“5 blind men and an elephant”

In the parable about “5 blind men and an elephant,” each man touches the elephant
in a different place and concludes something entirely different from the others.
A tree, a wall, a vine, a big leaf, a… wtf?

They are aware only of the one part they touched — none can see the big picture — the elephant.

2025, of all years is likely to be very different from all the ones before it.
The elephant is changed. What’s different about it and what are you gonna do next?
There’s a new elephant in the room.

If there were ever a more important time to put together a thorough bottom to top business plan, this would be it.

Stick with me here as you’ll see/learn why this is your singular top priority before launching anything else,
The world and our business ecosystem is too complicated to rely on assumptions and prior biases.
The “harmonic convergence” of revelations and observations revealed here could be worth millions sooner than later.

Why this is an important discussion right now.
It’s that time of year — strategic planning time. Again.
Is your plan for 2025 going to be a strategy or a stragedy?

Many think their plan for a new year is a month by month or quarter by quarter spreadsheet.
Crack that whip, do more of the same.

When was the last time you reconsidered everything about what you offer?
The problem(s) you solve?
Who your customers really are, prioritized by profitability.
How many of them are there?
How you’re reaching them (economically)?
Your value proposition compelling them to buy from you.
Who else is doing this and thinks they’re doing it better than you?

And…

With this new elephant in the room, do you and your team see it the same?
If differently, can you combine your perspectives to share a bigger picture?

The case for planning your business & employing a comprehensive business plan.

Is everyone in your business, on your management team, all on the same page?
Or, is everything in one person’s head?
(Yours?!?)

While developing a business plan might not resonate with you right now, abandoning
it entirely could cost you 1000X the very time and energy you think you’re saving.

Hear me out and I’ll reveal the simplicity and elegance of optimizing your business with a plan.

A good business plan should serve as a source of inspiration and illumination that fills your heart and
mind with energy and clarity so you go out and change the world with a wildly successful business.

I want you to save yourself years of trial and error (mostly error) with a guide to discover your own shortcuts
to success and dodge the missteps that keep you from building the business of your dreams.

The elephants will appear in the room.

You may be avoiding writing a business plan because you think it’s hard, but
the time and effort it takes to build your business without a plan is much harder.
Come on, you already know this. Don’t you.

Heck, I can’t even got to Home Depot without a list — my ADD kicks in like I’m a 5 year old in a candy store.
Look at everything I can use to fix-up my house…
Why am I here? Oh yeah, I just need a paint brush. I digress.

“You need to figure out the payoff that you can produce.”
– Myron Golden. “BOSS Moves“

What value can you offer your customers right now?

Here’s your Business Plan, Strategic Plan, Operating Plan, Blueprint, Playbook, Execution Plan…
All variations on the same theme.
All created on a common foundation upon which everything is built.

A good business plan can help you grow your business without taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back.
(That’s 3 steps with only 1 step to show for the effort.)

But we’re not a startup!

Unfortunately, many people seem to think that business plans are only for startups.
I hear it over and over again, “We don’t need a business plan, we’re not a start up!”

“Of 26,000 businesses that failed,
65% had no business plan.”
~ SBA Study

It wasn’t just 65% of startups that failed, it was 65% ALL businesses that failed!
Is that surprising?

What about your business?
Do you keep your ideas, strategy, goals and expectations in your head
where you’re the only one who really knows what’s going on?

If you were an Orchestra Conductor, do you walk amongst your musicians and
teach each one how to play the tune or would you give them the sheet music
and go back to directing everyone to play together?

On a construction site where you’re the architect…
Do you expect each worker to walk up to you with a 2×4 or a pipe and ask, “Where does this go?” or
do you tell him, her or them, “Hey, here’s the blueprint. Follow it and build this building?”

A movie director pitching a studio… Gotta script?

An overlooked application.

“Shee-it… I can do all that with A.I.,” you say.
Sure, if you know what investors are looking for and can engineer
the prompts to give you what you want. Knock yourself out trying.
Unless you’re in a hurry to raise capital, hire new people,
and get your team pulling together MONTHS sooner.

More and more investors these days are “Betting on the jockey, not the horse.”
As you probably know, horse races are often “won by a nose.”
The difference between gold and silver in the Olympics can be as little as a 1/100th of a second.
Details matter.

A.I. won’t do that for you — it’s just not there yet.

“…Hell yes I read business plans. I want to know what the entrepreneur knows…”
~ an Angel investor who makes million $ bets

A business plan worth writing and reading makes you an entrepreneur worth funding.

Sure, you can BS your way through your business plan, and it’ll be read as if it was BS,
and leaving you, wondering why no one’s interested?

Successful businesses thrive on clarity and coordination.

And common sense.
Better yet, a good business plan helps you get it right the first time.

Spoiler alert: One of the top 3 killers of startups is the “founder breakup.”
The founders realize that they just don’t agree or get along.

It’s critical that everyone has 100% clarity, unless you enjoy herding cats all day, every day.
Smoke out everyone’s ideas, perspectives, and agenda—settle disagreements, differences and objections early.

“Never assume a colleague understands an idea the same way you do, often they don’t.
Misunderstandings will happen regardless, and the people who misunderstand the most can be the ones who are trying the hardest. People will ask “dumb” questions and say “dumb” things and get caught up in the air often.”

You want everyone involved in the same “room” as often as possible.
When you make decisions, repeat that decision out loud and get everyone’s agreement
before moving on, every time. This may seem painful, but it’s critical, always.
~ Joe Procopio, Published in Entrepreneur’s handbook

A pivot in 2025?!?

Fortunately, you may not need to change everything, but you may want to change a few things.
A pivot may just mean shifting focus prioritizing a new customer segment over previous ones.
Nevertheless, you need to consider it in the context of everything else in your business.
The problem(s) you solve, who has it…

Covering all the bases assures you the insight and foresight to properly
connect the dots and coordinate everything you want to do, you want to change,
and your priorities / limitations for getting there from here.
Not just “more-of-the-same.”

What makes this interesting and fun is what happens next…

You’ll solve problems you don’t know you have.
There may be fixable problems behind bigger problems, where there’s leverage to make even bigger improvements?!?

You can easily do this faster, and better yourself!
And with your team.

Unless you’re accustomed to hip-shooting and working harder.
Problems get solved.

You could be a start-up, you could be raising capital, maybe
rethinking your business for next year, or you’re ready to sell.

Are you just checking a box or actually expecting a check?
When you want the check, you need to do much more than just check a box.

“In this digital space, we can lose sight of the people we serve, reducing them to mere numbers.
This approach is bad for business at best and dangerous at worst.”

“Once we strip away the glitz of hustle culture and adopt a realistic view of entrepreneurship, we’re closer to building a sustainable business. The initial excitement will fade, and the only way to keep going is by having a real passion for solving the problem you started with. Before you dive into an idea, consider your reasons: Are you doing it to prove something? To build a personal brand? Even those can be valid, but it’s essential to clarify your ‘why’ before investing hard-earned money.”

~ Excerpted from “Getting Hustled: How Gen Z is Beginning to Lose the Plot of Business“ by Keith Nord in Medium

If you had a business “plan,” here’s everywhere along the way you can use it.

In your brainstorming and planning sessions, consider your plan to be a handy reference guide to build on.
Keep it updated and use it over and over again for all of these crucial events throughout the life of your business:

“The biggest fault of every businessperson is you’re so in the weeds, worried about today and tomorrow. What will take your company to the next point is thinking years down the line, because you’re giving yourself something to work toward.”
~ Gregg Majewski, founder of Craveworthy Brands and former CEO of Jimmy John’s

Due Diligence — it’s inevitable.
Whether you’re raising capital anywhere along the way or finally selling the business,
investors or buyers will want to verify everything you tell them.
When you keep that end in mind and prepare as you go, when the crunch to get the money is upon you,
you’ll be prepared and save months when you need them the most.
Or wing-it and take what you get?

Getting there is a good thing.
And the easier you make it for everyone to understand and believe, the sooner you’ll get your deal.

“The truth is, financial projections are an effective way of quickly assessing an entrepreneur’s sophistication. Investors aren’t looking at your projections to see how much money they’re going to make; they’re looking at your projections as a way of evaluating you. Specifically, they’re trying to answer questions like:

• How well do you understand the intricacies of your own business?
• How much thought have you put into your growth strategy?
• Do you have a realistic grasp of the costs and challenges ahead?
• Do you understand the financial expectations of a venture-backed company?
• What kind of real-world experience do you have operating a company?

These are the kinds of insights an investor can glean from projections because what you include in your projections reveals a lot about how prepared you are to run a company.”

~ Read “Why Investors Expect Financial Projections (Even Though They Know They’re Made Up)“ by Aaron Dinin, PhD on Medium

Finally, the well-known secret: BizPlanBuilder® is the business planning toolset for all-of-the-above.
It’s all of a Business Plan, Strategic Plan, Operating Plan, Blueprint, Playbook, Roadmap, Execution Plan…

Rather than buying one more training course, set of books, or videos that are just going to
sit on your shelf un-read, un-watched, and un-used…

Like a dynamic cheat-sheet, here’s secure, collaborative online business planning system that gives you
the structure and scripting for exactly what to do with exactly what to say and how to say it.
Nobody else does this!

With a proper purpose-built system to manage your planning process as
well as a comprehensive financial model to simulate “what if?” with your ideas,
it can actually be easy.

Even fun!

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution,
I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask,
for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
~ Albert Einstein

Likewise for your friendly Elephant in the room:

1. Confusion → Clarity
2. Conflict → Cooperation → Collaboration
3. Distractions → Focus on priorities, profit potential, power to dominate your market
4. Bright, shiny objects → Do they make your business better?

The true shortcut you’re looking for.

No business plan for 2025?

If you’re sick and tired of pitching your business to investors who just don’t get it…
Or you’ve got a growing business, need to upgrade your strategic plan, seeking capital, or you’re ready to sell…

We can show you all kinds of success stories of others who started right where you are.

To be fair, you could use a free cookie-cutter template from the SBA or anywhere else,
But if your time and budget are limited, and you’re scared someone else might beat you to it…

This is the easiest, fastest, most reliable solution on Earth.
It’s an easily adaptable, agile planning platform enabling you to envision long-term, yet enable your team to execute the day-to-day.

Plus, financial projection models you can just plug-in your numbers — no formulas, easy enough for a non-financial person to project sales, costs, profit, and business valuation…

Now what could you do and how would you feel with a proper roadmap in place as well as a blueprint for the rest of your company?

Where everyone working with you knows what to do and is happily engaged doing it,
supporting your Vision, Priorities, and Expectations.

You’ll quickly see how it makes so much sense.
And how action-inspiring it becomes as you progress through it.