Page 53 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

44 • Business Plans that Work

learning that is gleaned from going through the process and the habit of
reshaping your plan. Through each iteration, you will learn more; for
example, you will identify more competitors in the next iteration than in
the first. The business plan is the novel of your vision. It articulates what
you see in your mind, as well as crystallizing that vision for you and your
team. It also provides a history, a photo album if you will, of the birth,
growth, and maturation of your business. Each major revision should
be kept and filed and occasionally looked back upon for the lessons you
have learned. Although daunting, we find writing a business plan exciting
and creative, especially if you are working on it with a founding team.
Whether it is over a glass of wine, mug of beer, or cup of coffee, talking
about your business concept with your founding team is invigorating, and
the business plan is a critical outcome of these discussions. So now, let us
dig in and examine how to develop and write effective business plans.

The Story Model: A Plan for Whom?

One of the major goals for business plans is to attract and convince vari-
ous stakeholders of the potential of your business. Therefore, you have
to keep in mind how these stakeholders will interpret your plan: who is
the plan for?—you, potential team members, a brain trust adviser, inves-
tors, customers? The guiding principal is that you are writing a story. All
good stories have a plot line, a unifying thread that ties the characters
and events together. If you think about the most successful businesses in
America, they all have well publicized plot lines, or more appropriately,
taglines. When you hear these taglines, you immediately connect them to
the business. For example, when you hear “absolutely, positively has to
be there overnight,” most people think of Federal Express and package
delivery. Similarly, “Just do it” is intricately linked to Nike and the image
of athletic excellence (Fig. 3.1). A tagline is a sentence, or even a fragment
of a sentence, that summarizes the pure essence of your business. It is
the plot line that every sentence, paragraph, page, and diagram within
your business plan should correlate to. One useful tip that we share with
every entrepreneur we work with is to put that tagline in a footer that
runs on the bottom of every page. Most word processing packages, such
as Microsoft Word, enable you to insert a footer that you can see as you
type. As you are writing, if the section doesn’t build on, explain, or oth-
erwise directly relate to the tagline, it most likely isn’t a necessary com-