Plan-as-you-go Planning

I’m Loving the New Version of Business Plan Pro

August 4, 2011

If you’re a regular reader you know I don’t normally do sales pitches here on this blog, but this is special. Last week Palo Alto Software introduced a brand new version of Business Plan Pro incorporating (finally) my Plan-as-You-Go Business Planning ideas into the mainstream of the software. With this new version, when you start [...]

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Business Planning for the ‘Lean Startup’

October 4, 2010

(Note: I wrote this first for my business planning column at entrepreneur.com. I’m reproducing it here, with permission of the publisher, for the convenience of my readers here. Tim.) There’s lots of talk these days about the so-called “lean startup.” Most would think that just meant a startup without a lot of outside capital. According [...]

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Seth Godin on Rethinking Business Plans

May 26, 2010

It’s about time that business writers, assorted experts, entrepreneurs, academic and the rest start focusing on the huge damaging and wasteful misunderstanding that most of us have contributed to: that completely out-of-date idea that a business plan is a document, done once, related to raising money. So I’m delighted to see Seth Godin jumping onto [...]

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The Best Business Email Might Be a Phone Call

May 12, 2010

This morning I picked up Finding the Right Words for Business Emails, a recent post by Bradford Shimp on his Allbusiness Answers blog. Bradford’s a smart person, and he has good advice here. Use language you’d use for a friend. Be careful with the subject line. Avoid phrases that sound like spam. And this, my [...]

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Want Real Strategy? Mind the Damned Gap

March 24, 2010

Mind the gap. It’s written all over the London tube (subway). They mean the gap between the trains and the platform. Mind the gap. It should be written wherever somebody is doing strategic planning for small business. It means that extremely common gap between the brilliant strategy cooked up in the meetings and the actual [...]

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Which Comes First: Plan or Pitch?

December 10, 2009

It’s not exactly the same as the chicken or the egg, but it has some similarities. I get this question a lot lately, so I decided to take it here to my blog. Don’t pitch a business without planning it first. That’s a lot like trying to film a movie without having a screenplay. You have [...]

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Revising the Root Canal Theory of Business Planning

August 14, 2009

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 [...]

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Number One Business Plan Book

September 11, 2008

I hope you’ll forgive me this post, but it took a long time writing, absorbed most of my Spring, and involved a lot of work by other people with editing, design, and so so forth. These things go up and…

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Audio on Business Planning

July 14, 2008

Last week I was a guest on Barbara Weltman’s Build Your Business radio show on wsradio.com. In the first part Barbara starts out with a review of the present bleak economic picture, then introduces me and business planning. It’s about…

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Zen Habits to Autopilot to Business Planning

June 17, 2008

Dieting. Regular exercise. Investing. Planning. All of them so much easier said than done. Easy to know what to do, but hard to do it, because you have to actually do it, repeatedly, not just know what to do. Emphasize,…

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