Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

So I just wanted to tell everyone that I’m back and I’m sorry for not posting in a while. Life has been crazy. I’m going to try to post more regularly again. Hey everyone, i’m back!

I spent the day writing a new business plan and set of docs for Groupable, a great startup I’m working on. It’s the most complicated set of documents I’ve written in about a year. In general I suggest writing complete business plans for internal use and short ones for pitching. I just finished a detailed draft of both.

4 docs in all: 1 pager, exec summary, PPT deck & 35 page business plan

Building a company is hard and so is building paper!

Hey everyone!

Welcome to my little piece of the startup world.  I was pretty pumped when Richie invited me to blog on BootStrapper.com and I think that this will be a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from all of you and vice versa.  I wanted to start off by talking a bit about the core of any business.  Big businesses, small businesses and everything in between all need one thing to be successful: a plan.  Now this doesn’t have to be a formal business plan (but it doesn’t hurt if it is), but the more developed the plan is, the more questions you’ll be able to answer.  There’s a million websites and a billion books about how to structure the plan, but it really is simple.  There is no standard format that works across all business.  There are no sections that are universal.  Your business is unique and beautiful and needs to be expressed as such.

One frequently asked question is: what do I put in the plan?

The answer: everything.

Write it ALL down.  I’m helping a friend right now work on a business of hers and she really is getting the value of a plan.  She started out struggling for content, but now her plan is flowing with information.  What is the business?  How will people know about it?  Who are the competitors?  What is needed?  What can be expected?  Anytime anyone asks you a question about your venture, you should make a mental note and stick it in the plan and answer it!  There’s about a thousand questions that you’ve thought of already and about 9,000 that you haven’t.

Who is the plan for?

YOU!  Don’t worry about the VC’s and the angel’s and the bankers and the rest of ‘em.  When you’re just starting out, the plan is for YOU and you alone.  Once YOU understand what your business is all about, you’ll have a MUCH easier time telling other people about it.  So write it for yourself and don’t get caught up in the details, like format, and proper grammar and the rest of it.  Let MS Word do the pretty-making stuff (or Pages if you’re a Mac person… which you should be) and you worry about filling it up.

What next?

Edit it.  Read it.  Review it.  Constantly.  It’s a living document and you need to make sure that you keep going back to it to see if there’s something important in there that you’ve sort of ignored.  Or maybe there’s something new that you need to add in there that you’re just realizing.

Well, that about sums it up for me for today.  Let me know what you think

A friend just showed me EZ Numbers, super simple tool, helps entrepreneurs understand their own finances cause let’s admit most entrepreneurs are not finance geeks (I plead the 5th and we can pretend i dont have a finance degree)

Richie

1) Make sure you understand what you are getting into.
2) Test your own logic and ask yourself the tough questions
3) You’re qualifying yourself by putting time into it to make sure you are serious about the commitment and not trying to run half ass with a crazy idea
3) Repeat

4) DO IT YOURSELF and It doesn’t matter if you don’t spell check…this is so you understand your own vision and goals