The One-Hour Business Plan: The Simple and Practical Way to Start Anything New

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, longest-serving First Lady of the United States

 

Conclusion: Pulling It All Together

Using Your One-Hour Business Plan to Earn Customers Today

 

The final 10 minutes of your One-Hour Business Plan foundation (1HRBPf) are intended to pull together your five worksheets in a way that works best for you to go to market and acquire your first customers. Here we review the five cornerstones of the business plan foundation to help you integrate them into a working, living document. The importance of beta users (field testers) is emphasized next as well as additional thoughts to support the work.

To summarize the 1HRBPf, I observed patterns in 1,000-plus business plans, actively watched businesses start, became angry at watching people needlessly fail, and wrote this work for the benefit of future innovators. Few people can argue that writing a quality business plan is not good for business. It provides us with a road map to guide ourselves toward desired outcomes. However, writing a business plan is like going to the dentist for most people. It is very good for you, yet can be painful at times and at a minimum uncomfortable. First, let's have some fun with the business plan writing equals dental visit analogy. My favorite visual of a dentist (other than my dentist brother-in-law and my dental hygienist sister and their perfect teeth) is of Steve Martin playing a sadistic dentist in the movie Little Shop of Horrors ...