the adage goes, the only thing worse than going the wrong direction – is going the wrong direction enthusiastically. By basing your business plan on the wrong assumptions, you end up going the wrong direction – probably enthusiastically – believing your bean counter-generated plan will be the path to wealth.

Entrepreneurs who have thought they were saving a few hundred dollars by hiring cheap number crunchers or inexperienced MBAs, end up losing everything they’ve invested in their new company – all because they were penny wise – and dollar foolish – or rather, thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars foolish.

Cash is always limited for start up companies – but this is one place you do not want to get trapped by false savings.

The Right Solution

What’s the best way for you to avoid the second biggest mistake for your new start up company?

Hire an experienced management consultant who specializes in start up companies – particularly a consultant who has started at least a dozen of their own companies. That way, you get insights based on real life experience that will help you end up with a genuinely implementable plan for the future – your future and the future of your new start up company.

Ceo Resource LLC has specialized in cost-effectively helping over 2,000 entrepreneurs and start up companies with their business planning for the past 16 years.

Please check out our services listed in the left column of this blog.

Firing the Indispensable Employee

As I get questions from readers from my Ask The Chief ImpleMentor Campaign, I will take some of the questions that I think might have a broad audience and post them here on the blog.

This one is filed under “Dragons – Personnel: How do you fire the indispensable person in your organization?”

Question:

We just moved and I have decided that even if you built an office across the street and moved in slowly, it is devastation to the routine. My staff all get their feathers ruffled despite the fact that their gain is significant in the work place. It just chaps me to no end to deal with WHINERS! Even though I am a woman CEO, I have to admit that I loathe women employees as a rule anyway – but whining women disturb me to my very core.

For the record, I employ 7 men to every woman – not by design but just the way it worked out. The women that I have (for the most part) think like men, behave like men and love men. However, I have one NAZI fem , the HR director, who is causing problems for the whole organization with her attitude and approach. Even though she is indispensable to my company, she is my biggest mistake. How do I rid myself of her since no one else knows what she knows in so many very critical areas?

Susan

Answer:

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