Business Plan Development

            In month eleven, our course was Business Plan Development.  This course was designed to finalize the business plans we started out with when we began the Entertainment Business Masters program.  Our Leadership Portfolio assignment was to research two business plan “gurus” if you will.  We would then use this research to decide if we could use any of their advice in our own business plans or not.  Naturally, since this was the first business plan I had ever written, there was a lot of very useful information out there for me.  I chose to do my assignment on two notable business plan gurus who were actually coming from very different schools of thought, which made the assignment much more interesting.  Guy Kawasaki is from the new school of thought.  He believes that if you can get your message across effectively in a fifteen to twenty page business plan, there’s no reason to add extra fluff for the sake of filling a specified page count.  William A. Cohen, Ph. D is certainly from the old school background.  He believes that business plans should be between fifty to one hundred pages long and stated that he would never go below thirty pages because you can’t possibly get an effective message across in less.  This comparison is just one of the many interesting contrasting views from these two men who are both very successful in what they do.

            What I was able to take from this assignment is that there can be many approaches to the same problem.  I’m sure that both Guy Kawasaki and William A. Cohen, Ph. D are experts in their methodologies for creating business plans.  However, they probably would be unwilling to accept the other’s theory because they have already found success with their own approach and there’s no reason to fix something that isn’t broken.  I was very lucky to find two successful business plan gurus with such contrasting views, because I was able to see the whole picture and clearly understand that there is no right or wrong way to write a business plan.  With this information, I was then able to pick and choose which aspects of both theories I felt would be most effective for my business plan.  I used Guy Kawasaki’s “less is more” approach with page numbers and the “let the facts speak for themselves” approach of William A. Cohen, Ph. D to make sure I was being realistic in my assumptions and not only pitching the best case scenario to investors.   

William A. Cohen Ph. D