Writing a Business Plan

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Writing a Business Plan

• College of Business Administration
• University of Central Florida

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Agenda

• Tips on writing
• Elements of a successful business plan
• Next week

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Tips on Writing
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Comments on Writing

• Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
  Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
  Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, 1669-1720
• Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready
  man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon
  1561-1626
• You write with ease to show your breeding, But
  easy writing 's curst hard reading. Richard
  Sheridan 1751-1816
• Writing is easy all you do is sit staring at a
  blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood
  form on your forehead. Gene Fowler

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Writing Good
Well

• Be succinct
• Be logical
• Be assertive
• Revise, revise, then revise
• Remember your purpose
• Let your passion show
• Tell a story!
• Be memorable

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Be Succinct

• Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare

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Be Logical

• I do not feel obliged to believe that the same
  God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and
  intellect has intended us to forgo their
  use. Galileo Galilei
• Do your ideas work together?
• Are there logical inconsistencies?
• Are your thoughts well organized?

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Be Assertive

• All you need in this life is ignorance and
  confidence, and then success is sure. Mark Twain
  (1835-1910)
• Write with confidence
• Use a confident voice even if you are not
• We feel that Unique Unicycles might achieve
  versus
• Unique Unicycles will achieve
• Avoid the use of qualifiers
• Rather, quite, hopeful, somewhat, might
• Support your assertions
• Use footnotes or endnotes for assertions that may
  be questioned

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Revise, Revise, then Revise

• I can write better than anybody who can write
  faster, and I can write faster than anybody who
  can write better. A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
  
• rewriting is the key to improved thinking. It
  demands a real open-mindedness and objectivity.
  It demands a willingness to cull verbiage so that
  ideas stand out clearly. And it demands a
  willingness to meet logical contradictions head
  on and trace them to the premises that have
  created them. In short, it forces a writer to
  get up his courage and expose his thinking to his
  own intelligence. Swift, Clear writing means
  clear thinking means, HBR, Jan-Feb 1973.

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Let your Passion Show
Passion

• Nothing great in the world has ever been
  accomplished without passion. G. W. F. Hegel
• As life is action and passion, it is required of
  a man that he should share the passion and action
  of his time, at peril of being judged not to have
  lived. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)

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Tell a Story!

• A story is worth a thousand pictures (unknown)
• A good story (and a good strategic plan) defines
  relationships, a sequence of events, cause and
  effect, and a priority among items and those
  elements are likely to be remembered as a complex
  whole. That likelihood, supported by a
  substantial amount of cognitive science, argues
  strongly for strategic planning through
  story-telling Shaw, Brown, Bromiley,
  Strategic Stories How 3M is Rewriting
  Business Planning, HBR May-Jun 1998.

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Be Memorable

• netLibrary will do for electronic publishing what
  Gutenberg did for printing and Amazon.com has
  done for book retailing. netLibrary business
  plan, 1998

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Be Professional

• Grammar and spell check
• Use an attractive layout
• Organize layout for easy comprehension
• Bullets and numbered lists
• Font changes
• Headings, subheadings,
• Tables, charts, graphs