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Thursday, November 17, 2005

How to NOT write a business plan

My colleague David Cowan writes on how to construct a business plan. He distinguishes between the more elaborate version prepared as an internal operating document and a more concise version that's better-suited for getting through to a VC with a limited attention span! I've been guilty (along with my former colleagues) of consistently violating this principle, in my earlier role at McKinsey. We regularly prepared dense slides with loads of data, that were ideally suited to leave behind as a document of record. However, the same slides were disastrous to present in a progress review and communicate key messages to senior client managers.

11 Comments:

At 6:51 PM, Blogger Falstaff said...

Huh? Oh, you were trying to get the message across to the CEO were you? Personally I was operating on Oscar Wilde's famous maxim about how to be intelligible is to be found out. :-).

 
At 7:57 PM, Blogger Anand Sridharan said...

falstaff: Sssshhhhh! Dont let out such deep & dark secrets. Lots of people - from Prince to Ponytail - still need to make a living.

 
At 10:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi I am Mani Iyer,running software biz from mumbai. Gone through your VC Blog. If you could pen what a start up company has to do before it reaches VC stage.. ? The days are gone we go with idea and come with money. Could you able to go through with simple examples and steps.. in indian context. In indian context most of the time we would not be having killing product. Mostly it will be of, service plus product combination. In that case, how to go about it.. ? Any light you can throw..

 
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Some more info from your competition at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

 
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