Camille Rose believes in the power of positive thinking. After starting and running several successful businesses, she says she’s learned how to reframe the thinking that dooms many would-be entrepreneurs. “When you start down the path of striking out on your own, [you need to] realize that you’re your own worst enemy. Your fear will feed your negative thoughts. You must stop those thoughts in their tracks and replace them with positive thoughts of success,” the Lafayette, California entrepreneur says. As she launches her newest venture, Get a Gofer, this month, it’s clear she’s taking her own advice.

The business plan for Get a Gofer was not her first, says Camille, who estimates she’s written around 20 of them, both for herself and for other people. “I have an idea and I immediately want to start writing a business plan. Not all the businesses I’ve written plans for have come to fruition obviously,” she notes. Get a Gofer, with it’s catchy slogan “Spend more time with your little angels,” she says, clearly wasn’t one of those “no-goes.”

“Errand services nowadays are mostly provided by work-at-home individuals or large companies who market their services to other large companies. We are filling an enormous gap in the market by creating an easy-to-use, affordable service for busy, elderly, and disabled individuals.”

Rose has successfully launched several other businesses, including a wine exporting business and a kebab lounge. And for each of them, she used Business Plan Pro to put together the plan. In fact, she’s raised more than $1 million — both from investors and from SBA loans –  for her ventures, thanks in no small part, she says, to the business plans she wrote.

According to Camille, the organization Business Plan Pro provides makes the process of writing the business plan easier. “My challenge is always keeping my business ideas documented. When I’m in the start-up phase, I do a ton of research.  I use Business Plan Pro’s tasks to capture my research in any given area.  I write my initial thoughts, paste URLs to blogs, statistics, links to articles and more, under the various tasks in the software (e.g., Market Analysis, Sales Strategy, etc.)  Then when I’m ready to start writing I have my initial thoughts and all my research already organized for me under each task, so the writing process is so much easier.”

Writing a business plan is a real learning experience, according to Camille. She says she always discovers something about her business through writing the plan, “which is why I didn’t launch some of the businesses I wrote plans for.” Seeing the cash or work-flow pitfalls before investing time and energy into a bad business idea is one advantage of good business planning.

In addition to Get a Gofer, Rose also owns and runs Pink Purse Ventures, which has been providing consulting services to women-owned businesses for more three years. She’s now putting all that she’s learned about business planning to work, and growing Pink Purse Ventures at the same time. Starting in May, she’ll be holding business-planning seminars for women, where she’ll encourage them to push past their fears to make their business dreams reality. And she’ll be using Business Plan Pro to lead them through the planning process.

Have you heard of Benjamin Zander? If you are a classical music buff, you might. He is the conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, a teacher, a master cellist and an inspirational speaker.

In October of this year, Zander spoke at the PopTech Conference about the power of inspiration.

Zander opened his talk talking about “The world of the downward spiral” or as he puts it, “the world of ‘it can’t be done’”.  The other world, as he shows on the second flip chart, is the world of radiating possibility. The world of human potential.

I found Zander’s talk not only to be personally inspiring, but he has a real message to businesses. You can inspire your employees to be more and encourage them to accomplish more by leading them towards “embracing life’s possibilities rather than living in the downward spiral”.

He uses the story of the shoe salesmen who go to Africa in the 1900′s. One writes back, “Situation hopeless, they don’t wear shoes” while the other one writes “Glorious news! They don’t have any shoes yet!”

Given the choice, wouldn’t a business be better served by the employee who is always seeking the opportunity rather than the who bemoans the lack of it?

The video is about a half hour long and is one of the more inspirational videos on this topic I’ve seen. If you have the time, I highly recommend watching Benjamin Zander and his fascinating speech.

‘Chelle Parmele
Palo Alto Software