Every year Palo Alto Software contributes to and participates in business plan competitions. We receive business plans from several different competitions around the country and key members of our staff read the plans then meet to determine best written plan, or best executive summary, what ever it is we’re set to award for that particular event.

I’ll never forget this particular plan for a resturant that was submitted.

Business plans for resturants seem fairly easy to write, I say this because we seem to get a lot of them during college business plan competitions, but harder to implement in the real world.

The plan started out well, they had a good management team, a good location and their “secret sauce” was pretty effective I thought. But then I got to the end of the document where they finished the plan with this summarizing comment:

While we believe the restaurant is a good idea, we’ve realized through the writing of this plan that there’s no way we could make a living running this restaurant. It’s just not going to work.

Well, I guess it’s good to know before you go too far that it’s not going to work, but here’s my question. Did they give up too soon? Was it a good assessment of the feasibility of the plan and the business? Or of their passion and willingness to build the business? I guess we’ll never know.

Sometimes the difference between success and failure is all in the way you look at it.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software