FORBES Business Development Council Featuring Mariya George, President cleareye.ai, Oct. 26, 2020 —
Research has shown that the businesses that survive the longest are those that have a solid business plan. New entrepreneurs hear this information, but it gets lost in a sea of contradicting tips and tricks. The result is that these entrepreneurs either fail to create a thorough business plan or try to make it do too much.
Many things set good business plans apart from bad ones. The one overarching idea is that the business plan should describe what the business does, how it does it and how it can keep on doing it at a larger scale. Below, 11 members of Forbes Business Development Council delve into the most common mistakes that new entrepreneurs fall prey to when developing their business plan and offer advice on what they should be doing instead.
Spending Too Much Time On Financial Planning
New entrepreneurs spend too much time on financial planning versus actual customer discovery. They get caught up in the total addressable market without focusing on how to get there. This results in taking wrong bets based on direction from the initial few customers versus the larger ecosystem. These assumptions then drive the business plan, and if the assumptions are not tracked explicitly, it results in a “faulty” business plan. – Mariya George, cleareye.ai
