Entrepreneurship

Over the course of the past nine years, I have written over eight dozens of business plans for several dozens of industries and for a large number of clients. Every business plan is a story of success, existing or future, of a business. Every business plan is a living and breathing being, a new company or a new addition to an existing company. Every business plan is a combination of hopes, wishes, someone's huge life plans, and a sizeable amount of money, time and effort pledged by a single person, a family, a group of people, and/or an organization to be invested in making things happen. When writing your own business plan, this is the spirit with which you need to approach it to make it work. Anything less will not make it, so do not waste yourself hundreds of hours if you are not ready. Wait for the time when you are and go for it. The end result, which is to successfully land financing for your business, is worth it.

This book is designed to tell you how to meaningfully write a business plan on your own. Since business plan writing is a reflection process, I am calling for you to reflect on things as you write your business plan. When writing a business plan, you do not only describe what you already know, you project this onto the future and try and predict what your business, existing or new, will look like, what it will offer and, most importantly, how it is going to succeed. A successful business plan calls for you to get on a journey of discovery. Your business plan can be expected to become a success when having finished writing it, you have learned something new about your business and your capacity to bring it to greatness. If, however, having finished your business plan you have learned nothing new, it is possible that your business plan is not telling your reader a persuasive story. So, go back and re-work it until you learn something you did not know.

4:21 p.m., January 22, 2018

Somewhere in Gatineau, Quebec

“Hey. What’s up?”

What is up is that Ottawa is in the depths of one of its hellacious blizzards.

Adam Miron is on the speaker in his car, headed down Autoroute 50 out of the Gatineau farmland around Masson-Angers and back to his home in central Ottawa. But, being Canadian and given that a blizzard is a weekly occurrence from December to March, he is on the phone with his colleague Julie Beun, speeding a little in his clapped-out Mazda 3 and doing business anyway. In this instance, however, there’s something electric in his voice.

“Yeah. How are you? I’m good. You got a minute?”

Small talk is not Adam’s strength when he’s excited, so he blows past waiting for an answer.

“Listen, I just have to tell someone. Today is the day we became a billion-dollar company. Any way you cut it . . . we have 218 million fully diluted shares outstanding at $4.95. That’s $1.08 billion. Today is the day.”

She can tell he is grinning down the phone.

“We did it.”