The Brass Tacks Guide to Writing a Winning Business Plan

By Todd Houston Smith

The Brass Tacks Guide to Writing a Winning Business Plan is a complete guide to creating a world class business plan package. It will walk you step by step through the process of researching, synthesizing, and writing a compelling, fundable VC-caliber business plan. You'll get a real-world look at the process of writing a plan for

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Horizon Venture Consulting
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735305950

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION

My first entrepreneurial experience was in 1979. I grew up in the town of York, Pennsylvania in a quiet neighborhood near York Hospital and York College. Instability in Iran had caused a huge increase in oil prices that year, and in Pennsylvania, this led to gasoline rationing and odd-even sales, where you could only purchase gas on certain days, depending on whether the numbers on your car’s license plate were odd or even.

At the bottom of our hilly neighborhood was a Gulf gas station, and during this crisis, cars would line up out the gas station parking lot, around the corner, and up the hill in our neighborhood, often a long way up the hill. Occasionally, there would be 20, 30, even 40 cars in line in the neighborhood. Cars back then guzzled a lot of gas, so perhaps the hill saved all the people idling in line from having to run their engines. They could just coast down the hill.

As a 9-year-old, this was quite the phenomenon. All these people from all over town, in OUR quiet neighborhood! We’d never seen so much action! After a day or two of watching this, suddenly, inspiration struck. All these people sitting in their cars for an hour or more, they must be thirsty! Maybe even hungry!

With this in mind, I teamed up with a girl on our block who was a little older, our parents staked us some money to buy supplies, and I borrowed my Dad’s well-worn red wheelbarrow. Across the street from the Gulf station was a Super Thrift grocery store, where we stocked up on coffee, lemonade, and doughnuts, after furious debate on what these drivers might want.

The next morning, we stirred up a batch of lemonade, got one of our moms to fill a thermos full of hot coffee, and we loaded it all into the wheelbarrow with the doughnuts, napkins, and cups with a handmade sign - $0.25 each! As it happened, pretty much no one could turn down two cute kids serving them car side, with something most of them wanted anyway.

Turns out, we had grossly underestimated the demand, and we sold out in perhaps 20 minutes, not even completing a full pass of the entire line. We had raked in about $25 in almost no time, even charging a quarter each for a doughnut or a drink. Most people ordered multiple things. Some even told us to keep the change!

To kids in the 70’s, $25 was an unfathomable fortune. We paid back our parents, used the remaining proceeds to go back to the store, and the next day, we were back in action. We made even more! But we were not doing this in a vacuum and our little monopoly lasted only a few days. Other kids started to take notice. They, too, could go to the store, mark up the cost, and do what we were doing. Soon, we had competition.

That, too, was short-lived, as gas rationing didn’t last too long, and soon the long lines and backups into the neighborhood were gone. I think we even ended up getting stuck with a fair amount of inventory, that our families ended up consuming over time.

It was a fabulous and exciting learning experience, and it was also instructive in that we really had no plan. We just ran our little enterprise by the seat of our pants, and quickly found out what happened when you miscalculated demand, failed to pay attention to competitors, or know where your customers are going to come from long term. Just as quickly as the lines of cars appeared in our neighborhood, they were gone, and so was our