The Business Plan is Dead
You heard me right… the business plan is dead. From this point forward, I will never write a business plan, review a business plan or even think about a business plan, I’m sick of them. In college we were instructed to create mock businesses, by generate a business plan. These business plans were graded on a highly sophisticated scaled, based on how many pages the plan included, 10-20 pages C, 21-50 pages B, 51+ pages, A. So guess how many pages my business plan was? Just barely 51 pages, no more, no less. That business plan was the biggest piece of crap that I created in my college career, littered with over-explained concepts, pointless graphs, and ridiculously big words that served no point expect to take up additional space. What a joke!
So what in my opinion is replacing the business plan, the “slide deck”. The slide deck is a 10-16 slide powerpoint presentation. A good example of how to structure a “deck” (this is what most people call it) can be found by downloading the Seattle Alliance of Angels Pitch Clinic here. One of the most important benefits of a slide deck is that it forces an entrepreneur to describe their business, market, operations, team, execution, etc. all in a very small amount of words, hence cutting out all the bullshit usually found in a typical business plan. Secondly, who the hell has time anymore to review a 50+ page business plan, besides teachers. In my short career as an entrepreneur I have not once had someone ask for my business plan, it’s always slide deck, slide deck, slide deck. I’m baffled at why colleges even make their students create business plans, doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s another blog post.
Word of caution: Some people may think this just made their life easier. It hasn’t. Don’t think that your job is done after those 10-16 slides, you better make sure that you have additional documents that back up almost every assumption, projection and statistic used in those slides. Seasoned investors will question the hell out of your slides, be prepared.
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