Why you should never start with a business plan

I have a university degree in Business. The importance they placed on creating and defining a business plan was paramount. You need a business plan there are not two ways about it. It needs to have all the information including where your business will be located, what you will do, your revenue model, your sales forecasts, a SWOT analysis, a mission statement, first aid steps and a budget… among many other things. What complete rubbish.

I’m about to tell you this. If your interested in trying out a new business idea and decide to start by putting a business plan together then your a goose. When starting out a business plan is an acceptable form of procrastination. I will repeat that again and put it in bold and italics. A business plan is an acceptable form of procrastination. If you have a bright idea and want to get the ball rolling and you set off to write a business plan then all that is doing is stopping you from getting started. You may be thinking writing a business plan is getting started but I’m sorry, it’s not. Getting started is jotting a few points down and then doing it. Not thinking about it or writing about it but actually doing it.

Why skip the business plan? The first thing a business plan will do is make you reconsider your initial idea. You will come across hurdles and barriers that you didn’t think about before and slowly but surely you will be weened off the idea before you have even started. You might be thinking that this is a good thing right? This would mean that you have effectively saved yourself time and effort by finding out all the flaws in your idea before wasting your time, right? Wrong. What you have done is convinced your mind that the idea is not possible, nothing else. If you had actually started implementing your idea you would have come across these barriers regardless. In every business there will be barriers. The difference is that because you have started and are immersed in your project you will find away around these barriers. Thinking and pin-pointing these hurdles before hand will make starting less likely and therefore you will never find solutions to these problems.

Another problem is that a business plan actually complicates things. A business plan will flood further ideas into your mind and your fantastic small idea will turn into an overwhelming behemoth before you know it. You add more and more bells and whistles, change tact and thinking about more revenue models and target market opportunities. You no longer have a great simple idea but a complex global conglomerate before you have even started. This will again put you in an overwhelmed and less motivated mindset and cause you not to start. If you keep it extremely simple, then its very easy to get started and create your idea. Once this idea has been created you will then know where the other opportunities lie.

A business plan is effectively your mind trying to find a way to not get started. This could be due to a fear of failure, fear of the effort you need to put in or fear of not knowing how to get it done. It’s all a form of procrastination. What your doing is taking the relatively easy and non-confrontational option of working on your ‘business plan’. I am guilty of this, if I didn’t feel confident about getting started I just focused on my business plan. It’s like not wanting to make cold calls so you prepare emails instead. The problem here as I have mentioned before, is that the business plan is not just a time consuming procrastination but it will also give you more and more excuses why you shouldn’t go ahead with your idea. Very rarely does it motivate you even more to pursue your idea, your motivation is already existent pre-business plan and all your doing is finding a sure fire way to destroy that motivation. This is the worst type of procrastination, let alone a productive, business enhancing task!

Nothing is ever constant especially in the current business world. Your business plan and direction will continually adapt to internal as well as external forces. Businesses today need to be extremely flexible with the ability to adapt quickly to change. After creating a plan for your business, you will certainly find that what ends up working in the real world is entirely different to what you had in your plan. Sure a business plan is adaptive in itself but why start with one? Why not do your idea, learn from it then find out the best way to move forward. Not the other way, that would be a complete and utter waste of time. When you get an allergy test does the doctor give you a plan of what you may be allergic to because others are allergic to it then move you on your merry way? No. The doctor tests you for each individual allergy by giving you a bit of the cause and watches for a reaction. Only then does she form an outline of what you are allergic to. Why doesn’t your business idea need testing then?

Am I saying never to do a business plan at all? No, I think a business plan is great, but not for when your starting out. I am going against everything I have been taught and the reason for this is that I am basing it on experience. A business plan should be implemented after you have gone out and tried your new idea, not before. Today, things are so much cheaper to create compared to what it once was so there is absolutely no excuse to have an idea and not put it into action. To be fair this wasn’t the case 10, maybe even 5 years ago, so what we are taught in schools, colleges and universities are defunct only a few years later. Now it is essential you go out and create your idea, only then will you be in a position to determine what you should include in your business plan.

A business plan can also be effective when you are working with a group of people. A basic plan will help put all the ideas down on paper so you have a chief aim and defined objectives to work towards. Even then, the plan should really only be a couple of pages long, if that at all. It needs to be just enough to point out the main details and get everyone thinking along the same path. This is not really a business plan but a basic business outline, leave the plans for later.

What about for investment? Don’t you need a plan? Yes of course you do, but you also need something to show for your idea. Most investors and venture capitalists want to see something in action before they decide to invest. So do something first, then plan out after.

A proper business plan takes times and effort. This is time where you could be putting things into action. This is the time when your at your most motivated and excited yet you will be putting it to waste. This is the time that will enable other people to leap frog you and get a started on your idea. This is the time when you could lose your first mover advantage. With the endless number of plug-ins and software on offer as well as the ability to easily and safely outsource the creation of your concept, the only person you have to blame for not getting started is yourself. Stop using your business plan as your excuse.