The BusinessMakers Show will broadcast an interview with Palo Alto Software founder and president, Tim Berry, on Saturday, May 12. Tim will share his experiences and expertise on business planning as well as his personal experiences as an entrepreneur.

The discussion will also look at the importance of succession planning, recounting Tim’s transfer of management of Palo Alto Software to his daughter and current CEO, Sabrina Parsons. The BusinessMakers Show will follow up with an interview with Ms. Parsons that will broadcast on May 19.

Starting this Saturday, you can listen to the interview on the BusinessMakers site. You’ll find an extensive collection of past interviews there as well, making it a great source for inspiration and education.

 Microphone image from homepage courtesy of Shutterstock

Congressman Peter DeFazio (Oregon, D) stopped by the Palo Alto Software office yesterday and discussed the important role small businesses play in their local economies.

While many cities and regions spend time and resources trying to attract and convince large corporations to relocate to their area, DeFazio says a focus on the local businesses can be a better fit.

If you can’t view the video above, click here to view it on YouTube.

Click here to view local news coverage of the visit.

Click here to find out more about Congressman DeFazio.

How many times have you thought “somebody should make…” or “why doesn’t anybody sell…”? Palo Alto Software customer Kelly Chaney had a moment like that, but instead of just wondering why nobody was making cake mix for dogs, she decided to solve the problem by becoming the somebody who does. And so Puppy Cake, innovative and gourmet treats for dogs, was born.

“People, myself included, love their dogs. I imagined that many dog owners would want to provide their dog with a cake. I wanted to create a cake mix that was close to cake mix for people”  she explains, but with ingredients that were dog friendly, like carob in place of chocolate. The mixes are professionally packaged and like regular cake mix, require just an egg, oil, and water to create a finished cake or batch of cupcakes. They even include a yogurt frosting mix so you can top your dog’s treat just like a traditional cake.

If Puppy Cake sounds familiar, it may be because you recently saw Kelly on the T.V. show Shark Tank. Kelly says she had been a fan of the show for years, adding “I have used the advice they give other entrepreneurs to help my own business. Auditioning for the show was a no brainer.”  While she didn’t get funding for her business, she did get national television exposure which was a boon for her business. “Appearing on the show was huge for Puppy Cake. We are still cashing in on the free publicity.” In fact, Kelly recently used the business plan she created with Business Plan Pro to pitch to a major investor who found her after seeing the show.

Kelly found that her biggest challenge in getting her business off the ground was her own inexperience. She started the company at the ripe old age of 21, and says “I thought I could do anything and that I knew enough to start a business. In some ways I was right – I could do anything and I did know enough to start a business, but definitely not enough to know how to run a business well.” For instance, she was able to secure a line of credit to finance the company fairly easily, and she found it was just as easy to burn through the money, primarily on inefficient advertising campaigns.

“I had no idea how difficult it was to make a dollar,” Kelly notes. “Perhaps it was my youthful naivete fueled by the American dream, but I really thought I would have $1,000,000 in sales in the first year. But it takes time to build a brand and reputation.”

Kelly was quick to learn from her mistakes. “I got creative in advertising my business. I require all of my advertising campaigns to have 100% ROI and I have sophisticated ways of calculating the ROI before I make the ad spend.” Social media plays a big role in her efforts, she says, noting “It’s an excellent way to connect with my customers and fans of Puppy Cake.”

Puppy Cake has already seen great growth (sales jumped 250% from year one to two!) and Kelly’s future plans include getting her mixes into more retail locations. “I have no doubt in my mind that in five years, Puppy Cake products will be in every major retailer that sells pet products.”

Learn more about Puppy Cake, healthy and satisfying treats for dogs.

With colleges receiving record numbers of applications each year, any edge students can get helps increase the chances of getting in to their chosen schools. And that’s where The Edge in College Prep comes in.

Started in late 2005 by Palo Alto Software customer Jessica Brondo, The Edge in College Prep provides in-person and online admissions counseling and tutoring for standardized tests, test prep boot camps for schools, and online SAT courses.

Brondo got her start as a tutor in high school and continued helping other students throughout her college days at Princeton. She then went to work for an SAT prep company before deciding to launch her own business, which she says “has a much more customized and global focus than other companies.”

Recently, the 24-person company expanded to cover six international cities and grew revenues by a whopping 500%. “I never expected to go international so soon. We hit Europe and Latin America very quickly!” With some big names in the same space as competition, Brondo’s company has benefited from the same kind of edge that students get when they use her service.

In this case, the edge is a creative approach to problem solving, which has played a major role in the company’s success and growth. Brondo says one of the biggest challenges she’s faced in her business has been “finding quality, standardized test instructors who have the perfect balance of intellect and charisma, especially in smaller cities.”

The solution was not to be dependent on local talent to get her services where they were needed. “Over the last six years, online seems to be the direction a lot of students are going,” Brondo notes. So the Edge shifted focus. “We developed an innovative online learning platform, as well as Skype tutoring. We also recently launched our first online course for the SAT which gives students 24/7 access to nearly 700 questions and 1,000 instructional videos.”

A lot of people dream of making a similar transition, and according to Jessica, confidence is the key.  “A lot of times, it can be overwhelming to think about competing with some of the larger companies, and some entrepreneurs get frustrated about trying to accomplish too many  things. I often think that people are too focused on what other companies are doing and less focused on just doing what they do really well. In yoga, teachers will tell you to focus on what is going on your mat and not look around at what others are doing and I think that holds true as an entrepreneur.”

The Edge in College Prep is a growing business. Within five years, says Brondo, they expect to employ 100 people. “We hope to continue the expansion of additional online course products, and hope to create a network of Edge-certified tutors throughout the world for students looking to supplement their courses with in-person or online tutoring.”

January of 1995. Few people knew of the Internet, Mozilla, and the world-wide web. The so-called “Internet” had existed for years, but seemed to the rest of us (anybody outside of a few spook havens and ivory towers) like a nerdy background utility for emails.  And I started bplans.com.

I hope you’ve noticed big changes at bplans.com lately: more information, more tutorials, and better organized, making what you’re looking for easier to find. And especially a new membership group. I hope it shows because we’ve put a lot of effort into it.

As part of the recent boom, the team asked me for stories of the so-called old days. When, how, and why did bplans.com get started. So here we go. Let’s call this a collection of loosely related stories:

1. A friend came by my office and showed me Mozilla, the first web browser, and the world-wide web. It knocked my socks off. I’d been active in Compuserve and its competition, but here was the whole new world. I was hooked.
2. I immediately registered a few obvious domain names. Businessplan.com had already been registered, but bplans.com was, so I registered it.
3. I did the earliest bplans.com sites myself, in my spare time, while running a company growing about 50% per year. In 1997 we hired an NYU undergrad to create a better bplans.com site, focusing on business planning and especially publishing sample plans. He worked for us remotely from New York. He’s now in his middle 30s, has become known for his success as CTO of Huffington Post and as of this month as founder of rebelmouse.com. He created a beautiful site very quickly. Within a couple of months it was getting national awards. And yes, that’s my son Paul.

From the beginning, bplans.com was always intended to be a resource site, offering free information. We did the software selling and support business at paloalto.com and gave people free content at bplans.com.  I’m not saying it was all generous and altruistic, because from the beginning – and still today – the smart people browsing at bplans figured it was dumb to not spend $99 (or less) on the software behind it. But I am saying it was all free, and we’ve kept it that way.

As membership numbers approach the 100,000 mark, Bplans.com has launched a poll and Twitter contest to celebrate!

Bplans is inviting participants to take a brief, five-question poll, then head over to Twitter.com to tweet their business name or idea to @Bplans with the hashtag: #IamBplans for a chance to win a free subscription to business-planning product, LivePlan.

Results of the poll, and winners will be announced early next week.

Did you miss any of Tim’s posts this past week? Let me just quickly sum up what you might have missed. Are you smart? Have you failed? Read this book. Check out Gust. Save the pie for yourself.

Mmmm pie.

Gust Streamlines the Angel Investment Process

Are you hoping to find angel investment for your startup? Are you looking to invest in startups? Go look at gust.com. It’s a better-than-ever first step.

So You Think You’re Smart? Prove It.

I’ve become increasingly more convinced that the best sign of real intelligence is being able to see both sides, or all sides, or any argument. You might call that having an open mind. You might call it listening. And you might call it having the good sense to say “I don’t know” a lot.

Why Don’t We Include Failures in Speakers’ Bios?

I say entrepreneurs should agree on full disclosure in their bios. We should list not just our successes, but also the failures. Nobody lists the failures.

Don’t Give Your Company Away in Pieces

Too often people in startups think they’re supposed to give pieces of their company away to people who help them. They aren’t. Or they think it’s clever to pay people for services by giving away pieces of their fledgling company. It isn’t.

5 Blogging Mistakes And A State of Wonder

Yesterday while flying cross country I read State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. It’s about real people in an almost-but-not-quite magical Amazon jungle, and, although the plot moves steadily forward, it’s more of a spell, woven with words by a great writer, than just a story.

Did you miss any of Tim’s posts this past week? You know the drill…

Brace Yourself. Success Brings Detractors.

It’s funny — well, maybe annoying is a better word — how one of the so-called trappings of success is criticism.

Is Entrepreneurship Contagious?

Is entrepreneurship contagious? Think about it, and consider this: Obesity is contagious, so is quitting smoking, and so is divorce. Why not entrepreneurship?

What Kind of Advertising for a Startup

I revised my timberry.com website a couple of months ago and one of the additions was the ask me page where I offering to answer questions people ask. This question came to me from that page and I think it might be a useful answer for this blog.

Use Business Lines to Read Warnings in Numbers

Are you minding your business? I’ve found through the years of minding my business that most of the important insight in the numbers comes in lines, not dots. I mean that tracking the change in key indicators over time, with lines, is much more valuable than looking at them at any specific point, as a dot.

As the song goes, it’s not easy being green. Well, it’s not easy being the Technical Support guy either. While the rest of us in the Marketing and Customer Service departments tend to get a lot of the fun sides of talking to our customers, that isn’t always the case with Tech Support.

So imagine our glee when Josh, our main Techie Guy, got a present in the mail!

Josh Havener is part of our technical support team. He is the first wave of support for anyone who calls in with any questions or technical issues with our software.

Typically, the calls that Josh receives aren’t full of long thoughtful conversation as generally people who get Josh are looking for some immediate help to get them working again.

So when Josh received a package in the mail on Friday from a happy customer, he was ridiculously excited.

Josh:
Sue Van Fossen (from http://www.granolasnacks.com) originally contacted us because she was having some issues with her plan file not adding things up properly. Thankfully I was able to quickly determine and fix the issue. She was so ecstatic and really grateful. She mentioned sending me something as a thanks, but since I rarely get things like that, I wasn’t really counting on it happening.

After a few days had passed, I received a package in the mail. I say this with a bit of wonder because I never get mail at the office. Curious about what was in the package, I tore into it like a 5 year old on Christmas. Lo and behold, it was a bag of Sue’s Gourmet Rocky Road Granola! This is the first gift that I’ve gotten from an appreciative customer, so I had to share the wealth with some of the people here in the office! It was unanimous, this granola was a hit!

Thanks Sue! Thank you for letting me play a small role in getting your business plan done, and thank you for the delicious granola snacks!

There’s a certain element of sunshine and laughter in the way Sue Van Fossen speaks. It comes through on the phone and you find yourself smiling almost immediately. And to be honest, it’s the exact feeling you get when you taste her Granola Snacks.

I spoke with Sue and her team on a Friday. They had just confirmed getting their snacks into a local winery, The Terra Cotta Vineyards, so they were celebrating a win. Champagne was flowing while we chatted a bit about the background of her company to go along with our review of her delicious snacks.

“I made my first sale to friends and family in 2008. I made $700 in the first month!”  Sue’s friends knew she had a gift. And as friends and family do, they encouraged her to turn what she was doing for free into a business. And if all that encouragement didn’t get her motivated, that first sale of her granola snacks sure did.

Sue quickly realized that working out of her own kitchen wasn’t going to work. Overrun with orders, she needed a better commercial kitchen and more help to keep it going.

Randy Baker brought an extra pair of hands and strong marketing to the business. He saw that they were “maxed out” production wise. They couldn’t make enough granola snacks to keep up with the demand of them.  Randy knew they needed to expand to keep up, but they couldn’t keep funding the expansion with credit cards.

In the middle of this, they realized they wanted to relocate and in their research, realized Columbus, Ohio had stimulus money still available to small businesses. But to access it, they knew they needed a plan. So Randy started a new search, this time for business planning software.

“I love the software for this reason,” Sue breaks in. “The software helped me get a broad view of everything we needed to present as a company.  A real high view of everything. And I realized I could get a high level view of what we were doing and then change it to see everything on a more granular level. What Business Plan Pro did was help me get down on paper what we were doing and which directions we were going that we never stopped to think about before. We had to stop and think about the why and where of our business. Then we could look and see the whole plan which helped us move forward.”

That Friday, as Granola Snacks was celebrating, the three of them, Sue, Randy and Kate Olkonnen, their production manager (aka the Boss) all gathered there, happy and enthusiastic about the business and the possibilities that were coming. It seemed that taking the time to put their plan down and make sure it was the right one was a strategy that was really working.

I didn’t want to take them from their celebration for too much longer,  so I asked what it was that Business Plan Pro had helped with specifically.

It was Sue that answered.

“It helped us see how great of a company we really are! We could see everything we accomplished in a year. It was so exciting! As I was writing it all out on paper, I’d show it to Randy and say, ‘We look so great!’”

There was that sunshine again.

“I was going through a divorce and feeling that I couldn’t keep up. I told my neighbor that I wanted to quit. She said, ‘No! You can’t! Tell me what your next step is? You have to take your next step!’. When I think now that I can’t do this, I remind myself that I can just take one more step. I can take one.”

Walk on, because you can’t go back now, Sue. We’re depending on that sunshine and those delicious treats.

**Update**
We received the following email from Sue last week.

Chelle!
We were approved to apply for the money from the city of Columbus!
We will know 100% in 30 days but pretty much it’s a done deal.

The approval was based solely on our business plan!! Thank you and please thank Josh. We are huge fans of Palo Alto!!

-Sue

Company:  Granola Snacks
Founded: 2008
Website: http://granolasnacks.com
Owned by:  Sue Van Fossen
Description: Granola Snacks is a company comprised of individuals who love to eat, listen to music, and are huge OSU Buckeye fans. We think having a business should be a ton of fun and that’s pretty much our first vocational rule. We are simply what our name says we are.  We believe Granola Snacks should come in delicious crunchewy chunks that are broken by hand and tasted a lot before they are bagged.

Even while traveling and teaching full day classes, Tim continues to bring daily content.  Did you miss one? That’s ok, I’ve got you covered.

Is All Good Business Inherently Social Enterprise?

I liked the phrase social entrepreneurship instantly when I first heard it. It’s doing well by doing good, I assumed, building businesses that help people. A business doesn’t have to not make a profit to do good, so the idea of social entrepreneurship makes sense.

Never Do a Contract When a Letter Will Do

I admit I probably shouldn’t be posting this because I’m not an attorney, so I don’t give legal advice. This is just anecdotal, based on what I’ve seen in my business experience. Consult your attorney. I worked for years with a smart, honest business lawyer who — well, let me get to that later in this post.

Hired Guns Are for Cowboy Movies, not Business

During my class at the ASBDC, something that came up in discussion and generated total consensus in the group was that the business plan document written by an outsider isn’t useful. I referenced my worst-ever consulting engagement, one of my favorite posts on this blog. Everybody in the room agreed that business planning is something you do, not something you buy. It’s a process, not a finished document.

Do You Know The Single Most Powerful Word in Business Writing?

Whether it’s email, Twitter, Facebook, or — going back to the ancient days — even business letters and proposals, the single most powerful word in business writing is….

True Story: Flying Out of San Diego After the Outage

Yesterday at about 6 pm I was with a few dozen people in the terminal that United Air Lines uses in the San Diego airport. Things did not look good. We’d been without power for more than two hours, and, according to what we learned via mobile phones and iPads and such — there was no wireless, because there was no power — the power was out for at least 50 miles to the north, maybe 100 miles to the south, and all the way to New Mexico to the east.