Never Get a ”Real„ Job (10 page)

If you wouldn’t do it, then they won’t either
. No matter how wonderful you think a marketing tactic may be or how perfect you think a service offering sounds, if
you
wouldn’t buy into it,
they
won’t either. Scrap it. Bad assumptions lead to poor business decisions; grandiose concepts and complex ideas lead to failure. Remember, you are asking prospective customers who don’t care about you and know nothing about you to suddenly take an interest. Keep your assumptions grounded in your reality, and keep your action steps simple and practical.

Stop writing about selling and go sell something
. There’s no way to predict or prepare for every possible occurrence. Attempting to do so is a fool’s errand. The more time you spend theorizing and imagining, the less time you’ll actually spend executing and testing. And, yes, those lost minutes will add up fast. So just get it done; don’t overplan. Every day that you don’t make money is one more day you’ll be unable to support your life burn rate. Don’t set yourself up for failure with unachievable cut-off dates, but don’t be afraid to remove yourself from your comfort zone. Set realistic timelines, stick to launch dates, and keep moving your start-up forward.

You’re not a fortune-teller
. Until you know for certain what your business actually is, how can you begin to predict what it will become? Planning for tomorrow instead of today will only ensure that there won’t be a tomorrow. So forget the 10-year plan. Focus on the 10-day plan.

Successful entrepreneurs work to minimize and eliminate the need for unsubstantiated assumptions before setting long-term growth objectives. Get a few successful and unsuccessful yesterdays under your belt before you try to plan out any long-term tomorrows.

Financial projections are total nonsense
. Before you claim that your start-up will earn $200 million in five years, try to earn $1 in a single month. The only thing 100 percent true, valid, or substantiated about your projected revenues and profits will be that they are undoubtedly wrong.

Leave your hockey stick projections on the ice. Unless you want to set yourself up for failure and high blood pressure, don’t fool yourself into believing that you can create realistic milestones without spending a single day in the trenches. Instead, concentrate on minimizing expenses and mastering your selling techniques. Figure out how to generate income daily to support your life burn rate, not on some random annual figure. As your business develops, you might—and that’s a
big
might—need financial forecasts for investors and banks. Should you be lucky enough to get to court the option of getting investment funds or a loan, at least you’ll have real data on which to base your nonsensical projections.

THE ONE-PARAGRAPH START-UP PLAN

You probably think I’m a quack. There’s absolutely no way you can write everything there is to know about your brilliant start-up in one paragraph, right?

Guess what? You’re wrong. You don’t have much to say—because you haven’t proved a thing yet.

The
last
thing with which you should concern yourself now—during the earliest stages of your business—is writing lengthy plans or long-winded executive summaries. Perhaps someday there’ll be a time when elongated materials are needed; I’m sure there will be hundreds of out-of-work MBAs dying for the chance to write that plan to validate their education. But now is not that moment.

Now is the time to kill the traditional business plan in favor of a real, practical tool.

The One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan
is exactly what it sounds like: Your entire business concept boiled down into an easily digestible short, sweet, and to-the-point format. Unlike traditional business-planning methodologies that teach you to brainstorm-write-brainstorm-write-revise-revise-execute, the goal of the one-paragraph plan is to have you brainstorm-write-execute-revise-execute. There are fundamental differences between these two approaches. The traditional route would have you finalize your entire strategy based on a hypothesis without bothering to test or validate it. The One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan is designed to test your hypothesis through daily experimentation. It also serves as a fluid action strategy that grows along with your start-up.

It took me three days to research, brainstorm, and write my first One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan. On the fourth day, I was up and running. Was it the perfect plan? Not by a long shot. But it got me started in no time, and set me on a course to generate revenue immediately.

Eight questions to answer when crafting your first draft
. Without breaking the previously outlined rules, answer each of the following eight questions completely and honestly—and in no more than one or two sentences. Put real thought into your answers, and feel confident that you can support and substantiate your core beliefs with relevant arguments.

Obviously, your first draft is not the final plan. Think of it as an outline for the beginning of your journey. As an example, check out my first One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan for my business, Sizzle It!, a specialized sizzle reel video production company.

Break your start-up plan into Guess and Checklists
. Now it’s time to turn your paragraph into a functional, action-based plan that you can revise regularly. A Guess and Checklist is a series of action steps designed to get your company up, running, and executing immediately. The goal of the exercise is to field-test each of your assumptions and determine whether they are true, false, or incomplete. As you learn lessons from your successes, failures, and nonstarters along your journey, you can then modify your plan to make it a formula for success.

Begin by breaking down each sentence in your plan into five steps you can execute immediately—actionable statements you can convert into reality. List each action step chronologically in a checklist format; it’s no different than a to-do list or a series of task reminders in your mobile phone or computer. Include applicable deadlines and denote any related expenses. In Chapter 8 on shoestrapping, I will teach you how to minimize start-up expenses and work with a shoestring budget. But for now, just determine what you think the expense will be and write it down. Take a look at how I broke down one of the sentences in my start-up plan into five action steps (including the deadlines I set for completing each item):

Sentence:
Sizzle It!’s primary clients are boutique public relations firms
.

Make sure that all of your action steps will move your business forward in some way. Even still, I promise you that there will be many improvements to come.

Do your action steps yield fruit?
Once you compose the first drafts of your Guess and Checklists for each sentence in your One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan, it’s time to get to work. Execute each action step as completely as possible. Keep your Guess and Checklists with you at all times—either on a mobile device or a printout—and jot down quick notes whenever you learn something new.

Once each task is completed, evaluate your findings with these six questions:

In the case of Sizzle It!, executing my various action steps quickly opened my eyes to many things I couldn’t have known prior to execution. For example, cold-calling PR professionals proved worthless; however, my search engine optimization tactics were raking in the dough. Though I managed to find a good amount of contact names at PR firms, I soon realized that the only useful ones were those of brand managers and senior account executives. Our 50 percent discount for first-time clients was a total flop. My research led me to find hundreds of independent PR specialists—a whole new grouping of prospective clients that I wasn’t aware of previously. These discoveries—as well as several others—allowed me to fine-tune and strengthen every aspect of my start-up. By doing so, my results improved week after week.

True, false, or incomplete?
Based on the information you gathered while executing your Guess and Checklist, determine if your original hypothesis is true, false, or incomplete. In the case of the Sizzle It! example, my original thesis was both false and incomplete. Not only did I miss an entire client category, I also failed to research the right decision makers. Sometimes you’ll validate your hypothesis; in other cases, you’ll see that you were totally off base. Whatever the outcome, identify and plug the holes in your false or incomplete assertions.

Create your success formulas
. Scrap what failed and improve on minor successes to bolster home runs. Adjust your plan to account for ways in which you can begin to transform each of your flawed assertions into true and complete statements. Use your findings to create new, more educated insights and craft more in-depth, specific checklists. Repeat this process regularly until your hypotheses turn into facts.

Two months of actively guessing and checking this particular Sizzle It! hypothesis allowed me to produce a proven marketing, sales, and referral formula that our sales team still uses today. Here is my revised One-Paragraph Start-Up Plan sentence and its corresponding Guess and Checklist with the five amended action steps.

Sentence:
Sizzle It!’s primary clients are independent PR specialists and brand managers and senior account executives at boutique and midsize public relations firms
.