From the category archives:
Today’s a good day to post on my angel investment experience, because this afternoon I’ll be speaking to a group on this subject in Corvallis, Oregon. What I want to do is just describe how it went for me, one set of eyes, one viewpoint, without making any generalizations about the rest of the world [...]
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Imagine yourself as judging a business plan competition. You read the plan, watch and listen to the pitch, ask questions, and consider the answers. What do you do, in that situation, with a team whose opportunity is in your opinion bigger than it realizes? What about a team whose opportunity is different from what it [...]
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I’m leaving for New York city today to participate as a judge tomorrow in the Forbes.com Boost Your Business business plan contest. This will be my second year. I love it.
I like judging business plan contests. I’ve judged the two big contests in Texas, both the University of Texas Moot Corp and the Rice University [...]
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I posted 10 questions on this topic last week. Today I have three more, on the same topic.
It sounds attractive, doesn’t it? Get a business plan by hiring somebody to do it for you? I can see how you’d think of that as division of labor, like hiring an expert to do design, or programming; [...]
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Somewhere somebody described to me the process in which Michelangelo imagined his David from inside a flawed block of granite marble that had a crack in it. The crack became the hitch in David’s arm as he holds the sling.
I think that’s something like real business strategy. The general type of business, what other people [...]
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No, it’s not that I have anything against business plan writers for hire. I spent some years doing that, although I never just wrote the plan; I always facilitated and translated and coached planning. (Unless, of course, you’ve read my post on my worst business plan engagement, in which case you’ll know I’ve used “never” [...]
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The business.gov site has posted my business plan tutorials, a collection of 13 videos covering business planning for real businesses. We’ve been working on this since last Spring, and I’m very happy to see it done and available now. I’m grateful to the team that put it together for me.
And I’m also happy to say [...]
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There can be great truth in stories. People have communicated in stories from the very beginning. We use stories to tell about God, family, each other, and business. Stories can be true or false by the message they carry, not just what happens in the story. Fables, parables, short stories … think about how much [...]
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It’s all paradoxical. Bill Cosby once said:
“I don’t know the secret to success, but I do know that the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.”
While driving to the office a few minutes ago, I saw an unusual Fedex truck, like a stunted-growth moving van, with the signage: “Fedex White Glove Service.” I don’t [...]
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For years I’ve lived with my own “root canal theory of business planning.” Do the Google search for that phrase and you’ll see that my previous writing about this comes up first. Like root canals, business plans were something people dreaded, but needed. Happily, things have changed.
Unlike a root canal, modern-day business planning should not be [...]
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President and founder of Palo Alto Software. Founder of bplans.com. Most recent book is The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan.
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