MBA Geek

Guy Kawasaki, a popular entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger used to contribute, till recently, to a blog for Sun Microsystems. In his final post he outlines five important lessons he learnt along the way. Here are his recommendations:

• Focus on cashflow: Profit is important, but if you cannot keep your business afloat, then it really doesn’t matter.
• Make a little progress every day: It’s extremely rare that something comes along and blows everything away. Practically all successful businesses were built one step at a time.
• Try stuff: The more things you try the more you learn and the better your chances of discovering/creating something outstanding.
• Ignore schmexperts: Schmexperts are the totally bad combination of schmucks who are experts–or experts who are schmucks.
• Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do: Whether it’s a customer or an employee if you’re not happy to do it, why would anyone else be?

Those are just the highlights, you can read the entire post here.

I came across some interesting information for anyone wanting to create a business plan. Whether it’s to take to your bank or just to firm up your ideas, it’s a step-by-step guide that can help you build up a meaningful plan. Here’s the information from BusinessLink:

A business plan is a written document that describes a business, its objectives, its strategies, the market it is in and its financial forecasts. It has many functions, from securing external funding to measuring success within your business.

This guide will show you how to prepare a high-quality plan using a number of easy-to-follow steps.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• The audience for your business plan
• What the plan should include
• The executive summary
• Your business, its products and services
• Your markets and competitors
• Marketing and sales
• Your team’s skills
• Your operations
• Financial forecasts
• Presenting your business plan
• Here’s how having an up-to-date business plan helped my business

Business plans are a great way to help you articulate what you are planning to do, so make the effort and put one together. If you can’t put it down on paper, chances are you won’t be able to explain it to your bank manager either.