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  • University of Oregon Students Study the Power of the Business Plan

    Tim Berry started off the year by announcing that a resurgence in business planning would help many small businesses experience a turnaround in 2010 , and he's sticking to his guns. Berry is founder of Palo Alto Software, and his company makes business planning software. So he has more than a rooting interest in business plans. But he points to a survey of nearly 3,000 users of his software as supporting his assertion about the importance of planning. The survey was done as part of a research paper by two University of Oregon students-- Eason Ding and Tim Hursey --under the supervision of professor of Economics Joe Stone . And Berry summarizes the "bottom line" was: ...completing a business plan correlated with increased success in every one of the business objectives that came up in the study (which were: getting a loan, making a major purchase, getting investment, recruiting a new team member, thinking more strategically, and growing the company). In every one of these cases, well beyond the threshold of statistical validity, completing a business plan improved the proportion of respondents who achieved the goal. Berry also provides this summary in chart form: Read more about the study here .

  • Back to Business Plans

    Over at Entrepreneur , Tim Berry says business plans are back. While planning may have fallen out of favor for some, Berry says his specialty (he's the business plans coach at Entrepreneur.com) is going to be the reason for many turnarounds this year. This is the year for getting key planning elements defined and understood, for regular plan review and course correction, and for more focus on the planning process. All of which means, in a nutshell, that more businesses will benefit from better planning processes. Ultimately, that means more businesses, more jobs and more success. Berry goes on to list three key factors behind his prediction: 1) The natural backlash of the 'don't plan' fad: "The more you see experts harping about the straw-man business plan that wasn't that useful, the more we're going to see people turning to real business planning because they need it." 2) Back to planning fundamentals: "...good planning increases your ability to manage change by providing you clear visibility of how everything links together." 3) New age of accountability: "You can't assume that showing up is enough anymore; things have to get done. And that means getting done remotely, or virtually, or wherever and whenever." Read the full article here .

  • Carnegie Mellon Team Takes Top Prize at Rice Business Plan Competition

    Credit card companies have come up with various new ways of fighting identity theft through new technolgies on the cards themselves. But these new ideas haven't stuck, mainly because they require merchants to change their equipment. A team of Carnegie Mellon students who developed a way of making a credit card magnetic stripe that could change its data from one card to another, allowing for greater security and added flexibility (theoretically, a person can carry several "cards" on just the one card). And for their novel idea, the team--now a company named Dynamics --was awarded the grand prize at the 2009 Rice Business Plan Competition . CNNMoney.com Small Business has a profile of Dynamics, and other winners at the competition, here . For more background on the competition, click here .