Your Imagine Cup Business Plan

The Art of Execution

Tim Berry — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:54:45 +0000

I noticed this very plan-as-you-go post by Guy Kawasaki on the American Express Open Forum. What I like about it, particularly, is where Guy says "set goals" and then lists these four desirable qualities of goals:

Measurable. If a goal isn’t measurable, its unlikely you’ll achieve it. For a startup, quantifiable goals are things like shipping deadlines, downloads, and sales volume. The old line What gets measured gets done is true. This also has ramifications for the number of goals, because you cant (and shouldn’t) measure everything. Three to five goals measured on a weekly basis are plenty.

Achievable. Take your conservative forecasts for these goals and multiply them by 10 percent; then use that as your goal. For example, if you think youll easily sell a million units in the first year, set your goal at 100,000 units. There is nothing more demoralizing than setting a conservative goal and falling short; instead take 10 percent of your forecast, make this your goal, and blow it away. You might think that such a practice will lead to underachieving organizations, because they aren’t being challenged. yeah, well, check back with me after you don’t sell a million widgets.

Relevant. A good goal is relevant. If you’re a software company, its the number of downloads of your demo version. Its not your ranking in Alexa, so telling the company to focus on getting into the top 50,000 sites in the world in terms of traffic is not nearly as relevant as 10,000 downloads per month.

Rathole resistant. A goal can be measurable, achievable, and relevant and still send you down a rathole. Lets say you’ve created a content Web site. Your measurable, achievable, and relevant goal is to sign up 100,000 registered users in the first ninety days. So far, so good. But what if you focus on this body count without regard to the stickiness of the site? So now you’ve gotten 100,000 people to register, but they visit once and never return. That’s a rathole. Ensure that your goal encompasses all the factors that will make your organization viable.

What I like about this, as you might guess, is that it’s a very close match to what I’m saying here, in this site, and in the book itself. Goals are about business, getting things done, and they do you know good unless you follow up on results and manage accordingly.

OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Art of Execution

Submitting the Starter Plan

Tim Berry — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:00:38 +0000

Your starter plan is supposed to be a simple summary, covering just a few important points. It should be formatted as a single document with 12-point font for the main text (some of your judges will be old enough to need reading glasses) and clear headers.

Divide it into the headings suggested in the outline. Put the headings in bold, set apart by paragraph spacing, and make them slightly larger than the body text.

Use illustrations well — sparingly, focused on enhancing your text — or not at all.

Edit before you submit. Use the spell checker of course, but remember that spell checkers don’t catch errors like confusing then with than or their with there, so even after the spell checker you still want to read it well. If you possibly can, have somebody else read it and check it before you submit. Try to find somebody who didn’t draft the document and knows basic rules of English grammar and spelling, who will do you the favor.

Wrap the starter plan as either an Adobe Acrobat PDF electronic document or a Microsoft Word *.doc or *.docx file ito a zip file that also includes the two other documents required, the software requirements document and the development schedule.

Starter Plan Outline

Tim Berry — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:38:10 +0000

Your starter plan is a simple summary of the business background of your qualifying round submission. It is one of three documents you need to submit before the January 15 deadline. The other two are the design requirements document and the development schedule, which are separate documents. Templates for those documents are available at www.microsoft4me.com/imaginecup.

The goal is to include simple descriptions of key points so that the judges can understand your business and make an informed decision. This is just your starter plan for the qualifying round.

Of course you’re probably working on the larger plan, but keep your submission short .

Concretely, my suggestion, no more than one page each on each of the following topics:

Chapter	Title	Description
1.	Executive Summary	Write this part last. Like all summaries, it contains the most important points.
2.	The Problem	What problem does your project solve? Think of needs and wants. The driver of every good business is the underlying need or want that sparks the interest. For more on this, read needs and wants in the Heart of the Plan section.Make sure you address the theme of the competition, which this year is ““Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” The United Nations has identified some of the hardest challenges in the world today in its Millennium Goals. Explain how you address one or more of these eight goals. Keep it short. This is a summary.
3.	Your Solution	Describe your solution. Explain how it meets the competition requirements. There is a list of technical requirements for the SDI division here (read down from the top). This is a summary, for the starter round, no more than a few paragraphs.
4.	The Market	This isn’t about formal market research yet, or the supporting information you’ll want to include in a semi-finals business plan. For this starter plan you want to establish the existence of the underlying market, and the scope. Describe your ideal target, set a scope for that target in understandable terms. This is mainly about establishing the existence of a significant target market, as part of the qualifying round. Later, you’ll be using this to make sure that you understand the decisions you make, understand the strategy, understand the heart of your plan. You’ll be going into detail later for the semi-finals business plan. For more on this idea, refer to the market in the Heart of the Plan section.
5.	Secret Sauce	Think about how your business will be different, and how your solution is uniquely suited to the target market. You don’t have to call this secret sauce, necessarily. It’s really about positioning vs. competition. You could call it the differentiators, or competitive edge. For more on this, there’s an article on this site on the Secret Sauce.
6.	Business Model	Explain how your business makes money. Ideally you can keep this simple: unit sales, memberships, subscriptions, advertising, or whatever. Think of the sales forecast to come soon: what are the revenue lines? What are the costs and expenses, and can you assume costs and expenses are less than revenues? For on this, there’s an article here about the business model.
7.	The Team	Of course this is where you introduce the team. Beyond the mere introduction of team members, explain how your team has what it will take to deliver the solution. How are you different, and better, and others who might be addressing the same underlying need? This is where you start to develop your team identity.

Filter Ideas from Opportunities

Tim Berry — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:23:45 +0000

Business ideas are interesting, exciting stuff to build a business by, but they are worth nothing (in general) until somebody builds a company around them.

Opportunities are the best of the ideas. An idea is just that. An opportunity is an idea you can implement. You have the resources, and know-how to do it. There is a market. You can make money on it, and the investment will be worth it.

Good business planning filters the opportunities from the ideas. Apply the planning process to the idea to make it an opportunity. Determine the market strength, what exactly is needed, how long it will take, how much money it will take, what people are required. Lay it out into steps.

Not all ideas can survive the rigor of planning. Some fall by the wayside, ending up as interesting ideas that aren’t really opportunities.

Some of the factors that count:

Risk vs. return. Is what it takes to pursue this idea worth the likely return? This is not scientific. It depends a lot on your business’ attitude about risk, and what other opportunities are available.
Realism. How realistic are the forecasts? Give them a good look. Are you pushing the forecast to make things work.
Resources. What will really be required? Think of people, know-how, skills, compensation, implied risk (paying people to build this company up). What are the start-up costs, including expenses required and assets required?
Market potential. The heart of your sales forecast is the market potential. How much do people want or need the business offering?
Business potential. How much money can the business make? How will this impact the business? How big is this opportunity, overall?

Starter Plan and Business Plan Pro

Tim Berry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:39:10 +0000

After you’ve installed Business Plan Pro, click here to download the Imagine Cup Blank Starter Plan, and save it onto your hard disk using a name and location you can easily remember.
After downloading, find the file icon on your hard disk (wherever you saved it) and double-click it to launch Business Plan Pro.
Business Plan Pro should launch showing a welcome screen with an outline view on the right. Notice that you’re not doing anything with the rest of the plan for the qualifying round, just covering the key points in the summary (Important: note that you’re just doing the simple topics showing as the starter plan in the the illustration below, not any of the rest of the business plan; seven points, as little as a paragraph for each one.)
Click on the “Executive Summary” topic in the outline to show that specific topic. Exact clicking from there isn’t important, so the sequence doesn’t matter, just use the toolbar or click on the topics in the outline to show the starter plan outline. Click on any topic in the outline to view the instructions and write your text into the topic.
The illustration here shows one way that the screen might look:

Quickly save your plan file under another name, in a directory of your choosing, where you’ll know where to get it later.
The screen might not show exactly as it does in this illustration, and it doesn’t have to. Details depend on your options. Just make sure you find the Outline view and the starter plan topics within it, and then you’re ready to go. For each of the seven topics suggested for the starter plan, you have topic instructions on top, and word processing in the action window below the instructions. Click on any of the topics in the Outline view on the right to go from topic to topic.
By the way, just so you know, the Task item in the Toolbar and the “next” and “previous” arrows below the action window take you out of the starter plan and into the main plan, which you won’t do yet. That’s because the starter plan is customized, specific to your Imagine Cup submission, and not part of the generic business plan. So try to navigate using the Outline view only, rather than the task list or next and previous arrows.
Now you’re on your way.
Click here for details on how to create the output files you need.

Output the Starter Plan from Business Plan Pro

Tim Berry — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:07:35 +0000

There’s a couple of simple ways to optimize your starter plan submission for Imagine Cup using the starter plan you’ve built in Business Plan Pro.

Use the starter plan file that has the starter plan outline built in, as explained here.
Use the Export command in the File menu as shown here:
Choose to create a file in either word *.doc file format or Adobe Acrobat *.PDF file format, as shown here:
Check the Export only selected items option to select just the Starter Plan items, as shown here:
And you will end up with a file, saved on your disk in the directory you choose with the filename you choose, that you can submit to Imagine Cup 2009 as a starter plan for the starter plan portion of your qualifying round submission.

Semi-Finals Plan

Tim Berry — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:34:59 +0000

When you pass through the qualifying round and get into the semi-finals round your submission for the semi-finals will include a business plan. It’s going to look and feel a lot like the classic formal business plan. It will cover what the starter plan covers, plus more depth on strategy, market, and business prospects.

Sequence of Components in the semi-finals business Plan	What It Is and Where to Read More About It.
1.0 Executive Summary	Keep it short. Summarize the highlights. Some people will read this and nothing else, so make sure you hit the main points — what’s new, what’s different, how it addresses the millennium goals, and so on. Don’t forget strategy. You might want to read through the discussion on missions and mantras, objectives, and keys to success. These are in this site as the Heart of the Plan. You probably write this last. And keep it short.
2.0 Your Company	Tell your story. How did you start, where, when, and how far along are you. Include legal ownership details.
3.0 Your Technology	The Imagine Cup competition is about technology to change the world for the better, so of course the technology elements are very important. Make sure you cover all the information required. Refer back to the original Imagine Cup Software Design guidelines, and the semi-finals round judging criteria.
4.0 Your Market 4.1 Market Segmentation 4.2 Target Market Segment Strategy 4.2.1 Market Needs 4.2.2 Market Trends 4.2.3 Market Growth 4.3 Industry Analysis 4.3.1 Industry Participants 4.3.2 Distribution Patterns 4.3.3 Competition and Buying Patterns 4.3.4 Main Competitors	Don’t take the outline here too entirely literally. It’s a suggestion, not a requirement. What you do need for sure is your sense of who your target customer is, and what you’re selling them, why they buy, and what business you’re in, as discussed in The Heart of the Plan. The market validation elements, including market research, basic numbers, and target market segmentation, are described in Supporting Information. This is not a market research competition. Do what you can to validate your market. Ultimately, the goal in this section is to address the market elements of the judging criteria. Changing the world doesn’t happen without reaching a significant target market.
5.0 Your Business Strategy 5.1 Identity 5.2 Strategic Focus 5.3 Competitive Edge 5.4 Projected Sales	Your strategy is discussed in The Heart of the Plan. The Sales Forecast is part of the, Flesh and Bones.
6.0 Your Team 6.1 Organizational Structure 6.2 Management Team 6.3 Management Team Gaps 6.4 Personnel Plan	Most of this is discussion of an introduction of your 2009 Imagine Cup team. Beyond that, judges will want to know how you see your company management, and a projection of proposed personnel spending in detail.
7.0 Financial Plan 7.1 Important Assumptions 7.2 Startup costs 7.3 Startup funding 7.6 Projected Profit & Loss 7.7 Projected Cash Flow 7.8 Long-term Plan	Judges do expect some basic business projections as a key part of any business plan. My recommendation is that you use the Business Plan Pro software and fill out the tables suggested, including the Sales Forecast, Personnel Plan, Profit and Loss (Which pulls information you’ve done from sales and personnel, so you’ll fill in expenses and the rest is automatic), Startup costs, Startup funding, and Cash Flow. If you take the tables one by one, fill in the assumptions, this isn’t hard to do.

Great Marketing Lists and Resources

Tim Berry — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:36:52 +0000

Here’s a great resource for you, or a collection of resources, as you think through the marketing, identity, and focus factors that make up the heart of your plan.

It’s almost too big, but at least it’s divided into subsections, and it’s a great list. Thanks to Spotlight ID for this list of 250 top blog posts on advertising, marketing, media, and PR.

I got the tip on that list from Seth Godin’s blog post of last week, which started with that list, and then highlighted his top 20 favorites from his blog. He’s a clear winner in the top 250, and for good reason. You’ll find him referenced frequently in the plan-as-you-go approach (this site, and the book).

Add Duct Tape Marketing to that list (because I’ve referenced that in this site and the book too) and you have a lot of really good food for thought about your core marketing strategy.

The Secret Sauce

Tim Berry — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:57:25 +0000

I talk about the secret sauce a lot, in my seminars and in my class, at the office. It’s definitively another view of the same reality I’m calling the heart of the plan. So that’s one thing to add for the next edition.

The secret sauce is the magic, also called (boring) differentiators, and sometimes competitive edge; Guy Kawasaki calls it “underlying magic” and recommends that it be one of the 10 (or so) slides is a pitch presentation. You can google it and see how people are writing about it, using it to define what’s new or different about some businesses. (You’ll also see some items on McDonalds’ secret sauce for the big mac, and some cooking stuff, but you’ll see what I mean).

This idea of the secret sauce is a good way to explain how you’re different from your competitors. What sets you apart?

Examples? Apple Computer’s secret sauce is design, for example. Michelin tires’ branding tries (in my opinion) to emulate Volve, the safety angle. My favorite restaurant in Eugene, Poppi’s Anatolia, has an extremely spicy version of vindaloo chicken. Whole Foods’ secret sauce is its having established the brand for healthy and organic foods. In cars, just look at the mini-cooper or the Honda Element or the Toyota Prius and you see secret sauce immediately.

Plan as you Go and Business Plan Pro

Tim Berry — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:37:52 +0000

This is a flash video, set for 800×600 dimensions, which will require that you install Flash on your system if you don’t already have it. just click this link … Planning as you go with Business Plan Pro … it should open up a new window with a media player showing, and an obvious arrow to click.

The source file was set up at 800 x 600 resolution, so you might want to resize the window to show the resolution at its best. If the window you use to watch this is too big, then it looks fuzzy.

And here, below, is a flash player version of the same thing (I hope) …

If this doesn’t work for you, it might be a matter of Internet band width or compatibility with flash. I’d like to know, so leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.