182 | How to Write a business Plan
Introduction If you have followed all the steps in this book, you have completed a thorough plan for your business. You should feel good about completing a hard, demanding task. It’s also important to remember that completing your plan, finding the money you need, and opening or expanding your business are just the first three steps in your journey. Many small business books take fairly extreme approaches. Two common ones can be summarized as follows: 1. Here comes another lamb to the slaughter —hopefully this book can frighten him out of his dumb idea. 2. Anybody can find fame and fortune in a small business; just read this book and get a big strongbox in which to store your surplus gold. I hope to steer a middle course by offering you both encouragement and caution. In my view, small business is one of the last great frontiers of both individualism and opportunity, but like the prairies of yesteryear, there are more than a few rattlesnakes among the poppies. This chapter contains some highly personal recollections and observations on pitfalls and diversions you may encounter on your way to business success.
Watch Out for Problem Areas As a small business owner, you’ll have to work hard to meet your goals. It takes a lot of determination and drive to make things happen. As a result, you may focus so
completely on the immediate goals at hand that you lose sight of the larger picture. Recognizing that you don’t know every thing is a good first step toward business success. If you’re unsure of yourself in any particular area, please take advantage of the advice and help that is there for the asking. That way, you’re less likely to be sabotaged by something you didn’t know—and didn’t know you didn’t know.
It’s Lonely at the Top As a business owner, you often make decisions in a vacuum. Most of the time you won’t have immediate peers who understand your business and can also offer you good, dispassionate advice. Probably you have to go it alone, and that can be pretty tough. You and your business become targets for an army of job-seekers, government regulators, charities, competitors, consultants, salespeople, insurance brokers, and so forth. All these people have their own goals and objectives, which may or may not coincide with yours. As a matter of survival, you must become skeptical about what people claim they can do for you or your business. This isn’t necessarily either bad or good, it’s just the way things are. You are the only one who can decide what is good for your business. You also have to manage relations with your three primary sources of business success: customers, suppliers, and employees. Again, each person in these groups has her own set of goals and objectives. Your job is to reconcile all those