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Garbage In, Garbage Out

 

Still, Ochel reports that BRS had to simplify Business Insight to entice more people to buy it; Quick Insight is the "dumbed-down" result.

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Planning to Succeed
Even when they do help a company get financing, most business-plan packages fall down in helping users turn plans into reality. Indeed, they seem to treat planning as a hoop entrepreneurs have to jump through to get money -- as though being successful at raising capital were the key to being successful in business. In fact, a good business plan can guide a company's ongoing operations, communicate objectives and milestones to managers and employees, and help track progress toward the company's goals. "You can write a plan that makes your business look fabulous and gets you money," says Holmes, of Stowe Canoe, "but you can still go broke." He ought to know. Shortly after building his new factory, Holmes lost his largest customer to bankruptcy. Now he's scrambling to keep his own creditors at bay while he tries to recover the lost revenue. "I realize now I was undercapitalized. I probably should have borrowed twice what I thought I needed," he says.

Autumn Zamzow reports that she and her husband faced a similar cash-flow squeeze when they opened their first restaurant eight years ago, without a business plan. A long delay in obtaining a liquor license almost caused the young business to go under. Zamzow says a good program like AYBP would have forced her and her husband to work up better projections for how long the restaurant could survive without liquor revenues.

Business Plan Pro is one of the few programs that addresses plan implementation. There's a table for tracking date and budget milestones, and the software actually allows you to keep three versions of the numbers: the plan, the actual, and the difference between the two. Tim Berry, author of the program and Palo Alto's CEO, says, "It's important that plans stay alive and not end up in a drawer." He claims Business Plan Pro helps accomplish that by allowing users to gain access to and revise information quickly. A spokesperson for Jian says that company is working to add such capabilities to future versions of BizPlan Builder.

In the end, whether you're after financing or just looking for a management tool, which business-plan package you choose may be less important than the energy you put into using it. "If writing a good plan scares you off," says consultant Deion, "then maybe you should think about a less-challenging occupation than entrepreneurship."

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Brian McWilliams (bmcw@aol.com), a freelance writer based in Durham, N.H., is a frequent contributor to Inc. Technology and other business publications.

WHAT'S IN A PLAN?

There's no standard format for business plans, but the experts generally agree that a business plan should include the following parts:

? Cover page

? Table of contents

? Executive summary

? Company description

? Markets and competitors

? Products or services offered

? Sales and promotion plans

? Financial projections

OUTSOURCING YOUR PLAN

To avoid the headache of writing a business plan, some small-company CEOs farm out the task to accountants or consultants who specialize in plans. Brett Silvers, chairman and president of First National Bank of New England, says the plans prepared by accountants are the best he encounters: complete and professional looking.

That's what Laurel Hendrickson hoped for when she hired the local office of a national consulting firm two years ago to help her prepare a plan for Global Business Solutions, her $10-million computer consulting and software business in Costa Mesa, Calif. The cost: a hefty $80,000. "It ended up being a very poor investment," she says. "We got busy, and the consultants ended up doing the plan by themselves, without input from us. So it didn't focus on the things we felt were important. Plus, we never learned how to do a plan ourselves." Global's plan is now collecting dust on a shelf in Hendrickson's office.

Even when the help comes cheap, using accountants or consultants isn't always a great solution, says Michael Carter of Carter & Co. "The plans they create may have all the right pieces, but they don't sell the company well."

Worst of all, hiring an outsider to do the plan can and often does mean that the CEO can't explain what's in it -- and investors invariably ask questions.

RESOURCES

Most business-plan software packages are designed to run on either PCs or Macintosh computers and provide outlines or templates of the various sections that make up a business plan. (See "What's in a Plan," above.) Some even include boilerplate text that can be massaged to fit your business, along with a Help system for filling in the blanks and a few sample plans as guides.

Here are seven of the more popular business-plan programs and where you can find them:

? Automate Your Business Plan, from Out of Your Mind . . . and Into the Marketplace, Tustin, Calif., 714-544-0248

? BizPlan Builder, from Jian Tools for Sales, Mountain View, Calif., 800-346-5426

? Business Plan Pro, from Palo Alto Software, Eugene, Oreg., 800-229-7526, http://www.pasware.com

? PFS: Business Plan, from SoftKey International, Cambridge, Mass., 800-227-5609, http://www.softkey.com

? PlanMaker, from POWERSolutions for Business, St. Louis, 800-955-3337, http://www.planmaker.com

? PlanWrite, Business Insight, and Quick Insight, all from Business Resource Software, Austin, Tex., 800-423-1228, http://www.brs-inc.com

? Success Inc., from Dynamic Pathways, Newport Beach, Calif., 800-543-7788

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