Notes

Business Plan - Write it in 140 Characters
I stumbled on a very interesting article that lead me to an extremely interesting competition. Association of Business Analyst appeared in the brand new York Times on Friday 16 April with the next heading, "IS IT POSSIBLE TO Write a small business Plan With Fewer Than 140 Characters?" This article was written about a competition being run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) together with their MIT $100K annual business plan competition.

They call it the TWITCH (Twitter Pitch) contest. And this brings me to the topic because of this article, "Just how long when your business plan be?" Here are several of the advice you might find online:

It can vary from a 10 to a 100-page document;
It must be short enough never to bore your reader;
The shorter, the higher;
Shouldn't take up more than 25 pages;
Limit the program length to 15 pages;
15 to 25 pages may be the optimum length;
Basic plans are under ten pages;
Comprehensive plans are often 10-25 pages long;
Length ought to be 20 to 30 pages max;
Can be any length.
The general feeling is that shorter is way better. A few factors should dictate the ideal length of your business plan.

The nature of your business - The simpler the shorter, the more technical or "new" the longer.

Purpose of the plan - To improve millions may have to explain a lot more.

We personally believe that the shorter the higher provided that it achieves its objective. One expert said that "A business plan needs to be whatever length must excite the investor, prove that management truly understands the market, and detail the execution strategy."

The "empathy" test, once the business plan has been done, would be to put yourself in the shoes of the audience also to ask yourself if you would have done what you want them to do based on everything you see and read.

If the plan does not pass your "empathy" test there may be several known reasons for that and one of them may be incomplete information. This will require that you add more pages.

If one talks about the advertising industry the greatest challenge would be to sell something on the TV in a 30 seconds commercial. Is it possible to sell your plan in 30 seconds? We therefore go for the "Short is good, long is bad." approach. When we look at the various areas that needs to be covered in more detail we will endeavour to point just how long each section should ideally be.

In the next article we'll have a look at the idea of the "elevator speech" and how that can turn into a powerful tool running a business planning.

Happy planning. Ensure it is a challenging, exciting and creative experience.
Here's my website: http://apbmma.com/