What’s Different About This Book
I’ve been writing books for a lot of years, but I’m also blogging and doing podcasts and putting more and more of my daily work on the web. My approach to business planning has changed a lot, and what I expect to do with a book has changed a lot. This book is not what you expect.
A Different Approach to Business Planning
Planning Your Trip
Imagine that you’re going to take the trip of a lifetime. You’ve got the time, you’ve got the money, and you’re finally going to realize that dream trip. 
Would you enjoy planning that trip? Don’t you browse the web with relish, looking at hotel reviews, airline guides, destination websites, and whatever else you can find? Don’t you browse the bookstore for guidebooks and maps? Imagine yourself sitting with your travel companion in your living room stashed with books and maps and telephone and computer, planning that trip. It’s a good thought, right?
The heart of your plan is a combination of where you want to go, what you like to do, how, and with whom. The flesh and bones of your plan is a collection of concrete details: dates, flight numbers, hotel reservations, tour plans, and so on.
What would your travel plan look like? Where would you keep it? How would you share it?
You probably wouldn’t write your trip plan out as a formal document with a prescribed outline, table of contents, and appendices. You probably would keep it where you could get to it quickly as needed, whether that would be your phone, your laptop, or a collection of papers in your carry-on bag.
And you probably would work with your plan as you take the trip. For example, as you travel, things happen. Flights get cancelled or delayed. You miss connections. The article in the in-flight magazine recommends a hotel or a restaurant you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Hurricanes close airports. Hotels close for remodeling.
What do you do with your trip when things happen, and circumstances change? You change your plan, you revise your schedule, you plan as you go. You sit somewhere with your travel companions, and go back over guidebooks and schedules and possiblities, and revise accordingly. You don’t dump the core heart of your plan, but you might change the flesh and bones details.
You certainly wouldn’t just keep going just because that original plan said so, right? You wouldn’t try to fly into the hurricane or charter a plane to substitute for the one that was cancelled. You wouldn’t sneak into the hotel that was closed for remodeling. You wouldn’t ignore that great tip you got from the in-flight magazine.
When assumptions change, you don’t just run your head into a brick wall, because that’s what your plan said; you change your plan.
That’s where the title of this book comes from: you enjoy the plan as you build it, and you revise and correct and improve the plan as you go. Take some guidebooks and maps and a laptop along, so you can change things later. Listen to people you meet who offer new ideas. Expect to revise your plan as things happen and assumptions change.
Planning is part of the journey. It makes it better.
You might call that plan-as-you-go travel planning.
Planning Your Business
And I’m calling this new kind of business planning plan-as-you-go business planning. This is easier and far more practical than that large old-fashioned business plan you might imagine, and even fear, that you need.
My next chapter shows you how plan-as-you-go planning is different from the old-fashioned Business Plan that nobody uses. For now, here’s a quick summary:
- · It’s comes in integrated related pieces like blocks.
- · You can start anywhere and get going quickly. Jump from place to place.
- · You do only as much as you’re going to use. It’s planning for business’ sake, not for planning’s sake.
- · You can mix and match. Use what fits, ignore what doesn’t.
- · Like an artichoke, its built around a heart. The heart of the plan is a combination of market, identity, and focus.
- · Its flesh and bones are the concrete specifics, like dates, deadlines, milestones, budgets, and forecasts.
- · It’s a plan, not just a document. You don’t have to print it, but you can. You can also leave it on your computer.
- · It’s the source for the printed plan document, or the pitch presentation, or the elevator speech.
- · It leaves tracks so you can follow it back.
- · It assumes rapid change. It’s about managing change well.
- · It’s always there, always changing, always updated and refreshed, always ready to print as needed, but never finished.
- · It doesn’t have to be right to be useful. It helps you track where you were wrong and revise and review and correct. Like steering and walking, planning doesn’t hold the course when it’s better to correct the course.
- · It is concrete and measurable so you can track results and use it.
- · It never, never sits wasted and ignored in a drawer.
A Different Approach to What’s In a Book
Living in the Real World
This is 2008. I’m not pretending this book lives alone. As I write this I’m doing three blogs myself and three others as a guest expert. I’ve only recently stopped running a company that lives and breathes web traffic, download sales, conversion rates, page views, visitors, and Google analytics. I’m working with Microsoft office on four computers and on three different office subsitutes in the web world, where my documents live online and I visit them from whichever computer I’m on.
If you’re near a computer, go to www.timberry.com/thebook/ and you’ll see what that means to you. It’s a new world now, everything changes so quickly. Happily most of what I have to say lasts but there’s also constant updates, new ideas, tools, and of course new stuff on my blogs and associated websites. Join me there. That’s your portal to what else is happening in plan-as-you-go business planning.
I don’t expect this book to sit static on the shelf, I expect you to use it. And I don’t expect it to sit static as it is, I expect to update it constantly on the web, on my blogs, and as it flows through the world into other books, magazines, software, and so on.
The Blogs
From the portal page you’ll find links to other stuff: updates, online tools, templates, the proverbial latest and greatest. And I also hope you’ll check in and look for what’s going on at my regular posting places too:
Planning, Startups, Stories (http://blog.timberry.com), my first blog, sort of a flagship blog. That one gets a lot of my developing work on business planning, plus stories of real companies, including my own, mistakes, occasionally interesting videos, current events, and planning fundamentals.
Up and Running (http://upandrunning.entrepreneur.com), my blog on starting a business, hosted at entrepreneur.com. This one gets examples of actual startups, stories of startups, advice, new ideas, and links to other blogs and outside sources.
I’m also on some other blogs including the Business in General blog, Small Business Trends, and the Huffington Post.
Chapter updates
Please do check in at that portal page because I will be updating some chapters some times. After all, if we’re doing plan-as-you-go planning isn’t it also logical that we do write-as-you-go authorship? Things change, not just in your business, but also in the business of business planning.
Information sources
Links, resources, references that come up in this book can also change; once again, we’re living in the real world here, so we have to deal with change. I’ll keep you updated through the portal pages.
Software, Online Tools, etc.
You don’t need software to do plan-as-you-go business planning. This book is about the planning, how to do it, why, when, and how to work with the ideas, the people, the problems, the information, the decisions, and, of course, also the numbers. It isn’t about any particular software.
Planning doesn’t require any particular software. Plan-as-you-go planning is about results and management, not tools, so you can do it on the back of your hand as far as I’m concerned.
However, just in case you’re already asking yourself as you read this, I am also the principle author of Business Plan Pro, published by Palo Alto Software. I’m not going to talk about that in this book, but I can at least assure you that whatever I’m suggesting you do can be done within that software. And also, look for a coupon, there’s a deal available.
Finally, a related note about tools. I will refer to tools in some places where they are already up and running on the web and available to you at no charge. As with the software, you won’t need them to use this book, but they’ll be available to you; and, unlike the software, those tools are free. You’ll see them when they come along.
