Don’t Waste Time on a Business Plan
Common practice dictates that before you start a business you’ve got to write a business plan. There are entire college courses and degrees devoted to writing and executing a business plan. I don’t dare venture an exact guess, but there must be millions upon millions of dollars spent planning businesses that never become more than a detailed document called a “business plan.”
Business plans are archaic, unwieldy documents whose main purpose is for raising equity or debt investments. According to the Small Business Administration a proper business plan has over 22 sections! What a waste of time!
Modern online businesses don’t require investors or loans. It is so cheap to start a website and get a legitimate web-based business off the ground that almost anyone can afford it. Writing a business plan simply wastes time that you could spend actually making money. Businesses that take time writing a business plan, building a complicated website, and having an elaborate launch spend so much time and money that they need to have investors to pay for it all. These are also the businesses most likely to fail, because they are pandering to their investors from day one.
Outsource the capital intensive parts of your business. Modern online businesses outsource the expensive stuff. If you need a large piece of equipment, don’t buy it, simply hire another company who already owns the equipment. Don’t start spending money before you start making it!
Let Your Website be Your De Facto Business Plan
Websites provide distinct advantages to a business plan:
1.) Organization
Your start-up’s website will be, necessarily, tailored to your business. As you fill it with content and you test it yourself, you will naturally create questions and identify holes in your business plan.
2.) Customer Feedback
Websites provide almost instantaneous visitor feedback. You can track where users click, how many users visit each page, and even ask for customer comments and emails. This provides valuable market information that you could never get with just a business plan. There even tools available, such as Google Website Optimizer, that allow you to simultaneously test multiple versions of a site for effectiveness. Your website will let you quit guessing and find out what works and what doesn’t.
3.) Make Changes Instantly
If you aren’t getting the response you desired from your website you can change it instantly. If you receive client complaints about a service or a feature, you can quickly alter your website. Rather than being criticized as being a poorly designed website or offering a badly concocted service, customers will view you as being responsive to their needs. Everyone loves to be listened to – customers are no different.
4.) Get Noticed
The sooner your website is active, the sooner the search engines start crawling it and the sooner your clients find it. This process takes time, so it’s best to start right away.
5.) Cost / Benefit
There’s over 1.6 billion Internet users around the world and over 220 million in the USA (that’s over 74% of the population!). A website is, hands down, the cheapest way to access this large of an audience. You can register a domain, host the site for a year, and build a website for well under $300. TV commercials can’t even be produced for that amount – not to mention paying for air time. Your time is better spent creating a website too: try reaching just one of the 1.6 billion Internet users with your business plan.
6.) Build a Following
Being responsive to customers and letting them know that you listen to their ideas will create invested customers. Invested customers will grow your business organically by telling their friends, writing about it in their blog, Twittering, Facebooking, and so on.
7.) Establish a Responsive Mindset
Old fashioned business plans often take so long to “perfect” that once they acted upon, the business owners don’t ever stray from the plan – and when they do it’s a big event. Business doesn’t work like that today. Business and the information that drives it move faster than ever before. By starting a website that quickly, yet thoughtfully, adapts to information and customer feedback, your business model itself will react in the same way.
8.) Establish a Mindset of Execution
Forcing yourself to create a website thrusts you into the public’s view. One of the scariest aspects of starting a business is completed – you now actually have a business asset to your name. The greatest idea in the world isn’t worth a dime if you can’t execute it. If you never turn an idea into a real business, it remains only an idea. Start acting upon your ideas at the very beginning of your business.
9.) Get Paid Quicker
It may seem painfully obvious, but if your business isn’t live, you won’t have customers, and if you don’t have customers, you don’t get paid! Getting paid is the name of the game in business, so don’t get distracted by all of the accoutrements and focus on what’s important!
Do you have an experience implementing a business plan or starting a website?
I’d love to hear about it. Post a comment and share your thoughts!
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Nevertheless today business environment demands a continual, ongoing planning system. Business Letter