IAM2253 – Crafting Your Business Plan and Transform Ideas into Action

Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00

Because so many times we fall in love with the things that we're doing. We think they're great and they might very well be great. But the best way to know that is actually to execute, to live in that be, to live in that action so that you can continue to innovate.

You can continue to, at the end of the day, serve the clients you ultimately want to work with.

Gresham Harkless 00:28

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And this is a special episode where I break down something that came across years and years ago called The One Paragraph Business Plan.

So one of the things that I was able to do is when I started my business, I came across this book.

This book was basically called the Never Get a Real Job by Scott Gerber. He ended up founding the Young Entrepreneurs Society, I believe, and lots of other things.

But when I first started my entrepreneurial steps, I maybe formally started my entrepreneurial steps. I had a lot of entrepreneurial tendencies when I was born, when I was younger.

And one of the things that I read in this book of never getting a real job is just how powerful it is to be able to kind of start a business. And I always wanted to do that.

So I found this part of the book, as I read through the entire book, called the One Paragraph Business Plan, and I thought it was so powerful because I think so many times we forget as entrepreneurs, CEOs and business owners that one of the most powerful things we can do is actually to execute, get feedback, and iterate or pivot or whatever it is that we might need to do.

Like I just finished an episode that should be going live later where we talked a lot around understanding that the most powerful thing you could do is have activity to really live in the power of doing.

Elaine Sterling, who I had on the show, she talked so much around how she is very much so living in the do, and this is going to be episode number 2265, so come back and check that out.

But one of the things that really stuck out to me is that in this One Paragraph Business Plan, it is literally one paragraph.

As somebody who, if you listen to one of the previous episodes that I had, where I talked a little bit around starting my editing business and how I wrote the 20-30 page business plan, it really stuck with me.

How powerful it is to make sure that you're doing that because when you write that long, long, long, long business plan, you might not actually implement the things that you say that you're going to implement.

So what stuck with me is that this One Paragraph Business Plan is from the book Never Get a Real Job. It has shades of what is called an MVP, a minimum viable product by Eric Riles.

I'm always forget how to say his name, but here's what you're going to do. You're literally going to answer certain questions. You're going to answer these questions. You're going to answer them in 2 sentences or less.

And after you answer these questions, you're going to create a checklist for each of the things that are within the questions. From there, you're going to be able to just go through and execute on the plan.

You have a couple questions that you go through to understand and give you a little bit more instant feedback and then you're going to continue to revise that plan until you get to ultimately where you wanna be.

So to give you a little bit more idea on what those questions are, you're gonna be able to of course check out the link that I had the blog post that I wrote years and years ago on it.

But here's what you're going to ask. What product or service does your business provide today?

That's going to be the first question. Next question you're going to ask is how does your business produce or provide the product or service you do right now?

How will your customers use your product or service as it exists right now is question 3. Number 4 is how will your business generate immediate revenue?

Number 5 is who are the primary clients your business will target immediately? Number 6, how will you market your startup to prospective clients with the resources you currently have at your disposal?

Next, you're gonna ask, how are you different than your competitors right now? And then the last question is, what are your secondary or tertiary client bases that you would target once you have achieved success with your primary base?

One of the things I loved around this is because you literally don't have time to spend on this.

If you really wanted to do it a lot more efficiently, if you're starting a new business or potentially starting a new venture, what you can very simply do is go to ChatGPT or AI and literally type in these questions and prompt it to say, pretend you are an expert at creating a One Paragraph Business Plan.

You read the book, Never Get a Real Job by Scott Gerber. Answer these questions for me because I'm starting this business or I'm thinking about starting this business.

And what comes out is you get a literal checklist. Well, you don't actually get that checklist. You'll get each of those sentences that you can use.

And then from there, you can feed that back into ChatGPT or you can literally just reply to the same feed.

And you can see that you're going to come up with a list of 5 things you could do to start your business today.

And then after that, you're gonna be able to go through and just do the things that you need to do. What I really love about it is it's very much so action-oriented.

It gets you down to the things that you need to do to be able to see that business come to success. And I think it also speaks directly to the assumptions that we all have within our business and how we really get those assumptions out and about into the environment and really get that tested, we'll get a better idea on what exactly our plan is, if it's viable, if we need to pivot or change it.

And we don't spend that time writing a 20, 30, 40 page business plan sometimes. And of course, that always has a time and space if you're trying to get funding or you already have that proof of concept, maybe you're trying to scale up.

But generally speaking, I think for us to kind of start out and test out different ideas, this might be a really great thing.

And for me, of course, starting a little bit more of the franchise, moving more into the franchising world and franchise brokerage and consulting is something that I put.

So I'm going to put some links so that you can check out a little bit more on what we do and how we do it and how that output kind of came about from ChatGPT, but also how some of those questions were answered.

But I think this is one of the most exciting things because you have that opportunity to really get more into checking off the list of things that you need to do and figure out how you can create your lane and create the thing that's going to make you unique.

Because so many times we fall in love with the things that we're doing, we think they're great and they might very well be great, but the best way to know that is actually to execute, to live in that action so that you can continue to innovate.

You can continue to, at the end of the day, serve the clients you ultimately want to work with.

So after you go through and create that checklist, you have your things that you want to do.

What you do is you start executing the plan. And then from there, you're gonna ask yourself these questions after you complete a task.

These questions are what worked and what didn't, what was the result of each action step, was the overall experience positive or negative.

And why was that, what did you learn during the process, which steps can be modified or improved for better results, and how can that be done, and what needs to be deleted altogether.

So from there, you're going to continue to kind of revise your draft plan and continue to update your plan, but you ultimately get kind of like that flywheel of going through the process of testing things out very quickly, getting feedback, and then iterating from there.

And the more you do this, the more likely you are going to be successful, I think, because if you have this understanding that is very circular, it's not a set place that you're going to be, you're going to continue to innovate and you continue to come up with different ideas.

You're going to test out different markets or different communication, or language or content in order to get to where you ultimately want to be.

So this is one of the really awesome things that I found when I started my business. And a lot of times when I'm testing out a new idea, I would do that.

I feel like if you marry this along with maybe the 12 week year, it's gonna be something that's really phenomenal that can help out your business.

So Check out that CEO hack, check out the article, and of course check out the book as well too because it's one of those CEO hacks that you can really use and leverage to level up within your organization and do it quickly and rapidly so that you can get that feedback.

Don't fall in love with trying to make sure things are perfect. Don't let the perfect in the way of the possible. Just get it out there.

Start testing it out. If you're going to fail, fail with very low impact so that it doesn't hurt people or hurt your organization. And then you'll be able to continue and grow from there.

So this is Gresh signing out. I hope this is a phenomenal tool for you. If you have a new idea or something that you want to check out, then definitely be sure to check out that.

Outro 08:54 

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at Blue16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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