This isn’t mine, but I wish it were because it’s done very well and I agree with all of it. These are the seven deadly sins of business plans, from Stephen Fleming on Academic VC:
- Insist on a nondisclosure agreement upfront.
- Focus on the technology—not the market, the competition and the customers.
- Practice top-down sales forecasting.
- Use four significant digits everywhere.
- Position investors as necessary-but-unpleasant “mushrooms.” (He adds: Keep them in the dark and feed them plenty of… um, manure).
- Fill your plan with typos, errors, “chartjunk,” 3D graphs and repetition.
- Expect to be acquired by Cisco or Google.
Don’t settle for my quick summary, read the source, which is Academic VC: “Raising Capital: Part 09.” It’s right on point, on target and well worth reading. Fleming obviously knows this area very well.
And when you read it, you’ll notice that this is part 9 of an 11-part (so far) series on raising capital. It may be the best of the series, but not necessarily; there are some other very good pieces.
If you’re looking to raise capital, read every word in the series.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under startup advice, venture capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “7 Deadly Sins of Business Plans”
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April 11th, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] 7 deadly sins of business plans is a post on another very useful blog called, Up and Running. [...]
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:25 am
“Expect to be acquired by Cisco or Google”
Now that is funny. If some companies actually believe this/ have this mindset, they need to get real. Yes, it would be great to have that happen, but if that is your goal, the business model is already damaged.
If you expect nothing, then you can never be disappointed. Go out and earn it.
~the GURU
http://smallbizguru.blogspot.com