Write a business plan

We’re done with teaching our summer classes, and a lot of the questions and ambiguities that I had about the business have been answered or cleared up. I think, however, that I first have to get our book keeping-currently a mass of spreadsheets and a pile of documents-in order. I’ve installed QuickBooks and am getting all of our historical data into it. Once I have that settled, it will be much easier to do the financial part of the plan.

Something I noticed in our classes this summer is that so many students are averse to planning. We work with kids to make short animated films. So many of them just want to get some clay under the camera and have at it. We make them first either write a script or draw a story board. Still, there are those students who put up a tough resistance to this sort of planning. Typically, those films end up being less entertaining than those that are planned from the beginning. Many of them are incomplete by the end of class.

Being both a plan dodger and a plan enforcer gives me some perspective on the value of planning. I recognize that the fear of planning is natural—you’re afraid it will remove the magic of the experience, or it will prematurely lock you into something disasterous. Our culture fetishizes spontaneity and improvisation and tends to look at things that are “scripted” or “staged” as lifeless.

But I think proper planning allows for some changes, the right changes. A jazz musician doesn’t know what notes he’s going to play during any given solo, but he goes up on stage with a set list.

So I have to plan and I want to plan. I just need to work on making the time to create the focus to get the job done.

When I first wrote out this goal, I had plenty of time but a lack of inspiration. Now things are reversed.

We just taught classes for three weeks, and I have a much better grasp on the future possibilities of our business. I’m really excited and look forward to finishing the first draft of this plan. Also, I took a class at the local community college—that basically turned out to be a review of all the stuff I’ve read in business plan books, but it did give me a little shot of confidence.

I’m going to set aside some hours this week to work on this project.

So I’ve started this in earnest and I’m glad I did. I’m actually enjoying it now. I’ve cleared all the other stuff out of my calendar for this week and am primarily focusing on this. It’s difficult, but rewarding and reassuring.

I think that I was mainly afraid of making a mistake with the plan, but I realize now that BP’s are actually about avoiding common mistakes. If you can take care of those, you’ll have more resources to confront actual mistakes.

In business, the only value the past holds is what it suggests about the future. In that way, a mistake is almost as valuable as a success.

So I have started this. I am tired of having this hanging around my neck, and I want to kick out a first draft by the end of this week. No more procrastinating, no more excuses, no more dawdling…it’s go time!

I’ve cleared enough things out of my task list that I should be able to work on it this afternoon.

I finished doing our taxes and mailed them in on Friday. It was a huge boost. We’ve got very complicated taxes and it took me at least 25 hours to sort all the receipts, add all the figures, and navigate the forms.

Wendy says that the hard deadline for the taxes helped me, so she set May 15 as the deadline for the business plan. That’s do-able, I think.

NEXT STEPS: Write out an outline and fill in non-financial sections of the bp—by Friday.

I still haven’t done anything on this, but that’s because I’ve been working this week on my taxes. The good news, I think, is that I’ve done a lot of organizing and filing of documents. I think this will all make the financial part of the BP easier to do.

My last goal was to have a first draft done by the end of this month. That hasn’t worked. I’m still as far away from that as I was in December, October.

So what can I get done on this goal by the end of the month? I suppose I could come up with an timeline for the various elements and start seeking a local mentor to help me through it.

I’ve checked out books from the library, I’ve done excercises, I’ve started dozens of times, but I just can’t break through. At the start of each week, I think that I will find a day to devote to this. By the end of each week, I bump the Outlook task to next week.