How To Sign Oregon Banking Business Plan Template

How to industry sign banking oregon business plan template

hello everybody and welcome to the show today I'm really glad you could join us so today we are talking about something we never talked about but that's very important because we are talking about how to develop a business plan everything involved with doing so this is so valuable to your business because this gives you a structure and an idea of where you're going with your business your demographic who you serve etc and this has so many uses especially when it comes to getting capital of your business which we spent a lot of time talking about so with us today is Peter Thorson now Peter is a small business adduced he works on the business development department at Palo Alto Software and he leads a business development sales and strategic partnership for them now he actually is the mayor the maker of life plan where they actually create relationships and programs that help entrepreneurs succeed including many of which including some cool stuff to do with business plans which we'll talk about now Peters also started and sold a successful business with revenues over a million and directed strategic partnerships for Nickelodeon and Comedy Central organized local startup week and events and judge business competitions for rice Prince the Notre Dame and many others now he's actually taught contemporary business planning from concept to execution for many years in venues including Lane Community College University of Oregon Oregon SBDC an Oregon score as a volunteer Peter is the past president of board of directors for committed partners for youth in Lane County as well formerly Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and board director for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts Club of Emerald Valley he's also mentor individual local youth and local small businesses originally from the great state of Virginia Peters now enjoying the rain and trees in Eugene Oregon he likes sandwiches cats and working on his car which I said about Peter what kind of car do you have all right well now it's just it's an older BMW it's yeah I don't know where the car part got in the bio I think someone else but that well that's good yes that's a good hobby so I like not having to worry I don't have no mechanical ability whatsoever hey thanks for coming on the show today I appreciate you joining us absolutely thanks for having this is a great topic and something we love talking about so your software company produces so many different things I mean we could sit here for hours and hours and talk about the different solutions you provide for us as entrepreneurs thank you for that very much by the way but let's start with business points so you guys do some cool stuff with business plans you actively help a lot of businesses kind of get their start or get off the ground with business plans but a lot of people don't even know what this is so let's start there what fundamentally is a business plan yeah I mean ideally the the plan itself is is a flexible sort of an idea of how you intend to move forward with the business and it applies to whatever stage the business is in and I think this is gonna be something that I say over and over again but the idea of the business plan is treating that word plan as a verb not as a noun and what I mean there is you know when you think of the plan a lot of folks when they get into the planning process they start thinking of this long document something that they're gonna write and get to writing and finish writing and maybe never look at again and that's actually a well critiqued process and it doesn't get you the most benefit out of the work that you put into it so really the way that you should think about planning in general I'm gonna say the words lean planning take some of the best philosophies from the Lean Startup from from Eric Ries and Steve Blank and those kinds of folks and apply it to the concept of thinking about the future so if you're leaving the cubicle and gonna go start a business because you think you might be successful at something or you've been up and running for 10 years there's a right amount of planning for you at whatever stage you're in and that's how everyone should think about business planning in general why do people do this I mean what if some of the benefits on why people would write and want to have a business plan yeah you know there's any number of reasons you know it might be again if you're an earlier stage business you might want to think about is this idea of feasible could it ever succeed right do I understand my target market and their behaviors and what kind of money they spend on this kind of solution like what I'm providing and if I can get a grip on that will my product ever be profitable will I ever be able to pay myself those are like early-stage planning concepts the kinds of questions and hypotheses you might want to throw out there and see if you can kind of test them against the numbers but for an up and running business again it's it's it's equally important to be thinking about these critical components the critical assertions that your business is making at any given moment and what can you test and what kind of validations can you get from those tests so the plan should include if you're if you've been up and running for five ten years Main Street business you know a bakery a bike shop that kind of thing you should still have some kind of plan to how you intend to run this year and the next three years that includes seasonal assertions how do you intend to grow will you be hiring even if you just intend to stay perfectly flat compared to the previous year how exactly will you do that and the plan is just going to give you a more strategic platform to manage the business especially when you compare your plan versus your actuals like so when you bring in your accounting data and compare that to the plan and I'm sure I'll talk about that a little bit more later well and I love the way that you explain that because I think you know this show a large part is about capital and a lot of people think that a lot of people think you get a business plan to be able to get the business initially started or to be able to get capital but like you said I see it exactly as you describe it it's really your roadmap but your plan of exactly what you're gonna do how you're gonna execute it sets your guide for that year in the future of how you're gonna guide business so I love how you describe that because it's really a working plan that everybody should have and revise your a year to know the direction generally or where they're headed yeah exactly and the capital piece is is a hugely important thing and I don't mean to ignore that certainly one of the main drivers that sort of forced people into creating what I'll call the more traditional business plan one where you really do finish writing the plan and you show it to someone else the real driver for that is finance related so whether you're getting an angel investor on board or an SBA backed loan from a bank anywhere in between even friends and family you should have a sort of written plan that really does represent maybe three to five years a financial for testing that has a sound foundation in terms of your understanding of who you're selling to how your product will be priced what your intentions are in terms of growth over time absolutely so it's one of the if it's the rare exception to the idea of completing a business plan and that is sending that plan to someone who might provide financing otherwise the business plan is really part of managing the business at whatever stage you're in yeah absolutely how do you how do you do this I mean what's the process of writing an effective business plan yeah good question and and you know I think it really needs to start a little bit outside I mean you know I'm biased you mentioned we make a product called live plan which helps guide you through the entire process so one easy recommendation I would make is start with a tool that helps you another easy recommendation I would make is start with friends family Mentors your local SBDC office can offer you help for free if you have paid consultants rely on them and a paid consultant could include your own accountant if you're up and running so your accountant has so much information is so much wealth of knowledge locked up in the numbers that they manage if you will every month and yet so many small businesses so many Main Street businesses will look at their accounting data every single month kind of asked her accountant hey I'm still in business aren't I the account says yeah but here's all this valuable data you could be pulling your just intelligence you can get out of this and they kind of you know put it in a drawer and same with the old-school businessman put it in a drawer and say great well I got to get back to work I'm very busy and the trouble with that is you don't end up being as strategic as you can and just you know a quick statistic here you know of all businesses that fail 60% of them were profitable when they fail they just ran out of cash right you might say hey well how is that possible how do you how can you be profitable and also run out of cash and that's a cash flow issue it means that you either you had too many invoices out and they just ran out of time and your money just wasn't there for you or a similar kind of effect and those are things that can be solved by planning so again we talked about this planning as a verb thing it's really this idea that can help even the most stable up and running business make sure that they don't accidentally go out of business which can be heartbreaking for so many of those businesses absolutely and it's all comes down to really having a good plan when you're developing a good plan what what are the things that you kind of need to know before you write the plan like what kind of things are you going to need research wise or have prepared to be able to sit down and write the plan effectively yeah that's a it's a great question and I'll let me start by breaking it up into maybe the sort of earlier stage concept stage versus up and running I think on the very early stage on the startups a lot of the coaching that you get incubators accelerators college courses and even from SBDC offices and other kinds of consultants is really about knowing your customers knowing your target markets right a lot of people go into business because they have the best invention ever and the initial question everyone should ask themselves is are there people who are willing to pay money in exchange for your solution how many of those people exist and if they do pay you that money are you profitable so that's all work that you can do by just leaving the office getting out into the street doing actual customer interviews getting on you know Facebook doing polls by email whatever you can do to scramble and hustle and get that information so you have a validated idea it's really critical to do that before you kind of put too much effort into the planning process now once you have that information you can then start creating a financial forecast and say okay well how profitable I be how can I grow into other beachhead markets over time you know sort of that Tam Sam ssam analysis sort of work so that's sort of more from that startup phase going into the planning process if you are up and running especially if you're you know post revenue if you've got sales maybe up and running for five years I would actually suggest starting from your own accounting data so look at the amount of intelligence you get from your own financials and you know you could do this on your own while I'm talking how much the last time you got your last accounting update how deeply did you look at those numbers and did you ever think to compare where my financials are today and where they were yesterday that's the data you get from your accounting side and where I thought I should have been today and where I think I'll be tomorrow all in one conversation and you can see that if I'm talking about let's say an inventory issue oh you know I my sales have been going down but my inventory has been going up for the last six months you that might concern you right especially if your profitability is going down that might concern you as a business owner unless I add the phrase and that's exactly what I expected and it happens every year because that's how our seasonality works and next month we're gonna make up for all of that see how easy that becomes a strategic conversation that you can have with your accountant your consultant that kind of thing so I would say for the up and running business is even as stable as you can be start from that accounting data get more intelligence out of it and then build a forecast from the assertions that you make every single day that you go into your own office right yeah and I love that and you know it's interesting because I just talked about I just got done off a webinar teaching you know how you can multi-purpose content and before that I was doing a live stream teaching about a pitch deck with angel investors you're talking on the same thing I mean the components of what you said you need to be able to prepare a business plan it's fundamentally the exact same information you need to be able to create a pitch deck for angel investors and venture capitalists so I like that you're doing this because now you're coming in with a business plan you're also giving yourself guidance of of where the business is gonna go you're also bringing in as dad and I could help you eventually pitch to investors and so there's multiple purposes from this work that you're putting into develop in this plan yeah the angel investor thing I think a lot of people think of you know angel investors are so special and they serve such a specific purpose in the business lifecycle and they think of them as universally different there's this whole other world from you know venture capital or Bank cap or even friends and family frankly even from investing your own money you know as it as a sweat equity or your own or your own time inspector your own money as equity into the startup of a business frankly a lot of those things should be treated the same a lot of those people want to know the same kinds of answers to the same kinds of questions and those questions are can this business possibly succeed will it ever be profitable you know what I mean like will it sustain itself over time and if so how much do I stand to make yeah that's the unique thing about the angel investor is how much do I stand to make after the investment how much can I simply extract from this businesses value once it's up and running and growing extremely fast of course that's the angel investor goal in the whole thing yeah what about mistakes I mean you guys have a software that makes it super simple but what are some common mistakes and you see people that are making when they're trying to create the business plan yeah good question you know that the number one mistake is not doing it and you know I don't want to you know sound - like biased here but I am you know there is definitely a pendulum swing in the direction of you do not need to create a business plan period and I think a lot of the people who stated that and I'll quote Steve Blank here but you know Steve blanks one of his famous articles years ago was you know don't create a business plan don't do it and what he meant was you know get out of the office make sure you have your customer validation make sure you have the real data and kind of what you asked before you get into the planning process all of that work all of the like Lean Startup methodology is still a means to get to the point where you can then create a feasibility analysis a break-even analysis a true financial forecast that will prove whether you should go into that business or not and I you know I've talked to Steve Blank about it you know maybe the article could have been titled you know don't create a traditional business plan meaning don't create a forty page document that by the time you get to the end of it the whole world has changed and you shouldn't spend that much time writing a document and you're not gonna use it in the future anyway you're gonna put it in a drawer and ge back to work that is a waste of time when we all agree on that so again it comes back to this idea of lean planning what's the smallest amount of planning that you can do that's relevant to your business at the current stage and do that amount now and come back to it and revise and then when you know more about it you know when your best guess has become more into sort of a more informed then come back to that plan and revise it again so you really want the plan to be simple enough that you can edit it over time and you can come back to it and revise it so that's something we all agree on now and it seems like the pendulum is kind of swung a little bit more to the middle there and you know a lot of those lean activities are indeed a lead-up to creating what I would call a more full-fledged financial forecast and some of the other planning elements a great point you know that being said in what are things that really should absolutely be in this business plan he kind of touched upon this already because we talked about how to prepare what to put in there we talked about accounting documents and some of those things to bring over he touched on that but I didn't specifically ask like what kind of things absolutely should be in this business plan yeah absolutely I think in my opinion and you're gonna hear any other opinions on this I mean everyone's got their own thoughts on this and number one answer to that is if someone tells you especially someone who's gonna lend you money if someone tells you what they need in your business plan get them what they need if they give you a template if they give you a format if they have specific needs you know SWOT analysis or no SWOT analysis that kind of thing and listen to the person who holds the purse strings who might give you that financing so that's answer number one but on a more generic level certainly an applicable financial guess what's the best guess that your business can make right now on whatever the riskiest assertions are in the future of that business on however you're going to acquire customers and when I say best guess I really do mean that you know a business that's a start-up and it's just conceptualizing the idea maybe has interviewed 50 customers in their target market you know it feels like a guess to that kind of an entrepreneur even if they're going up for angel investments so feels like they're guessing what their market might be and their level of confidence will show through in their presentation but for a business that's up and running the reason you see businesses that have been running for five or ten years not continue to do customer interviews is because they have a comfort level but with that comfort level comes you know complacency how do you grow the business how do you continue to expand you should you be launching new products new features new services will a competitor come along and you know drink your milkshake or whatever kind of phrase you want to use there because you didn't do those kind of interviews so you know you really want to make sure that you have that as part of your plan regardless of what stage you're in so customer validation target market analysis that kind of thing and I would include some kind of research show that you're an expert in the field that you're entering I kind of see this really often where we have you know maybe a like a founding team of three co-founders and you know the MBA is the one who does the pitch I want to know that maybe the technical co-founder is passionate about the field is the greatest possible person to have in that role and same with all the team members so that's another thing that I really want to see in these earlier stage and also in the later stage plans as well so those kinds of elements to me are core and from there you tend to want to see one or two other elements based on your personality based on the industry that you're in whatever feels like you really need to expand on to tell the whole story should you figure out core values mission purpose all that stuff before you develop a plan you think you know it's a funny question you know and and back to your pitch concept you know when it comes to a pitch deck you know one of the things I always advocate for is probably slide - you know slide one is gonna just be your logo and an empty image slide - as soon as you start talking about your idea and we even have a fill in the blanks type exercise that we do here at Palo Alto software you know tell me exactly what the business does who it serves what the major competitors are and I can share this with you but it's this fun exercise it's just like blank is a blank who sells blank to blank who don't get blank from blank and needed because blank you know our primary futures are blank blank and blank and we intend to grow by blank in the next blank years just to say all that first early so that you don't leave your audience guessing this is true for the plan and the pitch so you don't leave your audience guessing what this product might be right you see it sometimes with some of these you know especially pitches for funding where they want to get to the punchline so a minute into a five-minute pitch you still don't know what the product is you're still not sure if the target market really needs the solution being proposed and if you get that far in and you kind of haven't hooked me in terms of what it is you're talking about I feel like you've wasted time so I always advocate for that as a as a part of the pitch and also a way of thinking about the longer form plan as well live plan fantastic solution we recommend it for our clients and build business plans and that's how we first started talking because we did a lot of research and we figured out that lie plan without a doubt is the best software out there to help with this so how does that work though how does software help make it easier for somebody to come in and build a business plan yeah well great question you know I think back to your question about what what people you know what were the biggest mistakes people don't do and I said not planning at all as a company we consider not doing the activities we recommend one of our biggest competitors right a lot of businesses can be up and running and not ever have a five-year financial forecast and what are they running on well they're running against the odds of that running out of cash statistic that 60% business is running out of cash statistic I said earlier right why put yourself at risk why not just you know do the best for the business that you possibly can do so that's part of why the software right so the what the software component it's almost like one of our biggest competitors in that field is still Microsoft Word and Excel right in a lot of cases you can do the work that could be done in life plan you know very you know rich spreadsheets in a very like formalized Word document but then the questions arise well where does the template come from do I know if this templates up-to-date can I continually edit it how do I work with different parties my adviser my consultant my investor and then on the financial side of course I mean when I first started my first business we were terrible at financials awful to the point where we overpaid our accountant dramatically and if I had a tool like my plan I probably would have been able to participate in the financial forecasting conversation I probably would have been able to edit my next year's forecast because we take away the fear of you know making an error and Excel and not being able to track it down we're not being able to understand what a full PNL a profit and loss statement looks like and all the other pro forma sheets that we include in my plan so it's made to be easy it's made to be usable by the bike shop owner as well as the startup going in for angel investment we have tens of thousands of those customers coming new to us you know every single week every single month we see new customers we take their feedback and we say is this usable and then from investors and people who are involved in the consulting side is this being used in the best practices ways that you understand to be out there so that's why we work so closely with like universities Accountants CPA's and all of our kind of favorite partners out there yeah yeah is because you take all that information congregate it and then create a software and continue continuously endeavours changing that helps people do it the right way yeah exactly how else do we know what the best practices are if we didn't hear from all these thousands of people yeah absolutely what do you recommend it's not good enough just to write a business plans did you go through it every six months every quarter every year to update it yeah great question and it's a little bit on the personality the entrepreneur and a little bit on this stage of the entrepreneurship as well very early startup stage businesses remember what I use that phrase it like your forecast is just your best guess that you have at any given moment so if you're very early-stage you're probably learning so fast that you want to come back to those little like tiny bits of planning that you do very frequently you know like the pitch deck is gonna change every week every week you this new information in the door you got to manipulate that you got to include that in your forecast as well but for the more stable business maybe someone who's you know expanding into a new let's say a new franchise I have to buy a new space to expand my business into my second location so I need an SBA background for some other type of investment to make that happen those people might want to be checking in on their forecast monthly right so it's not an everyday thing what you use the forecast form and everyday basis is waking up saying again are my financials where I thought they should be and do I understand where I'm going by the end of tomorrow and then get to work but the changing the forecast aspect a little bit more personality based and I would say at least quarterly would be a good rule of thumb there makes sense so that all makes sense I mean you want to make changes as often as the business is changing so in the startup phase in pineys even sooner than every quarter but it at least gives you kind of a chance even to look at it and see where you're going and like you said see where your plan doesn't merge or match perfectly with where you actually are yeah exactly and that's really the fundamental core item and you know I keep saying this but it's like even a lot of businesses they almost feel a certain sense of and hate to say this if you're listening and you feel this but it's like a sense of shame or guilt you know they could be doing better with their financial forecasting but they don't they're not a numbers person they went into business to fix bikes to write apps they didn't come into this business to write a financial forecast and so they again they tend to save it for last or tend not to do it at all and really what we recommend is taking ownership over those numbers use them as a management tool so that you don't have to develop an instinct keep all that data inside your brain every day so that you actually do have more time to focus on the business over time instead of trying to figure out how you're gonna come back and change the forecast and managed all that kind of stuff so yeah in a certain sense let the app do some of that work for you and then over time use it to manage the business so that you can get back to work faster Peter have you got you timed how long it takes your average person to really develop a business plan you know it's a great question we get that question a lot here in the office the sort of more traditional answer of course is it depends it depends on what stage you're in what you're applying for that kind of thing but let's frame it more specifically so how long would it take to create a business plan that is appropriate to submit for an SBA Baggs well right that's gonna be one of the more rich complex detailed plan formats that you're probably ever gonna do maybe like a VC uh venture funding kind of approach and some angels we require a lot of detail those kinds of plans again in terms of your expertise that's really what drives the timeframe are you working with a consultant and you have maybe an accountant already and a lawyer who can help you with some of the questions that most entrepreneur struggle with if so it could take you a month it could take you a couple weeks if you're really hustling and you really have a lot of the research already lined up some people it might take up to six months before they have something that they want to walk into the bank with and feel really comfortable with the real factors that are gonna drive the timeframe or how much research have you already done versus how much are you doing while you're writing the planning process how much help do you have with that financial forecasting elements how much help to need versus how much do you have and then how well do you understand that target market so again are you doing kind of that lean planning approach where you're starting today and plan plan plan over time and you'll kind of get to the end of the planning process like you said when you apply for that financing I mean if so that cycle could take since day one of the business all the way until you're up and running and we again we kind of encouraged that we really encouraged this idea that the planning process never stops but I'll respect the point that of course if you're applying for financing you got a hit stand on something so you got to hit that you got to finish the document for those folks and that's really one of the main reasons I would ever say that the plan is ever done is for that case yeah it's we're ready to wrap up anything I should have asked that I that I didn't I mean you've done a great overview here of why you need a business plan what they are the preparation that goes into them the software to use with live plan to be able to do them and so many other things of where this can be used how it can help what's in the business plan anything you can think of it's important for anybody who's thinking about developing a business plan I have it yet we should still probably talk about good questions you know if the thing I always get kind of a little bit of I roll from is the idea that you know one of the reasons I would really recommend you use an app like lioness so that you can start to unpack the intelligence and the business you know sort of intelligence that you can get from the financial forecast and kind of have fun with the nature of what the financial forecast means for your business so again I'm speaking now to people who went into business two to bake bread or build the next Twitter anywhere in there again these people tend to not want to mess around with numbers but the more that you're able to do that as the business owner as the co-founder the better sense of where the business can truly go you'll have and the more realistic view you'll have and I really like to suggest that it can be fun and so one one example would be if you're an up and running business you create a forecast that just represents doing exactly the same for next year so what does it take to just keep this business afloat and then maybe I want some reassurance so I make a whole separate scenario an entirely different forecast that represents the worst possible year I could have next year without completely failing some people like that because they get to go to sleep at night and they say well it's not as yeah it wasn't as great as it could have been but it wasn't the worst and I'm not going out of business tomorrow and then go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning and that's reassuring in a fun way but another fun way is to think about it like what's the best that I could imagine or that I would ever want it again like from an entrepreneurs personality perspective what's the most I can ever want out of this venture and forget reality for a minute let me just write down in a financial forecast where I am now and where I could possibly ever go Fona franchise this nationally and it speaks to the to the entre reneurs sometimes what's the biggest they want to think about for their idea and so having fun with those numbers having fun with the planning process I think unlocks a little more of the true entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of people want to give it credit for and again I think the problem is because most people you know start with a daunting excel file they feel that fear and shame or they feel like overwhelmed they say I'm not the numbers guy they never get into it and they just get back to work and it never comes up during their entire process and again my big thing is so let's try to inject that into your process and give you the unfair advantage versus the competitors out there right try to keep you from failing it's very true and knowing that kind of information even like demographic avatar information it really is true me and it real gives you a completely unfair advantage against your competition Peter thanks for coming on today where could everybody go to learn more about you guys and most importantly to learn more about liveplan yeah absolutely well just live clam calm Li vep LAN calm pal what the software it creates you know give it think of us as three big companies we've got live plan you know twenty bucks a month app help you do everything we just talked about we've also got a site called V plans calm be PLA NS calm if you're just thinking about everything I just said that's a free content website you can go check out sample business plans articles from me and the team here lots of great guest authors that we get maybe you should be a guest author sometime soon and then our third product is called outposts it's really for teen management of email so not really on topic for what we're talking about today but awesome for small businesses as well and then the other resources I would really recommend I mean you've got SBDC consultants out there and we work with spdc consults if you're a consultant you're watching this now live plant comms slash consultants if you teach at a four-year college at community college if you teach at an incubator and accelerator program across the US or internationally we've got an educators program we work with incubators we were accelerators and if you're a professional accountant a CPA we have a whole special version of how to work in live plan that works with professional financial advisors Accountants CPA's that kind of thing who want to use live plan with their clients so if you're a small business owner ask your accountant to sign up and if you're an accountant you can use that process to learn more about everything we just talked about really anyone out there is helping businesses succeed we want to get on board with your mission because that's what ours is we just want to make sure we're doing the right thing for thanks for coming on with us we appreciate it yeah absolutely man thanks so a lot of cool links to everybody and I'm gonna go ahead and put these in the show resources page you can find Peter's podcast at credit suite com forward slash podcast but I'm going to direct you most importantly liveplan comm their software does so many things for entrepreneurs and Peter talked about all of it I'm gonna put a link to each one of them on here but I gotta tell you live points tastic I mean we use this for so many of our customers they have so much success as Peter said it's ticularly affordable super easy to use and it's helped us go from having clients that would never even develop a business plan because of the complexity so simplifying it to a point where they come up with a really effective business plan it helps them get these financing that they're looking for from SBA loans and beyond but as Peter and I've talked about it's beyond Nova it's more important than just coming in and being able to develop a business plan to get funding I recommend you do this I recommend you revisit this every quarter it's your guide to what you're doing it talks about your customer demographic it talks about your cash projections it talks about so many things that are really the most important things that you need to know as a business owner and you just don't consciously think about a lot of things there's not aware of them but live plan and developing a business plan this way kind of forces you to think about the things that need to be top of mind as an entrepreneur to make sure that you're one of those ones that's very successful in business not one of the ones that we talked about the beginning that's profitable but ends up not being in business a short time after so the key is having a good plan and you could use it you could do that you could develop one using live playing com super simple so visit live playing combi learn more see how you can easily develop your own business plan and I'm going to go ahead and include some other cool links as well so you can take a look at their other software all of which is dedicated to helping us to helping entrepreneurs succeed so thanks everybody have a great day and make sure you visit live plan.com thanks everybody thanks