Books
Lean Business Planning
$19.95
Lean business planning is a simple but powerful way to get what you want from your business. Get focused, grow faster, and adjust to change. A Lean Business Plan is an easy and practical way to align strategy, tactics, milestones, assumptions, and essential cash flow without the fuss of a full business plan. It's not a business plan document. It's just bullet points, lists, and tables. Keep it short and review and revise monthly in just an hour or so. It's planning that matters, the process—not the plan.
The book includes easy ways to summarize strategy and tactics, and visualize strategic alignments. It explains how to set review schedules, milestones, and performance tracking and measurement. It includes step-by-step explanations (with lots of examples) of how to develop a sales forecast and expense budget, and how to plan real cash flow. It also covers how to review and revise the plan every month, what to look for, how to pull in your team, and how to decide when to stick to a plan and when to change it.
Recommended by business experts
Whether you're looking to start a new business or just run an existing business better, this book will help you set a strategic focus and tactics to match. If you do end up dealing with investors who want a business plan, this book even explains how you can stick with a Lean Plan and add what investors want.
― Guy Kawasaki, author of “The Art of the Start” and venture capitalist
Plan-As-You-Go
$19.95
The premise behind business planning guru Tim Berry's popular plan-as-you-go method is simple: You should plan for your company's sake, not for planning's sake.
Berry invites you to block all thoughts of overwhelming, traditional, formal, cookie-cutter business plans and embrace an easier, more practical, modern business plan—the plan that evolves with your business and allows you to start building your business now.
Recommended by business experts
Duct Tape Marketing: Planning-the small business equivalent of dental work? Maybe, but not if your plan is a tool-a flexible, modular, guiding light of a tool. Tim Berry's 'The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan' is that kind of business power tool. Let it guide your vision and then just remember to floss!
― John Jantsch
Hurdle: The Book on Business Planning
$19.95
This book uses a practical approach to teach the finer points of business plans and startups.
Many people mistakenly believe that the business plan is a “hurdle” that only MBAs can clear. This is not true. Entrepreneurs with good ideas come from everywhere, with all types of backgrounds. We created this book to help encourage people to empower themselves and to learn the process of business planning to better accomplish their business goals.
Learn how to develop a complete business plan with text, tables, and charts, in simple understandable steps. Understand business numbers, from profit and loss, to cash flow, to balance sheets and ratios, all laid out in simple terms with practical examples.
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Tim Berry
Tim Berry is the founder of Palo Alto Software, a co-founder of Borland International, and an expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame.
He's the expert other experts turn to. He's been interviewed on business planning by CNN, Forbes, USA Today, Guy Kawasaki, and others. He makes several notable appearances in “Fire in the Valley,” Swaine and Freiberger's classic history of the PC industry.
Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching, and evangelizing for business planning. He also writes for Bplans, Entrepreneur, and other publications. His full biography is available on Bplans.