Do you:

• Stay up late at night thinking about business ideas?
• See business opportunities all around you?
• Want to start a business in the next 90 days?

If you do, keep reading. I have a special offer to help you get started with your business.

Tim Berry, the president and founder of Palo Alto Software, the expert on business planning, and author of The Plan As You Go Business Plan, has put together a free Guide to Starting a Business. This free ebook, excerpted from Tim’s book Hurdle: The Book on Business Planning, is designed to help you start your next business.

Guide to Starting a Business will teach you how to master the basics of starting your business.

Learn how to:

• Identify your customers
• Assess the real risks of starting your own business
• Choose a business name
• Get funded and estimate start-up costs
• Decide on a legal structure
• Get licenses, permits, tax and employer numbers

A Simpler Plan for Start-Ups

We’re offering the Guide to Starting a Business to help you focus on the most important parts of your business. Guide to Starting a Business walks you through the process of creating a simpler business plan to help you move forward and make decisions.

The planning process should help you understand your business. It should help you define what you want from the business, understand what your customers want, and decide how to optimize your business on your own terms.

Tim Berry — Guide to Starting a Business

Confirm your email address to get your free copy of the PDF ebook Guide to Starting a Business, delivered right to your inbox.

Bonus: Get $20 Off Business Plan Pro

If you’re seriously considering starting up a business, it’s time to think about your business plan. Even at an early stage, a business plan is very important. But how do you get started?

Business Plan Pro can help. With Business Plan Pro, you can easily create a custom business plan, with all the financial tables and graphs to go with it. You’ll also be able to:

• View and edit over 500 complete sample business plans
• Save time with linked financial tables (the formulas are built in, so you don’t have to do the calculations!)
• Benefit from built-in help, expert advice from Tim, and tons of resources
• Present your plan with confidence, with automatic charts and graphs, corresponding to your financial data.

Confirm your email address to get your $20 discount on Business Plan Pro, the free Guide to Starting a Business and helpful startup tips, delivered right to your inbox.

Whether you are in a professional or personal relationship, setting authentic expectations up front can really create a foundation for the relationship’s longevity.

If you do something when you first interact with a prospective customer (or partner), they will expect that to be the norm. If you decide you no longer can or want to do that something, then you look like a jerk.

For example, I buy a lot online from prestige cosmetics retailer Sephora. Even though their products are pricey, they won me over originally with a number of sexy offers, from free shipping and free samples to a points program and free gift packaging.

At some point in the last 12 months or so, they took away the free gift packaging online- it now ranges from $2-4 per order. This does not break the bank in any way and theoretically shouldn’t matter as I buy more for myself than I do as gifts there, but I still feel cheated. Why? They set the expectation that free gift packaging was part of their offer. The worst part is that they didn’t need for it to come to this; the other offers were enough to win me over as a customer, but they went too far, offering something that they couldn’t fulfill long term and now it is a deficiency in my customer relationship with them.

There are plenty of other businesses that are affected by their expectations. The spa that I frequent always has a coupon, so I won’t go if I can’t get the discount. Many of my friends won’t buy premium makeup if it is not “bonus time” because it is almost always bonus time somewhere. If you make something the norm, your customers will expect it.

People do this all of the time in personal relationships too. A woman may show off her domestic skills early in a relationship by cooking and doing housework and a man may try to woo a woman by bringing her flowers weekly. That becomes the expectation. However, if you can’t authentically keep that up over time, when you stop, it becomes a loss.

When I met my husband, I was very clear that I don’t cook, I don’t clean and I really don’t do much of anything that would be considered “domestic”. Now, I had to bring something of value to the relationship, so I was clear about all of the things that he would find valuable, such as the fact that I love sports, that I am independent (financially and otherwise), that I am fairly low maintenance (personally, not professionally) and also a few other things that my husband would not be pleased if I wrote about, but let’s just say they add lots of value to a marriage. These are all things authentic to who I am and not something that I struggle with fulfilling.

Now, if I ever do anything domestic (which is very rare, but does happen once in a great while), I become a hero because it is out of the ordinary- it is not expected. This creates a very different situation than if I had pretended up front that I love to iron and then couldn’t keep up that charade.

Your business needs to do this as well. You need to have an outstanding value proposition to the customer, but it has to be something that you can keep up long term. Sephora never needed to offer the free gift packaging as an “always” perk. They could have done a special offer with orders over a certain size or if you reach a certain level in their loyalty program. Then it would have been a benefit, not an eventual deficiency.

Think hard about the expectations you set with your customers (and everyone else too). Nothing good ever comes from someone saying, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore…”

With all the talk surrounding the landmark book Free by Chris Anderson, I want to recommend Steve King‘s post “Free isn’t a Business Model, But it is a Business Strategy” on his Small Business Labs blog.

I’ve followed the Free controversy myself, and posted about it here on this blog, and  here on the Huffington Post, when two of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, squared off about it a few months ago. Gladwell essentially hated the idea, and Godin declared it here whether we like it or not.

If I had to choose one short description of the basic idea, it would be this paragraph from Anderson’s 2008 story in Wired:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multi-player online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

King has a gift for summary. He says in his post:

Free has been used effectively as a business strategy and marketing tactic for pretty much as long as businesses have existed. Given how widespread and successful free is and has been, I don’t see how you challenge the concept.

The only place I see room for criticism is if you think Anderson is suggesting that free is a complete business model. Obviously, if free means no source of revenue then it is destined for failure. But I don’t think this is what Anderson is suggesting.

King goes on to point out several examples. He also points out that it could be tactic, strategy or something else. And it’s not that new an idea, either (Chris Anderson would agree with all three).

Are you looking at using a free offer as part of a business plan? You’ll have good company. I do hope, though, that you define for yourself the specific business objectives (traffic, visibility, whatever) and put in some metrics so you can measure results.

(Image credit: from Wired.com, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business)

One of Palo Alto Software’s most popular websites is www.bplans.com website, on that free resource website you can find hundreds of articles on a wide array of business planning information from starting your business to incorporation and buying a business.

We also have a page full of extremely helpful business calculators.

One of our most popular calculators is the Cash Flow Calculator.

Many startups and small businesses fail despite being nominally profitable. When it is time to pay the bills, cash is king. This handy calculator helps you see the effect of sales, inventory, credit terms, and other variables on your company’s cash flow.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software