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

Introduction

A One-Hour Business Plan foundation? Are you kidding me? Who can possibly write a business plan in one hour? It's impossible!

The “are you kidding me” I agree with. The “impossible,” I simply do not—because it is the wrong answer. No, you cannot write a complete business plan in one hour. In fact, you should not, particularly if you are innovating something. After you take your innovation to market, and get feedback from your early customers, you will have to rewrite your business plan anyway, and who wants to do that? I love strategic business planning and I sure don't! My hope is to enable you to write a business plan foundation in an hour of writing (not thinking) time. Then you can write a more complete business plan after your customers have substantiated the value of your innovative offering, which will manifest via customer payments. Does this make sense yet?

If you still don't want to spend one hour writing a foundation plan for your business model, then think about this. More than 50 percent of businesses fail three years after their incorporation date. Why? The reasons are many. Experts, even our government, cannot agree on the final statistics for the reasons why business innovations fail. In fairness to the researchers, the question is difficult to answer because the reasons are myriad and we entrepreneurs tend to hide ourselves and move on after we fail. However, the research definitively shows a correlation of success to those businesses that had a business ...