Lots of people think of themselves as either word (or concept) people or numbers people. In business planning, however, it’s hard to separate the two. Even the words and concepts people need numbers — the sales forecast, the expense budget, other metrics — to make their planning real. And the numbers people need to move away from the numbers for long enough to think through the core strategy: how their company is different, what their customers want from them, and how to deliver it.

The problems come when people get bogged down. Some people fear writing; they think of the empty page, spelling errors, grammar errors, bad days in school. Some people fear math. They think of arithmetic errors, red marks on papers, not being qualified.

And the magic solution is just keeping it simple.

• As for words and concepts, particularly at the beginning, think of the core as that elevator speech, maybe a few bullet points, but not a term paper or well-written prose. It doesn’t matter. Nobody but you is reading it. You can dress it up later when you actually need to show it to an outsider.
• For the numbers, start with just a few basics. Do a sales forecast. Do an expense budget. Be mindful of the cash flow traps, watch your cash balance, but don’t think you need a full financial forecast from day one. Just create some estimates you can track and review and manage by comparing plan vs. actual. If, and only if, you’re a startup, do your starting costs, too.

You may have a business plan event, in which case you’ll probably want to do the full explanations with supporting information, covering the bigger market picture, team background, company history, and a complete financial forecast including sales, personnel, profit and loss statement, balance sheet, cash flow, even the business ratios, and probably a break-even analysis. You may also include what you’re going to do with the money you’re seeking, how much of your company you’re trading for investment, and so on.

And for the words and concepts people, you already have somebody running the numbers of your company. You have to have that to survive administration and taxes. If you’re just starting, then you can usually find somebody who understands basic business numbers so you can add those skills to your team. Remember, it doesn’t have to be just you; you can build a team with co-founders or partners or contractors or employees. Somebody will have to run the numbers once you get going.

For you numbers people, I think I know you pretty well even though I was a lit major in college and wrote for a living for years. I discovered numbers in business later, when I got the MBA. You are probably keeping those concepts in your head — things like positioning, differentiation, strategy, and focus — because you think them through the numbers. Don’t sweat the format or the mistakes or the sentence structure; just tell your story. And start with the numbers; that works just as well.

Remember, with the plan-as-you-go business plan, the idea is to start anywhere and get going. Build it as you need it.

That having been said, I want to share a words-and-numbers together story. This is from my book Hurdle: the Book on Business Planning:

In 1974, I switched from general journalism, writing for United Press International from Mexico City, to business journalism, writing for Business International and McGraw-Hill World News. With the switch, I found myself covering business and economics instead of general news, writing for (among others) Business Week and Business Latin America. Because I thought it would be nice to have some idea what I was writing about, I went to the local graduate school at night for courses in general economics, accounting, finance, and marketing.

As I learned about macroeconomics, and how to read financial statements, I discovered that the truth in business is almost always a combination of words and numbers, and can’t be explained separately. For example, when a Central American government announced a new federal budget that it said was going to both develop growth and reduce inflation, the numbers said that was a contradiction. You can’t do both; you can do one or the other. You could only see that by dealing with both words and numbers.

I went on from there, in that book, to plow through the whole numbers thing as if everybody had a full business plan event to worry about, and therefore a full complete formal plan to do. This was too much, in retrospect. You can track and manage most businesses with the core plan numbers in the sales forecast and expense budget.

A business plan is like that, too. You can’t describe a plan without both text and tables, both words and numbers. The single most important analysis in a business plan is a cash flow plan, because cash is the most critical element in business. With the way the numbers work, however, you can’t do a cash flow plan without looking at the income statement and balance sheet as well.

You really can’t do the income statement without looking at sales, cost of sales, personnel expenses and other expenses, so you need those too. And you’d have trouble doing a sales forecast without understanding your market, so a market analysis is recommended.

And then you have the break-even as part of the initial assessment, and tables for business ratios, general assumptions, and other numbers. Step by step, the business plan becomes a collection of tables and charts around the text.

Although cash is critical, people think in terms of profits instead of cash. We all do. When you and your friends imagine a new business, you think of what it would cost to make the product, what you could sell it for, and what the profits per unit might be. We are trained to think of business as sales minus costs and expenses, which results in profits.

Unfortunately, we don’t spend the profits in a business. We spend cash. Profitable companies go broke because they had all their money tied up in assets and couldn’t pay their expenses. Working capital is critical to business health. Unfortunately, we don’t see the cash implications as clearly as we should, which is one of the best reasons for proper business planning. We have to manage cash, as well as profits.

This is all important, when you’re doing the formal plan for outsiders. With the initial plan-as-you-go plan, some of that can wait until later.

We’re going to address all of it in this book, by the way, but some of it waits for the business plan event, so you do it when you really need it, as your business and plan grow.

One of the most important new ideas in the plan-as-you-go business plan is that the plan doesn’t necessarily include the supporting information that everybody assumes is part of the traditional formal business plan. I mean the market analysis, industry analysis, company history, management team backgrounds, and other information you expect in a complete business plan.

Your plan is about what’s going to happen, what you are going to do. It’s about business strategy, specific milestones, dates, deadlines, and forecasts of sales and expenses and so forth.

So what about market analysis? Think about the business purpose. Do you need the market analysis to help determine your strategy? Then do it. Are you ready to go with that strategy regardless? Then don’t sweat the market analysis.

Supporting information may or may not be included. You don’t have to do a rigorous market analysis as part of your plan if you know exactly what you’re offering, and to whom.

This is ultimately your responsibility. You gather all the supporting information just because somebody said it was supposed to be there. You do it if you’re going to actually use it to make decisions.

This is a big win for the plan-as-you-go business plan over the standard traditional business plan. It helps preserve the idea of planning for the people who know what they’re doing in the market, who already know their industry and their customers and their strategy and how and why it works, but don’t plan because they think, wrongly, that doing a plan means proving something to somebody else. If you already know and you’re satisfied with it, then skip the proof.

You build a good plan like an artichoke, inside out from the heart. That doesn’t mean you necessarily start with the heart and go in rapid succession — I am serious about starting anywhere — but it might. Maybe you did your sales forecast first, but eventually your plan will revolve around its heart.

Of course the heart is not necessarily a written document, not necessarily rehearsed, not necessarily a recorded.

At this point, however, we have to address those of you who have a business plan event that you need to prepare for. You need a full formal complete plan for school, for an investor, for a bank, for a boss, as a consultant, or whatever. Then you might have to do the whole thing at once, and not enjoy the luxury of letting it grow organically. Don’t worry, though: you can still benefit from the idea of the core and the blocks.

The artichoke analogy applies when you build the supporting parts of the plan — or blocks, if you want to call them that — around the heart. For example:

• A really cool way to make sure your planning is useful is to set up the review schedule now, in the beginning. Set up recurring meetings, for example, on the third Thursday of each month. Put these meetings on the calendar. Invite the team members. Surprise people; don’t wait until the plan is done – set up the review schedule first.
• After you’ve figured out your market strategy, target market, focused offering, core competence, and so on, then you need to think through the logical tactics and specific activities to take that idea to market. What is the message? Where do you deliver it, to whom, through what medium? How much will that cost? You can do that with a strategy pyramid, or not; a milestones table is really practical.
• A lot of core benefits of planning link to the milestones table. Metrics, for example, are presumably built into that table. Tracking and accountability also relate to that table, so it’s a pretty important block.
• You really need to take your business strategy and work it into a concrete and specific sales forecast. Hard as forecasting might be, it’s harder to run a business without it. And the sales forecast is when you start tracking. Plan vs. actual numbers will help you adjust your plan, and from that improve your management.
• You need an expense budget. That’s another piece you can track, so you set up your goals and keep an eye on your progress. And while you’re at it, include costs as well as expenses and you’ll have a better hold on your business.

And with that, I want to pause. Take a breath. Notice that at this point you’ve got a strategy and three key metrics to track: milestones, sales, and spending. You’re on your way. Your planning has started. You even have a review schedule.

All of these things are like the leaves of the artichoke. They surround the heart. They aren’t the only things you can do, though; they are just suggestions. Here are some additional suggestions:

• I like the SWOT analysis. It brings the teams together.
• Lots of people like to do the mission statement, or the mantra, or objectives. I like keys to success too.
• You have to be sensitive to your business, and your business’ needs. Maybe distribution channels are important, so you set some milestones. Maybe product design, prototyping, or packaging is important, so you set some milestones.
• The more you have a group involved, the more it helps to create a document on the computer. A set of bullet points, or maybe some prose, gets the ideas down so people can refer back to them.

And now another pause. Let’s reflect on progress and process. A lot of this thinking things through, necessary for good business and good management, ends up in the milestones table.

• Is this plan going to be a document? I hope you see clearly now that it depends on needs. If you’re going to show this document to somebody else, and you expect her to read it, then you might have to start writing things down and organizing things like outlines and structures. The milestones table won’t explain itself.
• And even if it’s just for your team members, although you will spend less time on sweating the output details, you still probably want to record key points into (Business Plan Pro software comes to mind, but it’s not required) so people can refer to them.
• Form follows function. More on that later.

So this might be the evolution of a normal plan, for a normal company, startup or not. You do this plan not because somebody says you have to, but because you want to, because you’re interested in creating a business or growing a business. You care about your business. You think about it a lot. Call it planning.

And then, in some cases, comes the business plan event. Or you’re one of those who started this planning task with the full business plan event starting you in the face. No worry — in that case you add the dressing you need like the supporting information, detailed financial forecast, and descriptions of the management team, and you have the formal plan document.

A plan is worth the decisions it causes. If you already know your market, don’t waste time or money doing market research.

Don’t do it just because somebody said it was part of a business plan. But are you sure? Is it worth a fresh look? You decide.

The supporting information isn’t part of your plan; it’s just supporting information. Do you have to prove the concept? Will outsiders be reading your plan, and evaluating it? Does the market research prove something that must be proven? Then include it.

Information in business is worth the decisions it causes. You measure this by taking a guess at what your bank balance would have been without the information and comparing it to what it is because you had the information. Subtract the hypothetical balance without the information from the balance with the information, and that’s the value.

That’s a hard equation to deal with sometimes, and of course it’s based on hypothetical values; but it’s still an important concept to understand. Your business plan shouldn’t include anything your business won’t use. Either it’s going to use the market analysis or it needs to present it as proof of market for outsiders — or you just don’t perform the analysis.

One of the most common errors in business planning is confusing planning with accounting.

They are two different dimensions. Accounting goes from today backwards into time in ever-increasing detail. Planning, on the other hand, goes forward into the future in ever-increasing summary and aggregation.

Understanding this difference helps you work with and understand the educated guessing you need to do to make projections — specifically, the sales forecast, expense forecast, and eventually the profit and loss, cash flow, and the rest of the financial forecast — into your business planning.

Accounting has to be correct, to the last detail. You use it to pay taxes. Forecasts in a business plan aren’t correct, by definition (see your business plan is always wrong).

Different Dimensions

I like to use the 1994 movie Stargate starring James Spader and Kurt Russell, to illustrate the difference between planning and accounting.

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In the movie, some fictitious freak of nature had opens up a strange, luminous gate between two dimensions. On one side of it was the world as we know it. On the other side, a strange, alien world, like nothing we’d ever seen. I like the idea because it reminds me of the difference dimensions that are planning and accounting.

If that strikes you as theoretical or conceptual, perhaps a bit impractical, think again. This is important. It can save you needless headache and stress. It helps keep you in the right dimension, understanding that the financial projections in your business plan are not meant to be built in excruciating detail.

A Simple Example

Take the balance sheet here, a sample taken from Wikipedia. The so-called balance sheet is a standard financial report, listing the assets and liabilities and capital of a business at the end of some specific day, month, year, or whatever. Assets are good — things you own like cash and land, or money owed to you like accounts receivable. Liabilities are debts, money you owe, which is why you see things that are “payable” –- meaning you’re going to have to pay them –- as liabilities. Capital is what’s left over. It’s called a balance sheet because it’s magic, the magic of double-entry bookkeeping: the assets are always exactly equal to the liabilities and the capital.

Is this an accounting report or a projection in a business plan? You can’t tell. It looks exactly the same, either way. However, in truth, they are different dimensions.

Accounting Collects Records of Transactions

Accounting goes backward from today into the past in ever increasing detail.

If it’s accounting, then every number shown in a balance sheet is actually a summary report of a database full of transactions. The cash balance is like your checkbook balance; it’s the result of adding up all the deposits and subtracting all the checks. What they call accounts receivable is the sum of all the amounts of money owed to you by all your different customers, a report of hundreds, maybe thousands of different transactions. You make a sale, leave an invoice, wait to get paid, then finally get paid, record the transaction, debit cash and credit accounts receivable, and so on, through a collection of specific transactions. The $52,000 reported as land value might be what you paid for land, but it might also be the resolution of dozens of land transactions, selling some, buying others, and that’s the balance.

Liability balances, like assets, are built from bottom up in accounting by keeping track of all the transactions and summarizing the end result. Notes payable might be dozens of small trade bills sitting on a spike somewhere, or a loan from the bank, in which case it’s related to the starting loan amount less the total of all the principal payments.

I hope you get the idea: accounting is a huge collection of summarized past transactions. Focus on any number in an accounting statement and you should be able to zoom in on more detail, down to each individual transaction.

Planning Makes Reasonable Educated Guesses

Planning goes forward from today into the future in ever increasing summary and aggregation.

Now consider, if you will, that same illustration as part of a business plan, making an educated guess of what the balance will be two or three years from now. Don’t even try, not for a second, to think that you’re going to estimate cash by estimating the details of thousands of transactions and adding them up. You’re not going to estimate assets by guessing what you’re going to buy, and when (not to mention depreciation, so pretend I didn’t). You’re not going to estimate debts by guessing when you will take out each loan, exactly what you will purchase, and when. That’s impossible — and silly. You’re going to find some way to guess your cash, your assets, and your liabilities, based on larger educated guesses tied logically into the major flows, like sales.

We’ll be working together later on how you can make reasonable estimates, but for the sake of illustration, I have some of examples to explain the difference in dimensions:

• Accounts receivable means money owed to you by customers. You make the sale but you deliver an invoice, and wait to get paid; that’s the way it goes in business-to-business sales. So you need to guess how much money will be sitting there, at important points in the future, waiting to be received. Every dollar in accounts receivable is a dollar less cash, because it was booked as sales but you don’t have the money. You don’t however, try to guess all the specific sales transactions with all the specific customers and add them all up and figure out where the total will be two or three years from now. Instead, you guess what percent of sales involve invoices and waiting, and then you guess how many days on average you have to wait, and you can do some numbers tricks to make an educated guess.
• You don’t guess what you’re going to owe by adding up all the imagined bills from some guessed-at future purchases. Instead, you estimate how much you’re currently paying out in expenses as a percentage of sales and payroll or some other measure, then estimate about a month’s worth of that as payables.

I’m not going to belabor the examples because I think that’s already enough to make the point. You have to make some logical guesses.

Why Does This Matter?

Every so often I encounter somebody trying to manage the minute details of projected interest expense to allow for several different loans with differing rates and terms as part of a business plan. Or I find somebody trying to guess assets by guessing the detailed purchase dates and values. And then there are people trying to project future accounts receivable by customer, guessing each customer’s future sales and payment patterns.

The problem, of course, is that is really hard to do. You can spend a lifetime calculating details and never get as close as you would with a good estimate.

Compare the levels of certainty: Let’s say interest is normally a percent or two of total expenses, and expenses are normally something like two-thirds of sales. If your sales estimate for future years is within 5 percent either way, you’re doing way better than most. How wrong can you go with a simple estimated interest rate, and how much does that affect your projections? Aren’t we talking about tiny percentages of expense, in a system that has to estimate other elements that have hundreds of times more uncertainty?

I consider this a problem of what I call levels of uncertainty, which is a matter of how correct you expect to be. For example, assume it’s Spring of 2008. When your accounting report says your sales were $2,893,712.07 for 2007, and you put that number into your tax reports for 2007, you expect it to be absolutely correct. You have accounting software and professional accounting help, and you enter all the records, so you assume that the number is correct. That’s presumably a very low level of uncertainty. Even a $10,000 difference between what you see on the accounting report and what actually happened is very bad. On the other hand, when your 2008 business plan says you expect to sell $5 million for 2011, that’s an educated guess with a relatively high level of uncertainty. While your accounting for past sales in a tax report is a disaster if it’s off by $10,000, your projected $5 million sales for three years from now has so much uncertainty to it that you’re probably very pleased to end up within $500,000 of that number you estimated in 2008 when you finally do get actual results for 2011.

Now take that same idea into more detail, using the example of specific interest expenses. Interest is deductible from income before you pay taxes, so if it’s already 2008 then your accounting should be telling down to the last penny what you paid in interest expense in 2007. Let’s just take as an example that you paid $21,093.76 in interest for 2007. There is no margin for error. The interest expense for the whole year is the sum of all the separate interest payments paid for whatever different loans were involved. On the other hand, if it’s 2008 now and you’re estimating what your interest expenses will be in 2011, you can’t possibly expect to be exactly right. And — most important — you should not try to calculate interest expenses in the future like you do for the past, by knowing all the loans you have and all the different interest rates and adding them all up. That kind of detail in projections just doesn’t work. A simple estimate will do.

I suggest we think about this for just a second. Does it make sense that business planning is about projecting the future so exactly that using a simple average estimated interest rate applied to your projected liabilities isn’t good enough? Do you really have time to be modeling the detailed impact of multiple hypothetical interest rates on multiple hypothetical loans as part of a projection that depends on an estimated sales forecast?

Planning is for making decisions, setting priorities, and management. Accounting is also for information and management, of course, but there are legal obligations related to taxes. Accounting must necessarily go very deep into detail. Planning requires a balance between detail and concept, because there are times when too much detail is not productive.

Good News: It Makes Things Easier

This is really good news for business planning. What it means is that you don’t have to paint a picture of your financial future by detailing every brick in every building. You can do it with a broad brush. That doesn’t make it less realistic, in fact it will usually make it more realistic, at least that’s what I’ve seen while working with thousands of people on thousands of business plans.

We’re human. We work better at imagining the future in scale than at building it brick by brick in our mind.

A Final Word of Warning

Seeing the difference between planning and accounting is particularly hard for well-trained accountants to handle. They learned to build reports from the bottom up, from the detail, and it can drive them crazy when you make estimates using percentages and algebra and plain common sense for something they’ve learned to build up from painstaking detail.

More important than driving them crazy, unfortunately, is that sometimes this dimensional discomfort can make the accountants so unhappy that they’ll say your estimates are wrong. In these cases, they are often misunderstanding what it means to be projecting the future in summary instead of counting the detail in the past. Forgive them — they mean well — but don’t let them drive you crazy either. Stick to the planning.

The original title of this piece was “Business Plans Are Made, Not Found.” It comes from my childhood memories of the Wheaties ad campaign of the 1950s. The slogan was “Champions Are Made, Not Found.”

The same applies to business plans. You make one, you don’t find one. You develop your own.

This idea comes up a lot these days because — I think– of sample business plans. The spread of sample business plans is a real problem for the greater good of business planning. And unfortunately, I might be part of the problem. Gulp.

I started creating sample business plans at Palo Alto Software in 1987 with the first Business Plan Toolkit, which included the original versions of Acme Consulting and AMT, the computer reseller, which I had written for clients.

Digression: If you’re curious, Google one or the other and see how widespread it is. By the way, there are a few sites that use one of these examples with permission (the SBA, for example, has permission to use AMT as a sample on its site), but there are a lot of people just copying one and calling it their own. Seems like there are hundreds of them out there. Only a very, very few have permission. Most are pirates. End of digression.

We came up with the idea of including sample plans with the business-planning product to help people understand what a business plan looks like, what it covers, and how it comes together. We included 10 real sample plans in late 1994 when we released Business Plan Pro. People liked the samples, so we included more. We polled the users and came up with 20 real plans from real businesses to include with our second version in February of 1996, and 30 sample plans for the third version, in May of 1998. People really liked sample plans as part of the product.

Then the idea spread. People started buying and selling sample plans. Our life as market leader became very complicated when a competitor bought 100-some sample plans from a book compilation and included them as Adobe PDF files with some business plan software. That company didn’t tell their customers that the plans were just electronic documents, didn’t work with their software, and most didn’t even have financial information, but they did cause a stir in the market. We had to work like mad to get 250 real plans, all of which worked with Business Plan Pro and had financial data, to compete. We sponsored business plan competitions, and paid our customers, looking for real plans.

So the race was on. By this point we had our version 2002 (equivalent to the fifth version) of Business Plan Pro out. People started selling sample plans on the Web, most of them poorly-disguised knock-offs of our sample plans exported from Business Plan Pro and massaged slightly. We’ve had several legal battles with people using our work to compete against us. We’re up to 500 sample business plans with Business Plan Pro now, and, frankly, I hate it.

Here’s the problem: When it was two sample plans or even 10 sample plans, people generally understood that the examples were supposed to give you an idea of what a plan is. Now with hundreds of sample plans available, some people naturally think their own business plan is supposed to be one of those 500.

As an author and professional business planner, I hate this idea. People are buying and selling finished business plans as if they were term papers (also a bad idea) for college students. That trend is really spreading, and it’s a mistake. Not just wrong because of plagiarism, but wrong because it doesn’t work and clouds business planning.

I get the question all the time: “Do you have a plan for X?”

This brings me back to the title of this sidebar. I want to tell everybody that finding a business plan you can use is a really, really bad idea. You make a plan; you don’t find one. Obviously, every business is unique. Every business plan is unique. Even if you happened to find a business plan for a business very much like yours, it would never have the same owners, the same management team, the same strategy, and probably not the same market or location either.

Sure, I recognize that a sample plan can help in several ways. You can find out how somebody else defined the units and prices in a business, what her expense projections were and for what categories, and how she described her market.

But I strongly recommend you start at zero, and write your own plan. Refer to samples for some hard points, perhaps, but start with an empty plan. If you’re using Business Plan Pro, the wizard takes you through the process step by step, tells you what you need to include and why, so that you just tell your own story and do your own numbers. If you start with somebody else’s plan it’s going to be very hard to distinguish your own ideas from hers. You’re going to end up with a hodgepodge of rehash.

I just can’t believe people are buying and selling sample business plans as stand-alone documents, but they are. It’s bad enough that we have samples readily available for editing and modifying within the business plan software, but then you have several websites selling finished sample plans without any software, just as Word documents or worse. Most of these are the same plans recirculated, essentially stolen, but even that isn’t why they are a bad deal. It’s like buying a novel as a Word file and trying to get it published — it’s a bad idea.

Adapted with permission from blog.timberry.com. All rights reserved.

“Please, can you recommend somebody to write my business plan for me? How much will it cost? How do I find somebody?”

“Where can I find (or buy) a business plan for a doggie daycare? For a resort? For a website selling environmentally-sensitive goods?”

Forget it. You can’t. It won’t happen. Furthermore, the whole idea of finding a business plan for your business is off-kilter. I think it’s a new variation on the very bad idea of students buying term papers on the Web instead of writing them themselves; and in this case, it’s even worse, because it’s not just a term paper that you should have done once.

It isn’t something you just do and forget. It’s your business plan. Your business is unique. Buying a business plan makes about as much sense as buying a medical checkup already done and on paper, instead of going to a doctor.

Many people confuse the idea of sample business plans with somehow getting a business plan already done. That doesn’t work. Sample business plans can be useful in some cases because they can help you see what other people planned to do, in the best of cases in situations similar to yours. But their market is different from yours, their strategy is different, their resources are different, and their plan won’t work for your business.

Businesses aren’t built by recipes.

Okay, there are some exceptions to these rules.

• Sometimes a person with knowledge and experience in the right field can help you develop your business plan, by asking you the right questions and helping you to think through your ideas.
• Sometimes when you need help creating a document from your existing plan ideas, as long as the core content of the document is yours, you can work collaboratively with somebody to actually craft the thoughts onto paper.
• Most franchise businesses are formula businesses. The better franchises do work like recipes. You follow the steps. In fact, if it doesn’t work like that, you aren’t getting what you’re paying for as franchisee.

More important, notice how the plan-as-you-go business plan solves a lot of the stress related to finding a suitable existing business plan by focusing on doing only what you need, building it as you go, and developing it as you need it, in pieces.

So it’s not a hurdle. It’s not a business plan document you have to finish before you do something else. It’s an ongoing process, a regular management tool. You do it because you want to run your company well, move towards the future in an orderly fashion, dealing with change without always just reacting to change, sometimes proactively leading with change.

Business planning, particularly plan-as-you-go business planning, is the best way to control your own destiny. With a good planning process, you set your long-term goals and the steps to achieve them, then track progress carefully and watch changing assumptions and make corrections as needed to move toward your long-term vision. You move as quickly as possible or as slowly as necessary.

The opposite, not planning, leaves you and your business much more likely to be victims than drivers. You’re much more likely to be reacting to the latest phone call, the latest problem, than managing a plan that makes you proactive.

Think of it like navigating to a desired destination, making any necessary course corrections along the way.

You do it for yourself, for your company, whether or not there is some business plan event that requires it. Do it because you care about your company and you want to do it better. Control your destiny.

Recently I had one of those lightbulbs go off in my head. I’m referring to those times when you’re reminded of something you already knew, but had forgotten. In my case today it was this: Planning your new business, the one you’re thinking of starting, ought to be fun. Planning isn’t about writing some ponderous homework assignment or dull business memo; it’s about envisioning that business that you want to create. It should be fascinating to you. What do people want, how are you going to get it to them, how are you different, and what do you do better than anybody else?

Honestly, isn’t that related to the dreaming that makes some of us want to build our own businesses? It was for me, every time, including those ventures I worked on that made it and those that failed. Dreaming about the next thing I wanted to do was always part of it. Dreaming is related to looking forward, anticipating, and (in this case) business planning.

This came up this morning during my second day of video sessions for SBTV, which has been filming interviews with me on starting and managing a business and business planning. I was answering Beth Haselhorst’s question relating starting a business to getting out of the cubicle, when I realized that I was in danger of forgetting that business planning is part of the dreaming and part of the fun.

I think what’s important is that none of us should be intimidated by business planning because of what I’ve called the not-so-big business plan, or the point I’ve made about starting anywhere you like.  The business plan is a way to lay out your thoughts and think them through — it  shouldn’t be some dull ponderous task you have to get through.

If thinking through the core elements of your business, or for that matter the details of your business, isn’t interesting, then get a clue. If you’re not really looking forward to it, maybe you don’t want to start the business after all.

If you dread the planning of your next vacation, stay home. If you dread the planning of your new startup, don’t start it.

Adapted from an article originally published on the Up and Running blog.