Experts view on
Business Plan
Chuck Blakeman:
Chuck Blakeman is a very successful businessman that
dedicates himself to give advices to business owners to achieve success. He is
the author of “making money is killing your business”, which was considered in
2010 as the #1 rated business book by the National Federation of Independent
Business.
Mr. Blakeman began his career in the U.S. Army followed up
by a 13-year non-profit leadership development. He has started and grew five
“small” businesses and has helped lead three other companies between $20 -$100
million in revenue.
His company, The Crankset Group, provides outcome-based
mentoring and peer review to other business owners and CEO’s to help with the
growth of their business.
Blakeman’s idea on business plan are very peculiar, in fact,
he states: “Not a single Fortune 500 was
started with a business plan; not one. They understood that the second worst
thing someone starting a business can do is create a business plan, and the
worst thing they can do is follow it” (Blakeman, 2013)
Blakeman basically considers the worst possible idea to make
a business plan before beginning your business, which is an uncommon point of
view. The reason behind this is because Chuck Blakeman feels that doing massive
pre-planning will kill your creativity, help the lawyers but not the business,
its not supported by facts, and is a new thing (from 1950s on.) and because you
cannot plan for the future because you don’t know what the future is. According to Blakeman: “I’m not
against planning – we should be doing it at every step along the way as we are
moving. I’m not even against a little bit of pre-planning. But massive
pre-planning has a near 0% effectiveness at doing anything but killing
innovation.” (Blakeman 2013.)
The last advice that Blakeman gives is that
planning does not generate moving, but the other way around, in order to create
a successful company we should start doing and planning along the way, not plan
the future 5-10 years of the company and then start doing it.
Steve
Blank
Steve
Blank has had a 33-year career as a successful businessman, conservationist and
professor. Steve was part of the founders of eight venture-backed companies.
Four out of his eight companies went public. After his retirement he published
books, did some public services and began teaching. He teaches entrepreneurship
to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford
University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. He
wrote a book about building early stage companies called “Four Steps to the
Epiphany” based on a Customer development model.
Steve
Blank believes that no business plan will survive the first encounter with the
customer in a rapidly changing market because it requires continuous business
model rehearsals/ customer development, instead of sticking to the original
business plan. An example of this is the iridium cell phone $5.2 billion
mistake by Motorola, where they stuck to their original business plan in a
rapidly changing market.
Steve
believes that aspiring entrepreneurs need to know their customer and must test
their hypothesis in order to achieve success in the business world. The same
way he teaches his students, business owners should learn from their failures
and learn the true meaning of changing what they need to change in order to
meet the needs of their clients, who ultimately are the ones that will keep the
business alive. Steve says: “You used to have a revenue plan, and you’d execute
to the plan because it was written down, when it didn’t work you’d fire people.
Now, we fire the plan.” (Di Meglio, 2013.)
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