World champion boxer Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face."
Starting a business is like a prizefight, and the demand for a written plan as the de facto document in startup investment has always perplexed me.
Sure, you can lay out a proposed path to success, but the road will be full of surprise punches. More important than attempting to forecast is knowing how to duck and weave.
For exactly that reason, many top investors and incubators are shifting their views on written business plans. They would rather see founders building their concepts than spending time writing down ideas. Here's why I believe this dynamic is taking hold, and why business plans may be on the way out.
- Business plans are snapshots in time. Written plans are static, but startups are dynamic. A good drill for startups can be to save the plans that were created at various stages and review how they have changed--and, most important, how reality differed from what was on paper. Sophisticated investors will pay more attention to where a business has been than to its projections for the future. ... Read more from Entrepreneur