Frustration: People asking me (via email) “where can I find a business plan for …” some specific type of business. I get that a lot. Prewritten business plans. 

Sigh… Here:

• A pre-written business plan is about as useful as somebody else’s year-old airline and hotel reservations. 
• A pre-written business plan is about as useful as somebody else’s exercises already done. Like used pushups. 
• A pre-written business plan is about as useful as last month’s fresh fish. 
• A pre-written business plan is about as useful as last year’s calendar.
• A pre-written business plan is about as useful as a medical prescription written for somebody else a year ago. 

• The value of a business plan is measured by the decisions it causes. 
• Good business planning is 9 parts execution for every one part strategy.
• A business plan has a shelf life of a few weeks at best. Famous quote (Eisenhower and Napoleon): “The plan is useless; but planning is essential.”
• Whenever some expert says don’t do a business plan, ask that what he or she thinks about setting priorities, metrics, responsibilities, and milestones. Because that’s what a business plan is. 
• Make it just big enough. 
• Planning isn’t made useless by rapid change. Quite the contrary: the quicker the pace of change, the more necessary the planning. 
• A business plan is to a business pitch the same as a screenplay to a movie. 

… looks like growth to me. Economic growth. The result of, among other things, political and economic stability.

I’m posting today from Bogota, the capital of Colombia, during a week-long work visit recording business videos in Spanish. My opinion here isn’t formal economic analysis, just what’s obvious from a few days in the country. I don’t claim any expertise on this topic.

Still, if you search for “economic boom in Colombia” in any of the major web search engines, you’re going to see a lot of recent articles. And facts to back up the general optimism of the people I’m doing business with this week. Something special is going on here. This economy is growing despite the worldwide problems we’ve seen since 2007. And, perhaps more interesting, many of the articles and most of the people I’ve been talking to attribute the growth to fundamentals like political stability and decline of crime.

Some say that the U.S. so-called “war on drugs,” especially as it relates to the situation in Colombia of 10-20 years ago, may have helped this country stabilize and grow. So maybe it didn’t make much difference in the U.S., but it at least it probably helped the economy and the people of Colombia. Foreign investment grew more than 25% in the last year, and the per capita income has grown fourfold this century. The numbers are impressive. Colombia’s debt to GDP runs about 27 percent, compared to 73 percent in the United States. And Economic growth is running at about six percent per year.

I post here occasionally about my country-in-law, Mexico, where I spent 10 years of my youth. It seems only fair to post here about what’s happening in Colombia. Good news doesn’t get enough coverage.

Imagine a dark shape in the distant sky, moving towards you. Slowly. It’s white or perhaps off white, but not as clear a color as a cloud, speckled. And it seems more solid than a cloud, and it moves in ways clouds don’t. As it comes closer, maybe a mile away now, it’s as if it’s a flying giant creature. Then, as it gets closer still, you discover that it’s really an unusual flock of birds, flying very tightly together.

That’s a good metaphor for a hard fact about decisions we make. Most of the important big decisions are really made up of thousands of small decisions.

That’s life as well as business. Maybe more life than business.

For example, everybody wants to stay healthy. That’s the big decision. But it doesn’t happen without thousands of small decisions, probably dozens every day. Do I eat the big fat breakfast? Do I take the walk? Do I work out? Do I eat too much, the wrong things, or just right for lunch? Do I drive myself crazy worrying about next week? Do I dwell on my fears or just exhale and let it go? Staying healthy isn’t a big decision but rather a steady collection of small decisions.

For example, everybody wants to do well with their work or school. That’s the big decision. But it doesn’t happen without all those small decisions. In the context of school, every day it’s the choice of homework or not, more study or not, review or not, school work or television, take a nap or read the next chapter? Do I take the extra time to research SEO? Do I write that blog post, or put it off? Do I address the poor performance or let it go? Do I make those calls or put them off? Doing well in work or school isn’t a big decision but rather a steady collection of small decisions.

In my favorite topic area, business planning, doing it right isn’t a big business plan. It’s a just-big-enough business plan that gets reviewed and revised regularly. What makes it valuable is the process, the review, the management that happens because of the contrast between what was planned and what actually happened. And that happens not once but every month, in some contexts every week. Here too, the big decision is really a collection of small ones.

And, dammit, staying with it through the small decisions is hard. We’re human. The big decisions are glaringly obvious. Do you know anybody who doesn’t want to stay healthy, or do well in work or school? But actually executing on those decisions is really hard. We are so human, all of us, that it’s really hard to stick with the big decision without wavering through all the small ones. You can make nine out of ten healthy eating decisions and if the tenth is a Big Mac it nullifies all of the other nine. You can exercise all day one day and then not again for a whole month, and you’re worse off. Consistency is the collection of the small decisions.

Making the right decisions is easy. Making them stick is hard.

Here’s an idea for you. Use this to influence politics, win fame and/or fortune, or attract the opposite sex. Push a point of view. Make your own opinions look like data. 

First: Invent a high-sounding name for an association or interest group in some significant topic area. Call it the Association of this or Federation of that. Make it non profit. Make sure it sounds like an official-sounding group, representing people who matter in the topic area. For example, entrepreneurs, or small business owners, voters, concerned citizens, like that. 

Second: Generate, publish, and curate content that cushions and maybe hides your one-sided opinions on two-sided (well, multi-sided, because there are rarely only two sides) social, political, and economic interests inside high-sounding larger issues. Attract people who share your point of view. 

Third: Generate official-sounding research and data by asking the people you’ve attracted to your one-sided tribe about the issue you want to influence. Since you have a high-sounding official name (small business, or business owners, for example) your research seems to prove that your point of view is valid, or common, or the majority. 

And there you have it. An issue-oriented group pushing one side only publishing one-sided data that sounds like more than it is. 

Is this any organization you know? 

(image: bigstockphoto)

Damn! I just did it again. Even after 30+ years running my own business I still underestimate time for tasks I like, and overestimate time for tasks I don’t like. 

I like writing, and I like programming, which is definitely cool because that’s how I built a business. But when I look ahead, trying to schedule my time right, I end up consistently underestimating the time it’s going to take to post on a blog, develop an ebook, or write a column; and the time it’s going to take to redo one of my WordPress sites or work on one of my newer product development projects. 

That makes it hard to manage my time. 

Do you do this? Or is it just me? 

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)

Time flies. It’s a couple of decades ago now that while I was consulting with Apple Computer I absorbed that culture’s belief that an angry customer tells 20 people while a happy customer tells three. 

I’m certain those numbers are no longer valid. Technology changed them. 

Today, it’s like this: happy customers tell a few people, and angry customers tell the whole world. 

It gets worse. Happy customers tell a few people, and one in a thousand posts up some praise, which nobody believes because it reads like selling. But 6 of 10 angry customers post up complaints, and everybody believes complaints.  

So you tell me: what’s the business lesson here? 

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)

It seems like it often rains on Memorial Day where I live, in Western Oregon. Today is no exception; it’s cold and rainy. And it rained all night, so there’s a thick mist cushioning the quiet hills I live in. From my house, across a small valley, through the tall trees, I can see the flags on a cemetery on the other hill. A lot of the graves have flags today.

I’m thinking about the flags. How many from this century, Afghanistan, Iraq? Hard to tell. They’d be so young, somebody said.

Whether they died in 1943, or 1969, or 2007, they were all so young.

Switch to reality television. 1969. The draft lottery. They put the 366 possible days of the year in transparent plastic eggs, one each for each possible birthday. The put them all into a giant transparent barrel like we see in lotteries these days. They spun the wheel. They drew a date. Those of us born on that date got a number.

My number was 243. I didn’t get drafted. I didn’t go to Vietnam.

By 1969, most of us opposed the Vietnam war. We talked about what we’d do if drafted. Al became a conscientious objector, emptied bedpans for two years. I was engaged to be married, but that was not going to get me out of the war. But a January birth date did.

It turned out later that somebody did a statistical analysis on the draft lottery and the dates. They started on January 1 and threw them in from there day-by-day to December 31. The later birthdays tended to be on top. Or so I read later.

But we didn’t oppose the people, our peers, who fought. Whether it was their choice, or not.

Few in my generation chose to go to war. One who did, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, chose ROTC. Traveling around Europe, he collected military paraphernalia. His father was in the army. His grandfather had been in the army. He volunteered to be a helicopter pilot, and he died in Vietnam. In his helicopter. We weren’t that close, I heard about it later. My memories of him are of a 20-year-old kid having a wonderful time during a year in college abroad, laughing, drinking Austrian beer, learning; as alive as any memory could be. What a terrible loss.

Memorial Day, patriotism, flags, wars. Protests, anti-war, opposition. Memorial Day isn’t about war, or politics, or patriotism, or whatever might be the opposite of patriotism. It’s definitely not about flags. It’s about young people who died, and the people left behind who loved them. And all the people who endured it, risked their lives, went through the hell of it, for whatever reasons.

I lucked out. I won the reality TV of the last half century, the 1969 draft lottery. And I thank God for that. And honor and respect the ones who went, for whatever reasons. And hope that we can end the present war without causing chaos, and more death and suffering; and that we never fight another war again.

Joel Stein opens his Time Magazine cover story on Millennials:

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Ah yes, as he points out with tongue in cheek, there is proof: studies, statistics, and data. 

If nothing else, the so-called millennials generation, and all the writing, thinking, analysis, and opinions about that generation, are proof that in today’s drowning-in-information world, there is data to prove anything. 

If you want to knock people in their twenties, search the web for “millennials selfish” (300,000 hits) or “millennials entitled” (600,000 hits) or “millennials lazy” (150,000 hits) and you’ll find plenty of alleged data. 

On the other hand, if you want to praise them, do the search for “millennials entrepreneurship” (250,000 hits) or “millennials ambition” (1 million hits) or “millennials thoughtful” (5 million hits) and you’ll find plenty of alleged data for that too.

Conclusion: The generation generalizations are fun. They make us think. They’re like riffs on personality types of horoscopes, the best of them delightfully creative, finding traits that seem to make sense on the surface. But millennials are no more classifiable than generation X, baby boomers, or any of those. The world changes, but people don’t. 

For the sake of occasional business analysis — such as calculating return on investment (ROI) on a project, hiring a new employee, allocating costs — here’s a simple formula for calculating the hourly cost of an employee:

cost per hour = annual gross salary/1000

So the $75,000/year salary costs the company $75 per hour. The $30,000/year data entry person costs the company $30 per hour.

This quick and practical calculation is based on the assumption that the overhead, including payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, office space, office equipment, telephone, Internet, electric power, transportation, and so forth costs the company about as much as the employee gross salary.

So the step-by-step calculation, using a $75,000 salary, is:

1. Double the gross salary ($150,000)
2. Divide by 50 because a work year includes 50 weeks ($150,000/50 = $3,000)
3. Divide by 40 because a work week includes 40 hours ($3,000/40 = $75)

Yesterday’s Willamette Angel Conference (WAC) 2013 event invested more than $465,000 in four Oregon startups, highlighted by more than $250,000 in Portland-based Sonivate, which has developed a fingertip-mounted ultrasound probe that enables imaging while leaving both hands free to do work with simultaneous tactile feedback. 

Three other startups got WAC investment at the event: Amorphyx, a Corvallis company with innovative technology that reduces manufacturing costs and increasing the brightness, speed and efficiency of LCD and flexible displays; DesignMedix, a Portland company addressing the rapid rise in drug resistance in multiple diseases; and Green Zebra Grocery, an innovative chain of small healthy-food grocery and convenience stores, based in Portland.

The event concludes three months of study (called “due diligence”) by the group of more than 30 angel investors, about half and half from the Oregon university towns Corvallis and Eugene. This year’s event was held on campus at Oregon State University. The event alternates between Corvallis and Eugene. I’ve been a member since it started in 2009. 

Earlier in the day, keynote speaker Diane Fraiman of Voyager Capital noted that Oregon companies have received more than $600 million in venture capital funding, and challenged us, the WAC members, to continue investing in our area. That might have influenced us — our deliberations are strictly confidential, so I’m not saying — that afternoon as we added more than $200,000 to the investment amount originally planned that morning. That also doubled our previous year’s investment, and — we think — made this WAC event the largest investment of any of the Oregon angel investment groups. 

Hallspot, a Eugene company that started on campus at the University of Oregon, was awarded a $2,500 Palo Alto Software prize for the best concept-stage company.