21 Nov 2007

Free business plan course

While I was doing my MBA way back, I took 'Entrepreneurship' as an elective subject. I know some of you are probably laughing as did some of my entrepreneur friends, when I told them that I was studying entrepreneurship. "You can't learn to be an entrepreneur, you are born one", they said. I was not really sure at that time but thinking about it, a lot of entrepreneurs could definitely benefit from learning some formal business skills.

Related to this, I can recall the professor teaching the subject pointing out the high failure rate of entrepreneurs during the first year of operations. Of course most of you might have heard the often used statistic "90 percent of small businesses fail in their first year". I learnt later that this was a myth but the fact is that a large number of newly formed companies DO fail in a year or two of starting operations.

One of the reasons given by the professor was that a lot of entrepreneurs do not have a good business plan to start with when they started the business. It was only later that I realised how true this was. I have a few friends in the banking industry and they were telling us that the main reason that they refused loans to number of entrepreneurs unless they had some collateral was because they had lousy business plans even though some of their products and services sounded great. I am sure all investors feel that way because they don't want to throw their money into some business that didn't have a proper objective and how it plans to get there. And that's the role of the business plan.

If you want to planning to come up with a business plan, do go through the 'How to Write a Business Plan' course offered by Trump University, famous American entrepreneur Donald Trump's online educational company.

Signing up was really easy and it is totally free. The course was developed by Professor Paul Wimer. At first I was bit sceptical but found it to be really informative and useful. Do tell me what you think.

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