17 A formal business plan in 10 steps
This chapter covers
- What’s the compass that guides you through stages of company development? A formal business plan.
- How should you leverage your great go-to-market strategy? By baking it into your business plan.
- What is the key to a great strategy business planning process? Asking the right questions and an absolute focus on customers.
Business plans are not expected (and, quite frankly, are considered a waste of time) for early-stage (seed and Series A) startups because everything changes so fast that it’s hard to keep a business plan current, and three-year plans are pretty much wild guesses at the early stages. But even if you are early stage and not required to create a written business plan, the strategy process I describe here is still important: