Big Paper Blog

Business are inherently complicated, sticky, fuzzy, large-scale, operationally chaotic entities– which is probably at least one reason the 50-90% small business failure rate exists.

Let’s make it simple. A business is:

A translation of that would look like:

And finally, an example would be:

Often, startups get frustrated when looking for investment (or other external partnerships/support/resources) because they think they just need to spruce up their pitch documents and then they’re good to go.

It can be frustrating when the business plan is revised or rejected, or both, over and over again. Isn’t it just a document? Isn’t it true that no one cares about the business plan anyway?

The answer is “Yes, but…”

“Yes, it’s just a document, but if your documents are low quality, what does that say about your efforts elsewhere? Like your revenue model, hiring practices, or sales process?

“Yes, nobody cares about the business plan, but if the only thing you have to show IS the business plan, they start caring a lot about your plan– because they don’t have anything substantive to talk to you about. So it’s going to be ripped to shreds.”

(Interestingly– if you give investors or critics something to actually care or talk about, they immediately step the conversation up from a bashfest on your ideas, to a suggestion-fest on action steps.

Big difference. In the first case, they’re essentially telling you, “Hell, I have no idea if this will work or not, but what I do know, is that you are 95% hot air, with almost nothing to show for it. Come back in a year if you have something done by then.”)

Instead of focusing on talking or thinking about your idea, why not work to:

• Write a 1-page sales letter that gives an overview of the product, the price, and how to sign up
• Give the sales letter (either in person, or by email) to enough people to get 1 client to sign up for what you’re doing
• Hire an undergrad for 5 hours ($20 at 5 hours, or $100) to crank out a simple mockup of your website
• Go into your target client pool and get 3 purchase orders from clients who are willing to buy the full deal as soon the product is ready
• Interview staff who are willing to donate their time and will commit to coming on full-time when they/you are financially able to do so (pending funding or client sales
• Track site stats from your prototype release

In other words,

• Spend 2 hours to flesh out the triangle from above (use the “translation” one)
• Take 2 hours to sketch out the basic operations requirements (what are the operational components needed? What does your business need to do on a daily basis to produce the product/service in a way that delivers consistent results?) needed for the first 60 days of operating (starting from where you are currently).
• Take another 2 hours to sketch out the basic support framework: what are the systems, staff needs, partnerships, resources, etc. needed to pull off daily operations on a micro level?
• Take another 2 hours to take the previous operations & framework info, and dump it into a massive to do list.
• Cross things off that to do list EVERY DAY.

You get the idea.

Really, the question is, does ANYTHING in the tangible world exist, to show that you have transitioned from thinking about the concept, to taking action to push it forward into being a real life organization?

If the answer is no, why are you still sitting here reading this blog post???

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If you are looking for help fleshing out the nuts & bolts details of your business in a way that is do-able, particularly with limited resources (funds or manpower), I can help. Click here to set up a coffee.