I‘ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners like you for more than 40 years — mostly from within our Business Power Tools software apps and templates, and thru my blogs and book, "Business Black Belt."
My “Hero’s Journey” started In the early ’80s, I was the electronics buyer and a copywriter for the Sharper Image catalog. Later, I also sold some really cool word-processors in Silicon Valley. After Macs and PCs became popular, I started my own business creating sales literature for tech companies.
A friend had a deal going to sell his engineering software to Apple. They wanted to see his business plan to be sure his company would stay in business to provide future upgrades and support. At the time, I viewed a business plan as an elaborate brochure that sold his concept to people at all levels, and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (I learned that from selling word-processors.)
We Got the Deal.
Over the next year, people came to me with some brilliant ideas, but their plans weren’t getting funded. I helped them fill in the missing parts to succeed. Along the way, I saw that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. Hmmm…
What if I took all the content I’d developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a software template that many people could use?
This became BizPlanBuilder, the first of its kind, and my new company took off!
Inspired to help others build businesses that would make our world a better place, we became our own Guinea pigs seeking to remove as many common mistakes and as much unnecessary BS as possible, and crafted tools for others building businesses to make our world a better place.
We followed-up with MarketingBuilder, which picked-up where BizPlanBuilder left off, then we went even further with PRBuilder which included sample press release templates… In another direction, we added EmployeeManualBuilder and SafetyPlanBuilder full of actual policies and procedures.
Altogether, we had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees… (All that to say, I've been down the road you're on. I didn't just make this stuff up!)
Today, all of our products have been integrated into a streamlined and unified online toolbox/dashboard. And we’re the leader in business development software templates that help you build your business.
I also like dogs, kick-boxing, flying airplanes, writing, walking on the beach at sunset, candlelight dinners, and red wine... :-)
Excerpted from the book on conscious entrepreneurship and business management, Business Black Belt Asking the right questions is the key to getting the most useful information and validating assumptions. First, let’s identify a simple problem most of us are afflicted with: the need to be polite. When I was a little boy, my grandmother told…
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Especially today with the craziness of information (opinion?) overload, it’s crucial to qualify what we read, hear (and sometimes even see) to make the best decisions as well as maintain our own credibility.
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Here is a recently completed research study by George Bowden to find out what it actually costs to run a business in different cities across the world, ranked the results from best to worst in a beautiful table that shows you exactly what it will cost to run a successful business in 70 of the world’s top cities.
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How to plan for your business in the face of uncertainty, competitors, and everything else. Planning vs. the plan.
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Why plan? Do we even need to explain this? Here’s a blog post by my long-time friend Jim Castiglia I thought worth sharing with you… The key is to regularly assess the changes that have occurred and incorporate them into your business planning.
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