"Failing to plan is like planning to fail"

Our next monthly mailer will encourage the use of business plans and provide a few basic how to tips. Here's the first few paragraphs of an article from Entrepeneur Magazine and here's a link if you'd like to see more of the article.

9 Ways to Use Your Business Plan

It's not just for financing--your business plan can help you spot future success or failure, attract suppliers and employees, and more.

By David H. Bangs Jr. | September 27, 2005


Article Contents
9 Ways to Use Your Business Plan
Managing With Your Plan
Do the Numbers Add Up?
Plan for the Possibility of Failure

Editor's note: This article was excerpted fromBusiness Plans Made Easy, a guide to creating a high-impact business plan.

The process of writing a business plan helps you take a thorough, careful and comprehensive look at the most important facets of your business, including the contexts in which it operates. Just raising questions can sometimes lead to a solution, or at least ensure that if conditions change you won't be forced to make decisions hastily. The ongoing "what if this or that happens?" inherent in the planning process keeps you alert. In other words, the planning process itself makes you a far more capable manager than you would be without it. For many, this is a more valuable result than securing funding.

In many ways, writing a business plan is an end in itself. The process will teach you a lot about your business that you are unlikely to learn by any other process. You'll spot future trouble areas, identify opportunities, and help your organization run smoothly, simply through the act of writing a plan.