Imagine...
Imagine you wake up in the morning and find out that your breakfast cereal is running out, so you need to go out and buy your breakfast outside. It is like you have 15 minutes to have your breakfast; otherwise, it is too late for you to come to the office. So you quickly go to a restaurant 3 blocks away from your home to eat your favorite food, but when you arrive, the restaurant is closed for the next 3 days due to renovation, so you just lose your precious 10 minutes. Finally, you decide to buy fast food at another restaurant that is located precisely across from your house and eat it in your car. You cannot focus while driving while eating, so you drop your drink in your pants by accident. When you arrive in the office, you forget to bring something for the meeting. You have two options: either run and prepare the material quickly or go home and take it, but it will take a long time to come back. You choose to be honest, telling your boss the truth, and get more time to go back to your home, taking the consequence that your boss will definitely want to talk to you in private after the meeting. After the meeting is delayed, you finally come back with your material and present it, but unfortunately, your work is not in line with the assignment given before.
Now for the second scenario, let's imagine you wake up in the morning with an alarm set to wake you up 1 hour before your work starts. You have a lot of cereal stock for your breakfast, but you really want to eat something else for now. You already have a note that your favorite restaurant is closed for 3 days due to renovation; therefore, you will just walk to buy fast food across from your house. You eat there while having a conversation with your neighbor. After that, you drive to your office and then download the material from Dropbox because you already uploaded it one day before. On the same day, you also sent the material to your boss and team to confirm its suitability before the meeting. You present the right material that your boss wants on time and finally get a compliment.
Can we see the big difference between a lucky and an unlucky life scenario? Sad and happy endings---this loser and winner are not just naturally different. There is one factor why a loser can be a winner and vice versa, and that is planning. People always ask how I can succeed in running my business, but it does not happen by chance. An anonymous person said that a goal without a plan is just a wish. Now I can say that knowing what you will do has been 50% of your success; another 50% will depend on the execution, which means other factors outside of the plan. Setting up a business will require a budget, and whoever spends the budget will definitely need to know how their money is going to be spent, what the risk is, what they get if it works out, and what we will do if it does not work out.
That is the benefit of a business plan.
It is difficult to ensure that your business will be successful without a proper business plan. A business plan, by definition, can be made in our heads, but a lot of information and analysis will need to be written down. Therefore, it is usually in the form of a written document and includes all management functions inside the organization, such as finance, operations, marketing, and human resources, from macro to micro analysis, strategic and tactical. Without goals and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination, says Fitzhugh Dodson. This is very true, and investors will see our professionalism in our business plan proposal. As people say, first impressions are important; therefore, many companies even need external consultants to make business plans because of their expertise, experience, and sometimes investor networks.
Then how do you have a good business plan proposal?
Investors always see three things from us. The first is an idea; it is essential because this is a product that we want to sell, and that's what makes us money. Therefore, brilliant ideas are always demanded, and innovation is pushed because, without innovation, we must compete with a sea of competitors, and we can never make more money because they already run their businesses before us. We must make a difference! The second is our team; who is the guy? Is he the guy? Therefore, in business planning, don't be shy about mentioning all our achievements and strengths and building personal branding from now on. Make sure you and your team are solid and complement each other. However, not all innovation works; the big question is: why? This is related to the third thing that investors want to see from our business plan, which is the market. It does not matter if we have the weirdest innovation in the world if people do not need it. Therefore, market research should be conducted before the innovation is created, not after. This is because R&D needs budget, and always remember that inventing a business idea must come from what the market wants and needs, not what we can do. These three things are essential elements of a successful business plan.
Contributor: Donny Susilo, MBA
International Business Plan Consultant, founder of Donny and Partners
