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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | NOVEMBER 22, 1999 DEAR DIARY The Art of Distilling 10,000 Words into a Business Plan I force myself to stop researching and get it down on paper
 Target Market Segment Strategy. Business Participants. Competition and Buying Patterns. Strategy Pyramids. Assumptions. Break-Even Analysis. Business Ratios.
The aforementioned are the parts of a business plan. Have I got any idea what they mean? Are you kidding? I first tried to do a business plan a little more than four years ago, when I launched my own company. With the aid of a hopelessly complicated software package, I managed to eke out something resembling a plan, which I never really used except to amuse myself with wild projections of wealth which, of course, did not materialize. It did help, though, to get some thoughts on paper before they leaked out of my brain and got lost in the ether. Now that I am seasoned in the art of entrepreneurship — meaning I sport some pretty lurid scars from four years in the trenches — I'm once again writing an Official Business Plan. Only, this time it's serious. I plan to present it to venture capitalists, bankers, or anyone else who might bet real money on what I fervently believe is a sure thing — an Internet component to my editorial staffing business. I started working on the plan some weeks ago, when I naively thought I could produce an award-winning document if I hunkered down over a long weekend. Instead, I ended up with a couple of award-winning paragraphs and lots of research notes. The notes weren't a waste, mind you. Research is very important to a good business plan. The problem is that with all the information available now on the Internet, I find I don't know when to stop digging. You could easily spend a year making notes — while bankers and venture capitalists with truckloads of money pass you by on the capital highway. I finally forced myself to stop researching and start editing. But I was startled to realize that of the more than 10,000 words' worth of material I collected, I could extract only a few nuggets. That's O.K. You need those for your plan. The last time I did this, I promised myself I would never put myself through torture-by-business-plan software again. I finally broke down, though, and bought some to help me organize things. To my surprise, the package proved exceptionally simple to use. These things have gotten immeasurably better — even to a financially challenged person like myself. Still, I let my operations guy do the charts and tables. I understand them — I'm just not ready to embrace them. Anyway, I pay him to go nuts. Yesterday, I printed out 33 pages' worth of plan. There are plenty of gaps, but it's coming together. In all, I've spent about three full days a week working on it since early October, but we're coming into the home stretch. I've imposed a Dec. 3 deadline on myself. Meanwhile, I'm also mapping out and designing a new Web site, and once that's done, I have to write the content. In between, I try to keep the business together. At one point, I vowed to detach myself from the day-to-day business activities and concentrate on the cosmic overview. That lasted about a day. Good thing we have Saturdays and Sundays — about the only time I have to get some work done around here.  George Giokas is the president and CEO of StaffWriters Plus, a specialty agency that places writers in temporary and permanent positions with corporate and other employers. It also provides editorial consulting work. His database includes 2,500 writers and editors specializing in more than 60 categories. His Web site is located at www.staffwriters.com, and you can E-mail him at george@staffwriters.com  | | |
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