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business plan

$20K Open Business Plan Contest Closes Soon

by Tim Berry on August 10, 2010

Yes, you could win good money and travel benefits, but you have to get your act together soon. Entries close August 20. Click here to enter.

This is the Marriott’s Fairfield Inn & Suites $20,000 Small Business Challenge, which is, apparently, exactly what the headline suggests: a chance to win some money, plus some travel benefits, for your business. Fairfield Challenge

I’m impressed with the judges, featuring John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing, plus writers from Business Pundit and Inc Magazine, and an executive of Fairfield Suites.

It’s also an interesting competition. I like the way this goes:

We’ll select 10 small business finalists and follow them not only as they travel around the country, but also as they strive to meet their business goals. Finalists will publicly share their journey by blogging, tweeting and posting photos. Finalists will be notified by September 9, 2010 and the program kicks off on September 13, 2010.

About the Grand Prize

After three months of traveling the country and working through set business challenges, our judging panel, comprised of small business experts and Marriott International executives, will award one of the 10 finalists the grand prize of $20,000.

So good luck. I hope you do it. I hope you win.

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Business Plan: 5 Things You Need to Know

by Tim Berry on June 15, 2010


I’m quoted a lot in “Writing a Business Plan: 5 Things You Need to Know” by Charlotte Jensen on the AOL Small Business site this morning.

AOL Page

Those 5 things are:

  1. Chances are, you need a plan.
  2. Business planning should be ongoing.
  3. Review your plan on a regular basis.
  4. Don’t complicate things.
  5. Even a good plan doesn’t guarantee success.

In the source piece, there’s a lot more explanation. Charlotte Jensen did an excellent summary, and it’s a valuable piece. Sure, I’m biased because I’m in there, but there’s a lot of good stuff there besides mine. For example, where she quotes me on the need for constant course correction, she adds:

Think about it: Without constant course corrections and change, you end up driving in the wrong direction (and perhaps even over a cliff).

Well said.

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5-Step Business Planning for the Rest of Us

by Tim Berry on April 21, 2010


Gulp. Business planning for the rest of us, in less than four minutes? It was fun to do, great exposure and, what the heck, I at least tried to keep it short. For the rest of us, in this case, means all of those businesses that aren’t entering a business plan competition, don’t need to show a document to an investor or aren’t supporting a commercial lending application.

I’m not able to embed the video here, but you can click on it to go to the source video on the American Express OPEN Forum. This is from the MSNBC Your Business show last month, in an interview with Jean Chatzky.

You can see my five points on the image above, and here’s a quick summary as well:

1. Keep it simple

Don’t sweat the printed output, the writing and editing, so you can focus on keeping a live plan available to you and your team members on a computer or network. Do the main numbers. Use bullet points for big concepts, and lists for milestones and such.  Do the plan, but not necessarily the big, formal document.

2. Strategy is focus

A lot of great strategy is figuring out what you’re not doing. You can’t please everybody. Focus on those key elements that drive your business, and make sure you do those well. It doesn’t take a lot of writing. Use bullet points and pictures. Focus your target market and business offering.

3. Set the steps

Planning will help you keep long-term objectives in mind while you deal with the immediate problems. Figure out where you want to go and think about concrete, specific steps in the right direction. Don’t obsess on details. Set the main steps down so you can track your progress. Think about the metrics.

4. Set a review schedule

I mean like the third Thursday of the month, over lunch. Fix a time for reviewing the plan. The real value of planning isn’t just doing the plan, it’s using it to manage results and do the course corrections you need. Just like with diet and exercise, we need reminders. We’re only human. And business planning is about regular reviews. Plans are supposed to change.

5. List your assumptions

This one helps with the problem of when do you change the plan to match reality. If you keep changing it all the time, it’s less useful. On the other hand, one good reason to change a plan is because the underlying assumptions have changed. So you list your assumptions. Start your planning review by looking at how assumptions have changed.

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Good Short Video on Your Business Plan

by Tim Berry on April 19, 2010

This good short video on writing a business plan came out over the weekend on Bloomberg: Your Money’s Engage Today segment. It seems nicely done to me, a good summary:

If you don’t see the video here, you can click this link to go directly to the Bloomberg site.

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How to win a business plan competition

by sara on April 12, 2010

We’re in the middle of business plan competition season, and we’re seeing some great plans, and a lot of common mistakes. We’ve assembled some of our best advice on business competitions, below.

Ask Tim Berry – Tips for Business Plan Competitions

  • Don’t Shade Your Eyes, Summarize: “I don’t care if you’re the next big thing, with an unimaginably exciting new idea and a great team, you can still create a meaningful summary in 10 pages.”
  • Writing an Executive Summary: Hit these highlights, and customize your Executive Summary for the intended audience.
  • Estimating Unknown Expenses: How do you predict expenses? Normally you need some experience. If you have no idea, then you might think again about starting this business.
  • Why not do your best? If you’re going to a graduate level intercollegiate and international venture competition, ask somebody to edit the plan for simple practical writing. Make sure your projected income and balance link up correctly with the cash flow, and that the cash flow understands working capital. Use business charts to illustrate the main numbers.
  • How to Succeed in Competitions: Competitions normally receive far more entrants than they can practically screen any other way, so the business plan is the critical document. This white paper explains how to customize and improve the output you create in Business Plan Pro to meet the sophisticated needs of a venture contest.

How to lose a business plan competition

Presenting your plan to judges:

Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule: How listening to crappy business plan pitches is giving Guy Ménière’s disease.

Ask Tim Berry – The Elevator Pitch

Sara Prentice Manela
Editor

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Share your business pitch and get a FREE copy of Business Plan Pro

by Josh Cochrane on September 14, 2009

Can you communicate the core of your business plan in just a couple of minutes? How about in a single 140-character tweet? Our new Bplans Business Pitch tool can help you develop and refine your core message.

Add your pitch now and you can even get a FREE copy of our best-selling Business Plan Pro software. See below for details.

Elevator pitches made easy

It is increasingly important to be able to distill your startup or business idea down to its essence. Our new pitch tool makes it easy, walking you through each of the elements that potential investors and partners expect to hear. These are simple high-level questions like:

  • What problem do your customers need help with?
  • What’s your solution?
  • What’s your business model?
  • What’s your competitive advantage?
  • And so on…

Each step includes expert advice and handy tips. You can even dress up your pitch with your company logo or head shot and a link to a video version of your pitch on YouTube. And you can save a copy of your pitch as a PDF to share internally or email to your advisors.

Once your pitch is published on our gallery, you will get ratings and comments from our community of entrepreneurs and small-business owners with ideas on how to improve your pitch.

FREE software for the first five pitches!

Be one of the first five people to get your pitch published, and you’ll get a FREE copy of our best-selling Business Plan Pro Premier software (a $199.95 value).

Create and share your pitch now!

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Tip: Start the Business Planning Today

by Tim Berry on August 26, 2009

You don’t have to do a formal business plan to get the benefit of business planning. Why not start the planning process today; or, if you’ve done a plan in the past, reinvigorate the planning process. Real planning is modular, and iterative, not step by step. Here are some things you could do today.

  • Set a review schedule now. When are you going to double back and look at results? Put a date on it.
  • Develop assumptions. List them. 
  • Review or develop your strategy, the heart of any plan. How are you different, what are you better at? Who are you selling to, and who isn’t your market? What are you not doing, and why is that important?
  • Review or develop milestones: dates, deadlines, activities, budgets, and who’s responsible.
  • Develop your basic numbers, and write them down: sales forecast, expense budgets.

And don’t feel compelled to do all of these today if you can’t. Do just one. Pick a card. Start anywhere, and get going. One step at a time; and you choose which step.

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What Kind of Business Plan Do I Need?

by Tim Berry on May 8, 2009

This is a five-minute answer in video to a very common question.


If you can’t see the video here, please click here to go to the source on YouTube.

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Plan vs. Presentation vs. Parts of Both

by Tim Berry on April 14, 2009

In the rarefied air of the high-tech venture-capital-seeking new venture, these days the presentation–alias slide deck, PowerPoint, keynote or “the pitch”–is indispensable. What’s weird, though, is that some people talk as if the presentation replaces a business plan.

That’s sort of dumb, don’t you think? Doing a presentation without having first done a plan? How can you build a pitch without knowing, among other things, how much money you think you need and what you want to spend it on? Or how many people you need and what they need to be doing? Or how much reachable market you project, or the major milestones?

A plan is not just another sales document. It’s a plan. It’s what determines what’s in the sales document.

And it doesn’t have to be a document. It lives on your computer. The document happens to be one of the various outputs of the plan.

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11 things that matter in a Business Plan

by Guest Author on February 22, 2009

Barry Moltz has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. He’s also the author of “Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success”. He is an enthusiastic speaker and teacher on entrepreneurship.

The 11 things that matter in a Business Plan

What problem exists that your business is trying to solve. Where is the pain?

What does it cost to solve that problem now? How deep and compelling is the pain?

What solutions does your business have that solve this problem?

What will the customer pay you to solve this problem?

How will solving this problem will make the company a lot of money?

What alliances can you leverage with other companies to help your company?

How big can this business get if given the right capital?

How much cash do you need to find a path to profitability?

How will the skills of your management team, their domain knowledge, and track record of execution will make this happen?

What is the investors’ exit strategy?

Please remember, the business plan is basically an “argument” where you need to state the problem and pain, then provide your solution with supporting data and analogies.

Barry Moltz

www.barrymoltz.com
Twitter: barrymoltz

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