Video – How to Write a Business Plan:
Detailing Your “Use of Funds”

Author: Burke Franklin

I've been in the business software industry 32 years. Before that, I was the electronics buyer and copywriter for the Sharper Image catalog. I also sold word-processors in Silicon Valley in the mid 80s. After Macs and PCs ended that, I was 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 upgrade and support the system. 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. 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. And my company took off! We followed-up with MarketingBuilder, which picked-up where BizPlanBuilder left off, then we went even further with PRBuilder which also included 22 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... Today, all of our products have been integrated into a streamlined online dashboard. And now we're the leader in business development software templates.