How to Avoid “Too Much Stuff” Syndrome

One of the interesting benefits of my job helping entrepreneurs is that lots of old friends get in touch with me.

That may sound strange to you, but what I mean is that people that I knew from “past” lives, like high school, college, old jobs, etc. constantly contact me.

Lots of them hear about what I do from mutual friends, and the next thing I know, I’m getting emails, phone calls, LinkedIn requests, Facebook messages and so on.

The contact me because they want to become successful entrepreneurs.

In fact, according to The Kauffman Institute, 500,000 new companies are conceived each month in the US alone.

It turns out, people that I have known in past lives, are overly represented in this group : )

But that’s a good thing. It’s great to reconnect, and I love helping entrepreneurs succeed.

The first questions most of these entrepreneurs asks me is often about developing their business plan.

Which is a good thing. Since the word has finally gotten around that developing your business plan is the first and most important thing that an entrepreneur must do.

But, as I learned, while developing their business plans is often the first thing they START, it often goes unfinished.

And from conversation after conversation, I’ve found this is because most people simply don’t know what to include in their business plan.

As a result, it’s really hard to put pen to paper.

It’s like telling an artist to paint a picture when they haven’t the foggiest idea what to paint.

Or worse yet, when they have multiple ideas in their head and try to get them all in the one painting.

And that is the key issue that plagues entrepreneurs when developing their plans — trying to include too much information…trying to cram every conceivable aspect of their business, and every idea into their plan.

Rather, your business plan does NOT have to answer every question.

In fact, there are 2 questions that trump the rest. These questions are as follows:

1. Why is there a need for your business?

Mainly, you need to explain why customers need what you will be offering them. At the end of the day, it’s your customers that will dictate your success.

2. Why will you succeed?

We all know that business ideas are a dime a dozen. What is it about your idea, about you as an entrepreneur, about your marketing plans, etc., that will enable you to succeed while other ventures fail.

At the end of the day, your business plan MUST answer these two questions clearly.

Sure, there are lots of other key points you need to make, but these two trump the rest.

One of the reasons I put together Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template was to guide entrepreneurs through creating their business plans quickly and easily.

One of the keys to its success is that it guides you through only the questions that matter, that you MUST answer in your plan.

And it avoids all the superfluous information that doesn’t really matter (and which dramatically slows down the creation of your plan).

To download your copy of Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template, and finish your business plan in hours, and not months (or never), click here.