Business plans are bollocks

This is you - for starting a business. Ignorance is bliss I say.

Depending on what kind of business school hype you are smoking, you will think that all businesses are the same.

Scope out the needs, design a solution, raise funds, develop solution, sell solution and then get rich.

Yep – and I have unicorns in my garden, and I talk to the pixies and leprachauns every night in my dreams and everyone in the whole wide world is my friend.

Are you picking up on any sarcasm yet?

It doesn’t matter whether you work in software, product design or major projects the reality is that business plans and project plans are incremental and repetitive.

The real process is along the lines of the following

• Identify a market need.
• Scope out the need.
• Design a solution.
• Raise less funds than you wanted – if any at all in which case exit loop and do anything legal that makes money.
• Make a solution
• Try to sell the solution – discovering that your idea of what the market wanted was too simplistic and didn’t take their real needs into account.
• Drink yourself into oblivion for a couple of weeks.
• Come back to the office determined to do something about it.
• Work as a team to make your product better match client’s needs.
• Run out of money.
• Pay staff using your credit card while begging for funds from everyone you think might have money (this is the point that you will consider selling your soul).
• Run over your credit card limit and start borrowing from family and friends, basically doing everything you can short of embezzlement.
• Finally get funds through investors or pre-sales. At this time you will have four separate and entirely made up versions of your business plan which you hand out to investors depending on their attitudes. You may also be indulging in selling vapourware (OMG).
• Get revised product to market – discover hidden glitches, and fix at a great cost which is written off as capital.
• Finally get traction and make more sales.
• Have dinner at home with your partner and children for the first time in 2 years.
• Enter growth stage and have a whole new set of pains as you take on employees and are forced to make up systems as you go.

 From all this, the point is that you don’t know everything when you start out, the market is a brutal mistress and you will have to reinvent and start again on many aspects of what you are doing. And this is all normal.

Enjoy.