John McAdam - The One-Hour Business Plan: The Simple and Practical Way to Start Anything New

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Copyright 2013 by Pioneer Business Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

McAdam, John J.

The one-hour business plan : the simple and practical way to start anything new / John McAdam.

pages cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-72622-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-74715-5 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-74714-8 (ebk)

1. New business enterprises-Planning. I. Title.

HD62.5.M3863 2013

658.1'1 dc23

2013019138

In this writing, I want to have a conversation with you as if we are meeting at a coffee shop, pub, or airport. This is not another BS business book where the author dumps from head to paper without facts or replicable tools for the reader. This work was strategically planned after years of experience and observations of more than 1,000 business plans and their results. What are the patterns and most essential elements of any business plan foundation? I write to share some answers with you here. I give you everything I have to date to support you with a foundation for your innovative journey. I've been educating innovators long enough to know that most of you will not write anything for myriad reasons, and I respect that. For those of you who do plan something in writing, welcome to the power of business planning and the benefits therein. At the end, if you share your written plan with us, we can collaborate on your journey and possibly make it safer and more enriching for you. The collective mind of our community is smarter and more experienced than I ever can or will be. Now, about our conversation

A One-Hour Business Plan foundation? Are you kidding me? Who can possibly write a business plan in one hour? It's impossible!

The are you kidding me I agree with. The impossible, I simply do notbecause it is the wrong answer. No, you cannot write a complete business plan in one hour. In fact, you should not, particularly if you are innovating something. After you take your innovation to market, and get feedback from your early customers, you will have to rewrite your business plan anyway, and who wants to do that? I love strategic business planning and I sure don't! My hope is to enable you to write a business plan foundation in an hour of writing (not thinking) time. Then you can write a more complete business plan after your customers have substantiated the value of your innovative offering, which will manifest via customer payments. Does this make sense yet?

If you still don't want to spend one hour writing a foundation plan for your business model, then think about this. More than 50 percent of businesses fail three years after their incorporation date. Why? The reasons are many. Experts, even our government, cannot agree on the final statistics for the reasons why business innovations fail. In fairness to the researchers, the question is difficult to answer because the reasons are myriad and we entrepreneurs tend to hide ourselves and move on after we fail. However, the research definitively shows a correlation of success to those businesses that had a business plan.

I have served approximately 1,000 business owners, CEOs, start-up businesses, and student entrepreneurs over the course of my career, including my own. I began counting them, but stopped because it made me feel old. However, I can conclude that a business with a strong business plan foundation is more likely to succeed than a business with a typical business plan. I know this from experience, and it is a self-evident truth for me. From my experience, the success versus failure seesaw tips toward success with the right business plan foundation, to the point where more than 50 percent of start-ups are still operating after three years. This observation is based on the hundreds of business plans that I have reviewed.

What good does it do my fellow human beings if I take this knowledge to my grave? Nothing! In this book, you find a blueprint for building a business plan foundation that is simple, strong, and enabling rather than complex, weak, and stifling. It is harder for me to write about the simple rather than the complex because intellectually I enjoy the complex more. On a personal note, for whatever reason, I take greater pleasure in watching my clients, students, and readers succeed than I do in my own success. I take little pleasure in counting my money alone in a room. I am just not wired that way.

How do I write a business plan? What content should I include? The surgeon and the high-school dropout share this frustration. I know because I have taught them side by side. Their struggles are identical.

Therefore, my mission is to simplify what is clearly a daunting and complex task for most people (even actual rocket scientists), which is how to write a business plan. Not just any business plan, but a business plan foundation that can be written in one hour. This does not count the thinking time that you will need. You and I both know that you are thinking about your innovation frequently already, sometimes at very strange hours. We just have to focus together on the right thoughts. The right thoughts lead us to the right questions. The right thoughts and questions enable us to simplify a business planning process to its strongest foundation in the shortest amount of time.

I spent seven years searching for a method to help you write a business plan that will increase the likelihood of your success. Most of this time was spent arguing with myself about how to deliver this information. I started with the most complete business plan possible and ended with the most essential business plan components common to all. What a ride. I had to study my innovation failures more closely than my successes, as well as those of my clients, students, and friends.