Planning With A Heart

A lot of times, when someone starts a business, they think they are so unique that they have no competition. Wrong answer!

Here’s a clue:

One of the most important things you must do for your business is figure out what the conventional business model is in your industry. By business model, I mean, how does anyone make money, and hopefully profit, from doing what you do?

If you own a bakery, for example, figure out how other bakeries make money selling bread. What are the costs? What price do they sell at? How much profit is normal in the bakery business?

When I was a counselor for SCORE, I always recommended that people considering starting a business should go and interview the five most successful people in their area who ran similar businesses.

If your business does not market locally, use the internet. Find business models, or even business plans, for a typical business in your industry. Put together a profile of the competition.

When defining competition, it is sometimes not enough to look at businesses selling the same product. A key question to ask is, who else is competing for the time and dollars of your target market. For example, Starbucks caters to the young, working professional. What are their alternatives to visiting Starbucks? They could go to another coffee shop. They could go to a juice bar. They could meet in a restaurant. They could skip coffee altogether and switch to designer water!

Almost every industry has an association. This is a great source of information about the industry, and often has already done the competitive analysis.

If you are going for outside investors to help start your business (or even if you aren’t,) you should know their key concerns. One of the questions they will ask you is how you will make money in your business, faster, smarter, better than anyone else?

Here’s a saying to think about:

“Good artists borrow. Great artists steal!”

I just made this video for you to learn more about the creation process – how we get from our ideas to the reality of “open for business.”

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Happy creating!

Writing a business plan can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never written one before. If you’re an entrepreneur, your focus is on starting your business, developing your idea, putting your team together, dealing with legal and financial hurdles, and otherwise being successful. You are not in the business of writing business plans.

Here are some places you can go to for help writing a business plan. SCORE (Service Core of Retired Executives) sponsored by the SBA; most major universities have a SBDC (Small Business Development Center): your Chamber of Commerce may offer a class on business planning; business planning software, business consultants, and numerous online resources.

If you do go to one of these sources, here’s likely what you’ll find. You’ll be presented with an outline, or a guide, to writing your business plan. The outline will start with the Executive Summary, and go on through the product plan, marketing plan, financial plan, and so on. Any instructions you get will tell you to start at the beginning and keep writing until you are done.

Unfortunately, almost no one thinks this way. Business planning is “messy.” It’s essentially a creative process and stems as much from your right brain as from the left, logical, linear side of your head.

Effective business planning starts with vision. It is physiologically easier for your brain to step into the future (when your business is successful) and “remember” how you got there, than to plan everything in advance and project it forward.

Planning proceeds in clusters. Most people think associatively. They make lateral leaps to form connections that may not appear to go in a straight line. Clustered associations bring in new ideas and connect up existing ones.

It’s an amazing process but if you allow yourself to free-associate (brainstorm, doodle, think in clusters, randomly creating,) then you come to a point in the process where your brain switches hemispheres on its own and starts to put everything together for you in linear, logical mode. I’ve seen it happen over and over again with the hundreds of clients I’ve worked with.

Planning With A Heart™ is essentially a process that integrates both left-brain and right-brain thinking. It’s actually designed so that you can start anywhere, focus on what you know, continue to research and explore, and then, at the very end, put everything in a presentation format that is best suited to your readers.
If you want to know more, check out the eBook.

Have you ever thought about starting your own business? Lots of people have, but fewer actually do so.

Perhaps you were an entrepreneur from the get-go. As a child, you had a paper route, sold stuff door-to-door, mowed lawns, washed cars, baby sat for your neighbors. As you grew older, you were encouraged to, “got to school, get a good education, get a job.” Maybe your entrepreneurial aspirations hadn’t gelled yet, so you followed the normal course.

Now, perhaps, you’re at a point in your life where it’s time to do something different.

According to the most current BLS information, the unemployment rate has increased to 9.9% nationwide in April, 2010, meaning that approximately 15.3 million people who would like to work are unable to find jobs. An additional 9.2 million people are working part time because their hours were cut back or they were unable to find full-time work. Finally, there are 1.2 million “discouraged” workers who have ceased looking for a job altogether.

Here is some equally interesting data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Of the approximately 23.3 million business firms that are currently active, approximately 17.6 million, or nearly three quarters have no payroll. (Translate, no employees.) According to the research, “Most are self-employed persons operating unincorporated businesses, and may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income.” That was in 2004, the most recent year data is available. Further, an additional 5.8 million businesses that did have payroll have under 100 employees – the SBA’s definition of small business.

Last bunch of numbers: new job formation. March, 2010 saw 162,000 new jobs created. Where did these jobs come from? Historically, the majority have been associated with new business start-ups and small business hiring.

So what does this mean for the ordinary mortal who is still struggling to make ends meet, or sitting at a desk day after day doing a job he or she hates.

If you’ve ever had a dream, a desire, to make a difference in the world, now is the time to do it! What I’m trying to show from all these statistics is that the efforts of a single individual, or a small group of individuals do make a difference.

I’m reminded of the famous quote from Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

(from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles)

I’ve told clients for years, that if you have an idea (for a business), then it has been given to you because you are the one who is uniquely qualified and positioned to bring it into fruition. So if ever you’ve dreamed, now is the time to get up off your chair and just do it!

Why Planning With A Heart you might ask. It all began a long time ago.

I was teaching in Prescott, Arizona (in the mid-1990’s) and involved with the Episcopal church there. The church was overflowing its physical building and brought in an architect to talk to the board about building a new building. The architect was “innovative.” He had written a paper, called “Vision With Planning.” What he proposed was that after he got the new building built, he would then lead a visioning session with all the members of the congregation to “vision” what we might want to do with the new space.

I became incensed! I thought he had done it backwards. Vision first, then planning! I wrote a paper in response, called “Planning With Vision” which later became “Planning With A Heart”. That paper is now a chapter in the book.

“Without a vision, the people perish.” (PR 29:18)

This quote has been interpreted in many different ways. To me it means that there is some hunger in our soul, some need for inspiration, without which we don’t lead as full a life.

A friend of mine, Enrique Montiel, often says, “We all contribute. Some of us contribute while we’re still alive; some of us don’t contribute until after we’re dead.” If you think about it, wouldn’t you really rather contribute now?

To contribute means to exercise your God-given talents and abilities to create a unique expression of you. Many of us do that in the context of business. To create a business takes both vision and planning. Vision, to see the future as it already exists, to know how the world will be after your vision is fulfilled. Planning – the blueprinting of your idea in as much specific detail as possible, to map out the vision that you want to fulfill.

Planning With A Heart begins by helping you to uncover the vision of your heart. It takes you through the process of fleshing out the details of your idea to make it a viable business in today’s economy. It is filled with exercises and examples to help you along the way. It is a process, not a destination.

We live in troubled times. Even though many analysts suggest that the recession is over, unemployment still remains at 9.7% nationwide. That means over fifteen million people are still without gainful employment. That’s a lot of folks, folks.

Did you ever stop to think what unemployment really means? What do people do when they’re unemployed, under-employed, or have just plain given up?

When the going gets tough, the tough get going!

What I mean is, most people are entrepreneurial to one degree or another. They pick up things on the side. They work “under the table.” They pick up odd jobs. They start online businesses. They become involved in network marketing. All of these are essentially entrepreneurial activities.

What I mean by entrepreneurship is “bringing together resources for productive activity.”

According to Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and trend spotter:

“Great entrepreneurs are not visionaries or risk takers — they just have better economic modeling skills than the rest of us.”

That means being able to see an opportunity, perceive a need in the marketplace, and predict, with a reasonable degree of certainty, how to capitalize on that opportunity and profit. [Read more]

So, why start a business today?

Small business is always a key element in economic recovery.

Small businesses create jobs, starting with your own. But it’s not just about starting a business because you can’t find a job.

Small businesses express the inherent creativity in the human soul, our desire to express ourselves, even leave a legacy.

Starting a business is fundamentally about expressing yourself fully and making a meaningful contribution to society.

It’s time to stop asking, “What’s in it for me?” and to be begin asking, “How can I help others?”

One of my favorite mentors Barry Spilchuk used to say, “Getting Is Very Easy.” GIVE!

This website is dedicated to entrepreneurs everywhere.

Remember the 1997 Apple Video “Think Different”?

The text says:
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers, the round pegs in the square holes. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

This could well be written of entrepreneurs.  It is a well-known fact that more new jobs are created by small businesses (translate entrepreneurs).  Entrepreneurs are the risk takers.

I’ve been saying for a long time that entrepreneurship is the survival skill of the twenty-first century.  What I mean is we can no longer rely on existing institutions to “save” us.  We must learn how to save ourselves, to become responsible for creating our own livelihood.

If you’ve found this blog, you’re probably already interested in starting your own business, or perhaps you already have.  If you’re at the beginning stages, someone has probably told you that you need a business plan.

A business plan is simply a specific, detailed description of what it is you want to create.

Perhaps you’ve heard that all things are created twice – once as an idea, and then again in physical form.  In order to get past the idea stage into physical reality, you must have a blueprint.

There are a lot of people out there who will tell you how to write a business plan.  Actually, I’m one.  Most people will give you an outline to start from, or some software where you fill in the blank.  They’ll ask you question after question and tell you how to get organized.

The problem I have with a lot of these well-meaning folks is that virtually no one thinks in a straight line.  No one has all the answers before they start.

What you’ll discover in Planning With A Heart is a process of “uncovery.”   What I mean is that as you delve deeper and deeper into your idea, your market, your competition, you’ll uncover the true path to follow.  You’ll find that your heart will lead you.