Business Plan Experts and My Business Plan

Andrea Cockerton’s wisdom about business plans has made me very critical about my own business’s ability to address a needed market. She also points out that a business plan should address the innovativeness of the company’s ideas along with its abilities to execute those ideas, but my company already has those qualities in spades. It’s the need in the market we appear to currently be lacking. Doing amazing and incredible things has little meaning if the market doesn’t have any legitimate need for what the company is creating. It doesn’t seem like there’s a very high demand for motivational/inspirational web-based video that has a biting edge to it.

Kevin Geiger and Chuck Blakeman both addressed the issue of committing to the execution of your plan. Geiger was more in favor of it, Blakeman was less so. This makes me think about the relationship between my own business plan and how it will be executed, and the more I am honest with myself about it, the more it feels like I couldn’t expect myself to be completely loyal to the original plan. Mostly, this is because of lack of experience. The brutal reality is I will never have experience executing a business plan until I get that investor’s approval the first time. Therefore, while completing my first business plan, I won’t have the capacity to be completely realistic. It’s hard to picture obstacles I have not yet faced or witnessed. My first business plan is going to be a good old-fashioned educated guess.

All three of these experts have confronted me with the reality that I am currently poorly-equipped to join the gap between the work I want to do and the realities of putting that work on the market. What I may need to do is go back to the drawing board, give serious thought to everything I have learned about the market I want to compete within, and use my current experience and creativity to build a project and a business that the market actually wants rather than what I want it to want.