If you are reading these business posts, you are likely in the early stages of your entrepreneurship journey. First of all, congratulations on starting. I hope you find success and fulfillment.
I understand some of the emotions and experiences you might be going through. Starting your first business is confusing, daunting, and stressful. There is financial stress, pressure from friends and family, and then there is the stress from self-doubt, isn’t there? Until we achieve success, we have no idea when it will come, whether it will ever come, and how long we will struggle before it finally arrives.
Starting a business can feel like a freefall and the scariest thing for a person in freefall is not knowing how long the freefall will continue, and whether the landing will be a hard or a smooth one.
When I started my first company, I had no business experience. My education is in Computer Science. Everything in entrepreneurship was new and confusing. I felt like everyone knew more than I did. Everyone had opinions as to what I should do with my business. In hindsight, it is easy to see that those opinionated people were also mostly beginners, but their ideas seemed good at the time because I didn’t know better.
And since I had no way to evaluate ideas or strategies, I plowed ahead without much planning.
Even if I did the business planning on my own, what could I really plan? I had no way to tell whether one strategy was better than another. All my plans were made at a novice level.
As you can guess, my initial businesses were disasters that crashed and burned. Ouch!
My success came much later, but from years of struggle and misery of failure arose a passion to ensure that other entrepreneurs get the kind of help I never had. This led me to create many resources to support entrepreneurs.
After helping many entrepreneurs, I realized that simplicity and focus in planning are key and that you can describe the core of any business in just three sentences. That’s why I created the 3-sentence business plan. It is a perfect place to begin your business planning journey.