J. Anthony Allen argues that writing a business plan matters most to you, the founder. The act of drafting forces you to research, test assumptions, and spot fatal flaws before they sink the company. A plan won't guarantee success, but it shows whether you're set up for it or failure.
Okay. Why should you make a business plan in the first place? The first reason, which is the best reason, is that it's actually useful to you. We're going to talk in a minute about how it's useful to other people. But what writing this big document is going to do is it's going to sort everything out in your head, let you put everything down on paper. You might make some discoveries while you're doing that, because there's a little bit of research we're going to have to do to really flesh this out. And you're going to realize elements of how your business fits into the world and into the economy that you're going into and just how you're going to pull off doing business. There have been times when I've written a business plan, I've gotten three quarters of the way through, and I said, you know what? This isn't going to work. Like, once I lay it all out in a business plan, you're like, oh, there's like a fatal flaw in here, and I don't think I should probably do this business. So it is actually useful. It's an exercise that you can do that will let you see a lot of how your business is going to run. And it's gonna. It's not gonna be something that tells you if your business is gonna be successful or not, because there's a ton of factors that go into that. But it will be something that tells you if you are set up for success or not, or if you're set up for failure, which is something you can find often in a business plan. So it's going to tell you what I'm going to call your market strategy. It's going to tell you if this is going to work, if it's going to fit into the market. Now, like I said in the previous thing, you will probably find yourself revisiting your business plan a number of times. We call this. In the kind of startup world, we call this a pivot. So you might write a business plan that says you're going to do everything a certain way. And then when you get down to it and your business is up and running, you might say, well, this isn't working, but this other thing kind of is. So let's realign our business to go this other direction. We call that a pivot. We're going to pivot. We're going to go this way. Now, it's healthy, it's good to do. And every time you do that, you should revisit your business plan and make sure it's aligned with what you're actually doing and go through the process again. So the business plan is really valuable to you to look through everything and to have a document that you can look back at later. So you when your business is running, if you're struggling, you can look at your business plan and say, what am I not doing that I planned for? Or what is in my plan and is not working? It's kind of like a roadmap for how you're going to do everything. That's one reason. One reason. And what I think is the best reason is that it's for you. Other reasons is that there are some other people that would like to see your business plan as well. And let's talk about those next.
