Given the emphasis on writing business plans — the competitions, the guide books and internet sites, the classroom exercises — NEN decided to ask its VC Experts: how important do you regard business plans?
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We were surprised by the sharply different views.
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| Avnish Bajaj Matrix Partners |
No, I did not make a business plan for Baazee. In fact, we raised all our funding without a business plan.
I mean, that is a little unusual. We didn’t even have an investor presentation.But I think real entrepreneurs don’t waste time with writing a business plan. They spend time trying to create the business. And that is what we were doing.
We had started our technology product development; we had started signing up with people who would upload items on the site. We did not have a business plan. In fact one of my potential investors asked me, “When can we get a business plan?” I said, “When we have a business, then we will start planning. Right now let’s just build a business.”
That said, I don’t want to discount too much the importance of planning. Planning is important. Sometimes what happens with entrepreneurs—it used to happen with me—is that you end up being a little cynical about process and planning and all of that. But it is still very important. The question is: do you need to write a 100-page document? No.
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| Kanwal Singh Helion Ventures |
The business plan is very important for the entrepreneur to determine his or her own focus and ensure that he is on the right track. The depth of the plan will depend on the stage of the business. At the early stage the idea needs to be fleshed out in the context of the market opportunity, key differentiators, execution plan and financial projections. At later stages organization structure and detailed financial become more relevant in addition.
We generally do read a business plan after we have decided to dig deeper into an opportunity. Also, we don’t just read the plan—we prefer to spend more time with the entrepreneur to discuss various aspects of the business.
The entrepreneur should spend reasonable time on the plan to be comfortable that he or she has addressed all the key imperatives of the business. Very lengthy biz plans are neither required nor desired.
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written by Famous entrepreneurs, February 03, 2010
written by Pawan Bhandari, September 20, 2009
Most of the MSE i have come across suffer from the fact that they have not done business planning. This leads them to be opportunity driven and prevents them to be focused.
Conclusion - Business Planning is a must - Business plan - may be not..
written by M A J Jeyaseelan, September 17, 2009
On the other hand, it is difficult to develop a clearcut business plan for projects that are based on a large number of new ideas or have much bigger business potential. In such cases, future, while assured because of the inherent technological foundations, cannot be clearly spelled out. Such companies could grow along any of the multiple options available to them. These companies are more likely to follow an evolutionary growth pattern.
So the feasibility of business plans depends on the nature of projects that they venture in to. In fact, if we look around companies that have grown really big did not have any water tight business plans or initial venture funding. On the contrary, a lot many of the business plan oriented and venture funded organisattions have stayed small in spite of being successful
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