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 [...]
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I noticed this very plan-as-you-go post by Guy Kawasaki on the American Express Open Forum. What I like about it, particularly, is where Guy says “set goals” and then lists these four desirable qualities of goals: Measurable. If a goal isn’t measurable, its unlikely you’ll achieve it. For a startup, quantifiable goals are things like [...]
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(Note: this is from my business plans coaching column this month at Entrepreneur.com. I’m reposting it here, with permission, for convenience of our BIG blog readers. Tim.) Plans are wrong, but nonetheless vital. There’s a paradox for you. It’s a simple statement, one that I hope is somewhat surprising coming from a business planning expert; [...]
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Palo Alto Software Ltd is delighted to announce that we will be running a number of business planning workshops in London, U.K., commencing on 27 January 2009. These business planning workshops will be run in conjunction with Company Partners, a Wokingham-England based business matching service, and will be held at the British Library in Central [...]
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Harumph. Google ads. This is a blog post reviewing Business Plan Pro; a nice review. I appreciate the comments. But, thanks to the magic of Google ads, it’s surrounded by ads for schlocky business plan templates. Dumb ads, making dumb promises. For example: “download” a winning business plan? That’s nonsense. If it was already written, [...]
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Business pitches are growing in popularity here in the UK as well as in the US. However, as this article, The Business Pitch by Alan Gleeson illustrates, business pitches are no substitute for the real thing – a thorough business plan! This short article describes the concept of pitching in detail, and argues why pitches [...]
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I was just browsing the web with my laptop on a Sunday afternoon, half watching football, when I caught a LinkedIn question about business plan software. “Just use Excel and do your own,” the answer says. “Yeah, right,” as one of my daughters used to say, rolling her eyes, when she was still a teenager, [...]
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I’m sorry, but I’m angry this morning. I just saw another blogger, who knows better, bad-mouthing the business plan as part of the startup; because investors want to know you and see your pitch first, instead of just reading a business plan. Are the following points not so obvious that I have a right to [...]
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I’m sure almost everyone is familiar with the story that Thomas Edison discovered 99 ways to NOT make a light bulb. That’s 99 no to reach 1 yes. The point here is that a negative result, proving something didn’t work or was not so, is just as valuable as a positive result. Sadly, scientific research [...]
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