Tim Berry is well known in the world of business planning
and he is very good at his job. Pamela Slim, author of the best-selling Escape
From Cubicle Nation, calls him the
Obi-wan Kenobi of business planning and Guy Kawasaki made me his
business plan expert in” How
to Write a Business Plan”. Tim has an MBA from Stanford University and is
also the founder of Palo Alto Software.
Tim berry has also been a consultant to one of the largest tech companies in
the world Apple. Tim has done the annual business plans for Apple Japan and
Apple Latin America. Apple Latin America grew from $2 million to $37 million
and Apple Japan grew from $187 million to $1.5 billion while Berry handled
their business planning. Berry believes in lean business planning that is
constantly reviewed and revised. Berry
urges business owners not to hire a business planner until you have reviewed
all the free content on the web.
The most important parts of a business plan are still business
planning projections including sales, cost of sales, expenses, profit or loss,
balance sheet, and by far the most important cash flow projections. The next
expert I would like to highlight is Barry Moltz. Moltz is an expert in
entrepreneurship and has been featured on MSNBC, NPR and writes regularly for
the American Express Open Forum, Forbes.com and Crain’s Chicago Enterprise
City. Moltz takes the classic approach to business planning by finding what
problem exists that your business is trying to solve, what does it cost to
solve the problem now, What will the customer pay you to solve this problem, What
alliances can you leverage with other companies to help your company, How
much cash do you need to find a path to profitability and finally the business plan is
basically an "argument" where you need to state the problem and pain,
then provide your solution with supporting data and analogies. These are all
key suggestions because that I will be considering for my business plan due to
the successful track records of the above entrepreneurs. When I think of a
business plan I think of a contingency plan in which I have to anticipate
potential hurdle and ask myself all the right questions in order predict the
outcomes as accurately as possible.
