As I mentioned last week and began yesterday, the Business Plan is almost done… rising to a scary 50 pages when I stopped last night at 5pm to go out for a couple of birthday parties… I resumed today at about 1:30pm… it’s now 30 pages. In the end, it will probably be 25-30 pages. Yesterday I worked 4 hours or so, today probably another 3 hours, so figure a full day…
In the end, while it is very odd to do a business plan for a company where the model literally changed this weekend - by way of YouTube saying that they will pay content owners - I think that denigrators of the business plan (present company included) get it wrong: it is a useful exercise and document, but only if it does not become THE major project at hand. It definitely made me realize why I got into the business of vertical search, online video, why we launched the blog network and how the database-driven community network fits is and why we have a number of media properties to bridge the gaps.
Maybe more importantly, it forced me to reassess all of the financial and traffic metrics to honestly assess what works, what needs improvement.
Finally, I had to revisit every potential marketing and technology partner and give me a cue to hit each one back again to see how we can make both our businesses stronger by working together.
As per writing the business plan itself:
For a long time, I would keep links and data that I knew I would need in the event I had to write a business plan, so that saved me time. Also, I actually have been pontificating quite a bit on this blog about the business all year, so that helped me know where I needed to go… otherwise, clearly, there was no way I would have had 50 pages of facts, strategy, landscape intelligence in one day!
Somehow, I managed to bring it all together into a 30 page document. Still some things to do for it to be one cohesive 25-page document.
I am thinking of publishing some of the non-confidential, market intelligence that essentially summarizes a lot of data from companies like eMarketer, Jupiter Research, Borrell, McCann, Morgan Stanley and company.
Anyway, back to work.
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