Today's Guest

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, book author, blogger, and angel investor. Tim is an advocate for small businesses and a proponent for creating a lean business plan to help businesses run better. He also shares the key attributes a business plan should have and how every business can benefit from having one. Plus learn about a simple tool you can use to create and manage your lean business plan.

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Episode Summary

Today I do a fair bit of writing, speaking, or blogging but I’m also still the chairman of the company I founded. I have a great management team that runs the day-to-day operations of the business which allows me to focus on the parts of the business I enjoy. When I launched Palo Alto Software, many years ago, it was originally a consulting business that provided business planning services for local computer dealers. 

In the old days, business plans were more elaborate and rarely changed once they were created. Fast-forward to today and most successful businesses use a lean business plan that is reviewed and revised continuously. The misconception about business plans is that they aren’t useful in guiding your business today, which would be true if you created your business plan based on the decades-old model. However, the lean business plan I mentioned is something you can use daily to help run your business better. 

The key attributes to a lean business plan include a list of assumptions, a handful of major milestones, key metrics, and a few bullet points that outline your strategy and tactics. As entrepreneurs, we often get distracted by new ideas or solving a customer's problems. However, what I’ve learned is there is a principle of displacement at work here, solving for one problem rules out your ability to solve for another. That is where the business plan helps to keep you on track to solve the problems that align with your strategy. A great business plan is like exercise, it’s the workouts that get you the results, not the plan itself. 

Will your business be doomed to fail if you don’t have a business plan? No, you can find some level of success without a plan. However, every business will benefit and grow even more when they have a lean business plan that they use to help run their business. The business planning software we created is a web app that anyone can use and it's only $19.95 a month or less if you pay annually. So it doesn’t require a large investment to have a lean business plan but it will help you run your business better. 

Resources Shared

• Palo Alto Software
• Lean Business Planning by Tim Berry
• Bplans 
  

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