Questão 563200

The importance of discovering your plan B

By John W. Mullins and Randy Komisar

If the founders of Google, Starbucks, or PayPal

had stuck to their original business plans, we’d likely

never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical

changes to their initial models, became household

5 names, and delivered huge returns for their founders

and investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a

business model that worked? Why did they succeed

when most new ventures crash and burn?

Every aspiring entrepreneur, whether they

10 desire to start a new company or create something

new within an existing company, has a Plan A —

and virtually all of these individuals believe that their

Plan A will work. They can probably even imagine

how they’ll look on the cover of Fortune or Inc.

15 magazine. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong.

But what separates the ultimate successes from the

rest is what they do when their first plan fails to catch on.

Do they lick their wounds, get back on their feet, and

morph their newly found insights into great businesses

20 or do they doggedly stick to their original plan?

Let’s face an uncomfortable fact: the typical

startup process, largely driven by poorly conceived

business plans based on untested assumptions, is

seriously flawed. Most new ventures, even those

25 with venture capital backing, share one common

characteristic. They fail. But there is a better way to

launch new ideas — without wasting years of your

time and loads of investors’ money. This better way is

about discovering a business model that really works:

30 a Plan B, like those of Google and Starbucks, which

grows out of the original idea, builds on it, and once

it’s in place, enables the business to grow rapidly

and prosper.

Most of the time, breaking through to a better

35 business model takes time. And it takes error, too —

error from which you learn. For Max Levchin, who

wanted to build a business based on his cryptography

expertise, Plans A through F didn’t work, but Plan G

turned out to be the ubiquitous PayPal we know today.

40 -------Getting to Plan B in Your Business

How can you break through to a business model

that will work for your business? First, you’ll need an

idea to pursue. The best ideas resolve somebody’s pain,

some customer problem you’ve identified for which you

45 have a solution that might work. Alternatively, some

good ideas take something in customers’ lives that’s

pretty boring and create something so superior it provides

true customer delight, as was the case for the Walkman

and the iPod.

50---------Next, you’ll need to identify some analogs, portionsNext, you’ll need to identify some analogs, portions

of which you can borrow or adapt to help you understand

the economics and various other facets of your proposed

business and its business model. And you’ll need

antilogs, too. As we have seen from the Apple story,

55 analogs and antilogs don’t have to only be from your

own industry, though. Sometimes the most valuable

insights come from rather unusual sources.

Having identified both analogs and antilogs, you

can quickly reach conclusions about some things that

60 are, with at least a modicum of certainty, known about

your venture. But it is not what you know that will likely

scupper your Plan A, of course. It’s what you don’t

know. The questions you cannot answer from historical

precedent lead to your leaps of faith — beliefs you

65 hold about the answers to your questions despite

having no real evidence that these beliefs are actually

true.

To address your leaps of faith, you’ll have to

leap! Identify your key leaps of faith and then test

70 your hypothesis. That may mean opening a smaller

shop than you aspire to operate, just to see how

customers respond. It may mean trying different

prices for your newly developed gadget to see which

price makes sales pop. By identifying your leaps of

75 faith early and devising ways to test hypotheses that

will prove or refute them, you are in a position to learn

whether or not your Plan A will work before you waste

too much time and money.

...

The European Business Review Available at: http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=1608 - retrieved on July 4th, 2010.

In the fragments “…their first plan fails to catch on.” (line 17) and “How can you break through to a business model…” (line 41), the expressions “catch on” and “break through to” mean, respectively,