Start Business

I periodically get questions from readers of this blog about business plans. I was pondering the best way to work through a “business plan series” (similar to the Term Sheet series and Letter of Intent series) when Dave Jilk - my partner in Feld Technologies (my first company) - dropped a few documents on my desk, including the original Feld Technologies business plan. A scanner, Adobe Acrobat PDF maker, and a little OCR later, I had the document in electronic format.

While I don’t read business plans anymore (executive summaries are enough for me), I believe the business plan is a critical document for an entrepreneur to organize his thoughts around his new business. In today’s world of excessive PowerPoint presentations, the art of sitting thoughtfully and writing out the plan has – in many cases – been lost. The best way to explain what should be in a business plan is to show one and, as I read through the original Feld Technologies plan, I was pleasantly surprised by the content. In many ways it is simplistic and reflects the relatively naive thinking of a 22 year old working on his first business. However, when I think about how Feld Technologies evolved, the document framed the business very effectively.

If you are looking for sex, violence, insider trading, hackers, and rock and roll, stick with Tom Evslin’s blook hackoff.com. If you want to see a late 1980’s business plan and some of my commentary along the way, enjoy. I’m going to go linearly through the plan – the actual plan text will be in purple so it’s easy to separate the plan text from my comments.