The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, Chapter 4
Chapter 4: The Art of Writing a Business PlanLike Chapter 3, there simply isn't an exercise that I can use on the blog (at least that would make sense), so I'll simply post a thought that this chapter spurned.
When I first began sharing this idea that I had about a church plant in Austin, I had no idea what I was doing - I'm not so sure I do now. So, inevitibly, when I began making presentations asking churches to give toward this endeavor, I had very little knowledge of what I was doing. I simply shared my vision (at times missing with too broad of a vision, and others with too narrow and detail-focused).
The order I worked things out in my head was to write this wonderful prospectus (the Holy Grail for church planters) and share from that, allowing the prospectus to be my foundational piece of vision-casting, detailed visioning, and projections. Kawasaki has a different perspective. (Note that we use different language in church planting, so replace "business plan" with prospectus.)
Many entrepreneurs try to perfect their business plan and then pull
PowerPoint slides out of it. They view the business plan as the be-all and
end-all, and the pitch as a subset of this magnificent document.
This is backward thinking. A good business plan is a detailed version
of a pitch - as opposed to a pitch being a distilled version of a business
plan. If you get the pitch right, you'll get the plan right. The
converse is not true.
Oops. I know what I'll be working on for the next bit. It's good that God is doing significant things refining my vision for this church plant. I've got a lot of work to do.
