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From the category archives:

Business plan marathon

Do Business Plan Contest Winners Make It in the Real World?

by Tim Berry on May 18, 2009

in Angel investment, Business plan marathon, Venture Contests

Craig from trackster.com asked me last week in a comment he added to my Willamette Angel Conference post:

I was wondering with all these business plan competitions that you judge, how many winners or even non winners have you seen turn into successful companies? Are there any examples that you could give?
Yes, a lot of these [...]

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Turning Good Advice into Bad News

by Tim Berry on April 24, 2009

in Angel investment, Business Mistakes, Business plan marathon, Venture Capital

Imagine, if you will, this scene:
You are in a group of angel investors talking with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Or you are in a group of venture competition judges giving feedback to teams after the judging is over. The entrepreneurs listen intently, nod, they’re understanding, and then suddenly one or more of their faces change, [...]

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Don’t Shade Your Eyes, Summarize

by Tim Berry on April 14, 2009

in Business Education, Business plan marathon, Venture Contests

What if you had to take the classic business plan, developed for an MBA-level venture competition, and shrink it down to 10 pages?
Last Friday I spent a fun and fascinating day as a semi-finals judge at the University of Oregon New Venture Competition. My part of the program was evaluating four ventures developed by MBA [...]

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Your Profits Are Way Too High!

by Tim Berry on April 10, 2009

in Angel investment, Business plan marathon, Venture Capital, Venture Contests

Business plans everywhere. I’m reading, annotating, filling in score sheets, and getting cranky. I explained that on this blog last Monday.
So what’s with the unrealistically high profitability projections? This year it seems like I’ve discovered a new 50-50 rule of profitability in business plans, as in, 50% of the plans I’m looking at project 50% [...]

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Dan Schawbel, Me 2.0, and Personal Branding

by Tim Berry on April 7, 2009

in Books, Business plan marathon, Social media, Weblogs

What does personal branding mean to you?
To me it used to be about well-known experts whose names became brands in an almost-traditional business sense: Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tom Peters; they were experts whose names sold books and speaking engagements. Lately my view of personal branding has expanded as I start following John Jantsch, Anita [...]

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