The Solo Entrepreneur's Business Plan

by phil on Saturday Apr 12, 2003 1:41 PM
business tips

If you're running your own business, it sometimes help to have a business plan. A business plan can codify some objectives, profit points, etc. This only applies to certain types of businesses, though, such as running your own bakery. If, on the other hand, you are a solo entrepreneur like a renegade web designer or freelance writer, I have something better.

I bust out the TextPad (alt. to Notepad) and put together "Sheets." These are like sort of one-page cheat sheets for your venture. I designate a space at the top of the document for this sheet and the rest I designate for "spit." Some things I put into the sheet are the following: (\\\ Concrete (short-term) things to do \\\ Vague (rand-term) things to do \\\ Long-range Objectives \\\ Goals \\\ Standard path seen \\\ Game Plan \\\ Gathered tidbits \\\ Vague Observations \\\ Things to Remember). I order these items in terms of how frequently I should look at them. These sheets are kept in a text document, usually on my desktop, and I open it frequently (more than daily) to keep my mindset straight. The bottom portion of the document is for "spit." Spit is random stream of consciousness thinking. This is important because it's hard to formulate sheet-worthy material spontaneously. One usually needs to ruminate a bit to come to some solid take-away conclusions.