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12 • Business Plans that Work
If the aforementioned motivators ring true for you, then entrepreneur-
ship may be the way to achieve your goals. It may be hard to envision how
an entrepreneurial endeavor helps you achieve your goals unless you have
been involved in previous start-ups. Business planning can help you visual-
ize how entrepreneurship may help you achieve your goals. Business plan-
ning is nothing more than sophisticated scenario analysis to identify an
opportunity, the customer, and how to reach the customer. Furthermore,
you will also identify what is possible. If you succeed in implementing your
vision, business planning helps you imagine the future. You will get a sense
of how the business might grow. Specifically, your financial pro forma
statements will suggest the upside potential of a successful venture. 15
Finally, business planning will help you identify the skills that are
necessary to successfully implement the business. You will likely not pos-
sess all those skills yourself. As stated earlier, most successful ventures are
launched by teams, meaning that others fill the gaps where you are lack-
ing. However, you need enough skills to be credible as a lead entrepre-
neur. You need to have something special, whether it is technical wizardry
or business acumen, which can draw others to join you in your quest.
One of the first market tests that all entrepreneurs confront is whether
they can attract other core team members to join them. Again, the busi-
ness plan will help you define what attributes those core team members
should possess.
As we have worked with entrepreneurs over the years, we have no-
ticed an internal drive that successful entrepreneurs possess. In fact, it
seems that people who are successful in any context possess certain attri-
butes. One of the authors has identified five key attributes, called Zach’s
Star of Success, that he shares with all his students and the entrepreneurs
he works with.
Zach’s Star of Success
Zach’s Star of Success captures many of the attributes that we believe lead
to entrepreneurial success (Fig. 1.0). Whether one is pursuing an entre-
15 We will cover financial projections in great detail later in the book. It is important
to note that projections are best guesses and become less accurate the farther out
one goes, but they can give a sense of what is possible if you successfully identify an
opportunity and execute on it.