Business Plans

Founders need to care about where the market will be when they are ready to serve it – to project the intersection between their vision and market trends.  They need to care about where the [...]

The Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas are good tools for capturing and stimulating discussion, and are becoming more and more popular.  Locally Scottish Enterprise is encouraging [...]

Salient Point has developed a new template for use alongside the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to help compare different potential value propositions: Download the FREE Value [...]

This has been on my to-post list for a while. I keep reading it and thinking it’s a good piece so I’ve decided to post it today.  I do wonder if for most startups it might no be very [...]

I’ve long wanted to write something on the topic of how to decide how much money to raise, but I haven’t yet come up with anything I’m happy to share!  Fortunately someone has done a big analysis [...]

Financials projections are a central part of a business plan, and there are two key points about selecting a start date for the financials that I can save you a lot of work…

Most investors have experience of putting money into a project that looks and sounds very promising, but which ultimately fails because customers don’t actually buy the product (or service),  at [...]

There is no magic formula for calculating sales, or any other figure in a business plan, and there is almost certainly no right answer.  However, there are lots of different rules of thumb that [...]

Just because projections are always wrong doesn’t mean they aren’t useful when used wisely (hence the tenuously linked picture of an owl, a symbol of wisdom).

Business plans, investor pitches, and even executive summaries all have a section on competitors.  Talking about competitors can seem like the wrong thing to do, after all, surely competitors are [...]