I don’t have a plan. You don’t need one either.
I read the wrong kind of magazines, you know the ones that tell you that only 39% of businesses turn a profit (its true). Out of these 39% I wonder how many wrote a business plan? I wonder how many of the other 60% wrote a business plan – I’m guessing a fair few. In fact I would go as far as to say that most of these failures had a business plan.
Business plans are for MBA’s to waste time on, because banks and investors seem to feel deprived and less important without one.
I’ve learnt how to write a business plan. If needed too, I could churn out an elegant swot analysis any day of the week. But it would be a useless waste of time.
I chuckle at the thought of a 3 year plan. Hell I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing past next week. You may think this attitude is naive and immature (both true of me), but if there is one thing I’ve learnt building (the profitable) Task.fm is that things change. Everything from the product, target market, pricing to the development strategy of Task.fm has changed.
I would like to think that my product and I are constantly evolving. How can this possibly happen if I was to create a plan at the beginning? Sure its ok to think about the future. But you don’t need to dedicate an entire novels worth of time to it. There are no rules on what you should plan out, no right way to do it.
So I say screw business plans. This week is what counts.
Every day I simply try and look at how I can improve the company by just 1%.
Photo by – orangeacid
6 Comments
Hey Anthony,
Just 1%? Not 10x or 100x better?
I’m not sure if you saw that on HN too.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as well – I think for all the talk there has been about agile, and I honestly am no expert on it, the one thing I really liked that I got out of it was to focus on the most important things, don’t sweat the details too much since they will often change, and constantly iterate and improve in small amounts rather than set a hard line of a big, rigid plan
I like having 3, 5 and 10 year plans, and I do typically achieve what I want to – but I think the needs of customers and business probably change more than my long term dreams
. Like you may not know what task.fm will be in a year, but you likely have an idea of where you want to be in your involvement with it =)
Or maybe not
I originally heard the 1% from Tony Hsieh. (I try and avoid HN these days as my posts usually cop a fair bit of trolling).
Why not 100%? I have no idea how to improve Task.fm that much. But 1%? I can think of hundreds of things I can do to improve it that much. Think about this Sid, in 1 year Task.fm will be over 300% better – pretty amazing! How many businesses can claim that.
I have long term goals – but I don’t have a business plan for Task.fm and no set plans for my involvement. For example, I’m currently designing the next gen interface for the product. I have no idea how this will be received (for example, when I started the design, I didn’t accommodate for the iPad and needed to change). If I was to create a 3 year or even 1 year plan outlining that I wanted to do X number of design changes it would already be outdated just a couple of months in. The plan would have been useless.
Thanks for your comment Sid!
You know, the point about the iPad really makes me think
I don’t think for web based software it makes too much sense to plan too far in advance, because these kinds of things are totally changing how people are interacting with mobile services anyway, so you definitely need to be able to adapt.
Mobile web browsing, Smart Phone apps, and really true ubiquitous connectivity is changing everything. GPS in every phone, front facing cameras, and who knows what’s coming next.
And that’s actually a good point about the 1% improvement if you actually can do it every day
It beats people trying to get a 50% improvement – but never getting started because their grand scheme is just too overwhelming to ever begin.
“Every day I simply try and look at how I can improve the company by just 1%. ”
I love how you stated that. I think a lot of people hold back because they don’t know what a business plan is or how to generate a stack of 100 sheets representing one… and then people have these long-term goals. I think they’re fine in general but better to work on things in the short term, i.e. 2-3 months.
What are you upto these days, Anthony?
Thanks Moon.
These days im traveling and working on a huge new release of Task.fm
I really hate business plans, they were the catalyst for me never starting anything. It’s so much better to start something, even if it’s never going to eventuate into anything, but at least it gets the ball rolling. I noticed from my silly ideas, I’ve jumped on other ideas, so I say “no way to business plans as well”.