The Harbour Pilot

Plans Fundamentals of Research

Pilot — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:05:27 +0000

Step back. Close your eyes. Can you see the world? How big is the world in your mind? Do you see it as land masses … do you see it as a set of economic forces . . . do you see it as clusters of people? Do you see patterns of exchange that connect [...]

Plans Fundamentals

Pilot — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:36:44 +0000

Lets start at the beginning, shall we? A business starts with an idea. Simple really. Now, there was a time when the most common form of idea had to do with a production process or facility or material – a kind of ‘build it and they will come’ approach. This was prominent when the range [...]

Business Plan Models - Skill and Effort

Pilot — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:48:00 +0000

I’m a lazy guy. Now, sometimes people who know me consider this a ludicrous thing for me to say, but is true in a very real sense. What I mean is that I am completely unmotivated to do many things, unless I see some purpose to it. I do not go into a field [...]

Plan Give Up and Cry

Pilot — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 19:59:12 +0000

I was part of a discussion with someone on a public board recently, the focus of which was executive summaries for business plans. An entrepreneur was meeting with a SCORE advisor, who had asked for the ‘exec’. The drafted exec was 3 pages long! The SCORE advisor responded by saying that that 3 pages was [...]

Entrepreneurs Time Money Growth

Pilot — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:04:04 +0000

There is an Australian entrepreneur who writes a blog called the Entrepreneur’s Journey. Yaro has distilled some of the lessons he learned, starting from his pre-university days. One of those lessons was the critical importance of conserving cash and reinvesting. He points out that the two primary resources can be interchanged – money [...]

Entrepreneurial Roid Rage

Pilot — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:08:07 +0000

One of the blogs that I regularly stop off at is Jeff Cornwall’s The Entrepreneurial Mind. Professor Cornwall is the holder of the Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University, and has both a family history and personal experience in the field. His interests cover the spectrum of entrepreneurship, although he says his [...]

Plans Written and Ignored

Pilot — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:27:44 +0000

Reject business plans! Well, no, not exactly. The practice tends to be to write wide ranging, comprehensive books. These cover every possible aspect of the business, are neatly bound, have lovely graphics, moving pictures of the charismatic leader, and snazzy graphics. Cool. Ignored. Useless. Expensive. Time-burners. Let’s step back and see what actually happens, by [...]

Wargaming in Chaos

Pilot — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:57:57 +0000

In small and medium business planning, there is much more chaos (in the mathematical sense – unpredictable within certain boundaries) than many realize. This is driven by the enormous range of possible influences on the environment, and their cross-linkages. This is truer today than ever before, and the business operator’s response demands flexibility, constant monitoring [...]

Plans Long Ago Far away

Pilot — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:27:15 +0000

A long time ago, in a place far away, was a coffee house. And that coffee house was located in a harbour town, nestled close below some arching hills, and soothed by the lapping waters of the protected berths of ships that were safe home from the sea. And life was good. Until, one day, [...]

Plan Building Models

Pilot — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:01:46 +0000

Business plan models deal with relationships in time. Many entrepreneurs and independent business owner/operators understand their operations in terms of units – so many sheets of plywood, so many tons of steel, so many pounds of flour, so much work in hours, this many machines, that much floor space, this customer, and that customer, the [...]