Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

We’ve asked an enormous range of people for advice. Lawyers, business experts, civic leaders, accountants, technology gurus, marketing people, elected officials, artists, designers, retail folks, PR veterans – we could start our own city with these people. And the second question out of nearly everyone’s mouth has been, “Do you have a business plan?”

Aieeee. The business-plan issue. If you start your own company, you’ll face it, too.

The fact is, of all the people we’ve talked to, the only ones who didn’t  seem to care about  business plans were artists and technology entrepreneurs – the very people Most Likely to Start Something Independent. 

Individual artists just tend not to be ruled by plans; artists starting nonprofit organizations think more about mission statements and building their boards of directors. The techies? Well, we went to several of Cleveland’s many digital conferences and at one one them, I directly asked a panel of young technology entrepreneurs if they had created business plans for their companies. One simply said no. Another said he probably ought to put one together. The third sheepishly admitted that he had the start of one, but he’d stuck it in a drawer somewhere long ago.

Entrepreneurs know they’re supposed to develop business plans, but frankly, no one wants to actually do it.  They’re like giant term papers. They have a huge ugh factor.

People who’ve succeeded without them insist they aren’t really necessary (see college educations), but the fact is that all the people you’re going to want help – read money – from will demand to see your plan.

Really. All of them. Unless you’re planning to ask your grandma to underwrite your enterprise – and even she might insist you do one.

Banks, foundations, venture capitalists, incubators and angel investors want to know exactly how your new business is going to work. Which is kind of amusing, since everyone admits privately that all the projected customer-base and profit numbers will have to be invented.

The truth is, you – and they - don’t know if your business will succeed. And you won’t know until you get it up and running, probably over years. Unless you already have a working business, the bottom-line numbers tend be a polite fiction.  

But writing a plan – and my business advisor and fellow blogger Will Limkemann will be entertained to find me espousing his view now – truly does force you to consider every aspect of your business, from philosophy to staff positions to production costs. Especially if you have partners, it helps a lot to work out in advance any differences of opinion you may have on, say, whether or not you’re going to offer your employees health insurance, or if you’re going to locate your offices downtown or in the ‘burbs.

You know what they say – don’t get married without working out how many children you want and how you’re going to handle religion.

So – groaning and dragging all the way – my partner and I actually did sit down together for weeks and hash out everything we could, writing market justifications, drawing organizational charts, describing how our news and store operations would work, estimating costs of every kind from legal fees and web design down to pens and staplers and trying to guess responsibly, based on painful calculations of ad rates and merchandise sales, what our income levels and profits would be. 

Will helped us, coaching on how to figure out the numbers and what kinds of statistics we needed to back up our gut feelings. (Many resources exist to help with plan writing: check online and in bookstore for business-plan guides and ask your chamber of commerce and local business schools about workshops and the names of reliable professional advisors. )   

Yeah, our brains hurt. It was like having to write a dissertation about a topic you hadn’t majored in yet. But now we have a plan to show any people who ask. And we’re hoping they do. 

 so it’s not as if a plan is proof of