Darker Insights from Writing a Business Plan - The Accelerated Entrepreneur

During the Web 1.0 dot-com boom at the end of the 90s, part of my business was writing business plans for high-tech Internet start-ups.

In exchange for stock options.

Embarrassing, eh?

I was a writer. Business plans needed writing. Don't those go together?

(This topic continues to plague me.  I wrote about it here and here.)

I, of course, didn't have my own business plan.

If I had, I might have discovered my business model was a really, really bad one.

Having written a business plan for becoming a member company of business acceleration center, VT KnowledgeWorks, I had some insights.  I've had some more:

1. Writing my own business plan was an appropriately humbling experience. My hubris has catalyzed some of the highest heights in my life. It has also driven some of the lowest lows. In the 90s, while other people might have, I certainly didn't need no stinkin' business plan.
2. Writing someone else's business plan robs him or her of a chance to undergo a beyond-price, nearly epic journey of self-discovery, vision-creation, and resolve-hardening.

I regret that none of the companies for which I wrote business plans is in existence today.

That also means that I did not receive my payment in stock options.

I believe in my new business venture so powerfully that I have joined a business acceleration center and written a business plan.  May my accelerated Web 2.0 business have a brighter future than my ill-conceived, ill-fated Web 1.0 one.

The Accelerated Entrepreneur:  The Saga of the First Year as a Member Company of VT KnowledgeWorks is sponsored by YOUR NAME HERE with text link.  YOUR NAME HERE...specializes in your business description or tagline here.

Anne Giles Clelland is the founder of a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks, located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg, Virginia.