Never Outsource your Business Plan

Here's the summary of a planning tip contributed by Intuitive Life: A Business Weblog by Dave Taylor:
A book I'm reading recommends that businesses consider outsourcing their business plan development because they'll "get a better business plan, faster, and at lower cost" than doing it in house. This is absolutely wrong-headed thinking: if you outsource your business plan process, your company will be more likely to fail, not less.

It's the process of creating the plan that's important not the end document. When you share your business plan with an investor or venture capital firm, they want to see something coherent and learn about a smart business, but just as importantly, they want to know that your team can sit in a room and hammer out a single, unified vision of your company, one that covers all the major bases, from marketing to defending your intellectual property, cost of sales analysis to partnership ideas. And yet, pop over to Google and you'll find hundreds of companies advertising that they'll write your business plan for you, that they'll "help you clarify your business goals" and that they'll "help you get funded with a rock-solid business plan." Reject these companies. All of them. The only part of business plan creation you can safely outsource is unbiased analysis. Once you're done with your plan, it can be a darn good idea for you to run it past a professional business startup consultant, because they can give you the investor's view of your plan. Expect to pay at least $1000 for this service.

It's really like a Zen Koan because the journey is the reward. If you think that having a beautiful printed business plan, perfect bound and with color illustrations is going to impress an investor more than one that your team has sweat over, fought over, and hammered out over time, you're wrong. It's the implementation, not the idea that investors are paying for: if you can't even own your business planning process, the odds of you getting your product out the door, executing on your plan and generating a return on investment are pretty darn low.

So here's some free advice from a serial entrepreneur and management consultant who's been there and read hundreds of business plans: write your own business plan. Fight your own fights with your partners, argue about sources of revenue, debate income projections, and force yourselves to figure out enough of Word and Excel to capture that moment of your company's life. Because business planning is all about process, not destination.


source:www.planware.org