I have been thinking long and hard on my opinion of business plans lately. You see, when I started imagining up this blog a couple of months back in November, I saw it as a one-stop shop for business owners in Nigeria. At the same time, a lot of what is going to come up on this blog is going to be written by me. Therefore, it is a reflection of me. It is this realisation that has made me think hard on my postion on business plans.
Why spend such valuable time thinking about business plans? It is because I have come to realise that business plans even in their best forms may not be the best documents to help develop a business idea. Back in 2009, I was a student at the Lancaster University Management School taking a class on New Venture Planning. I remember that we spent so much time going through the business plan. The teacher for the class talked us through the importance of the business plan, how to write one and how to use the business plan. Now, I am post-school and one failed business venture down and I am not so naive anymore about entrepreneurship. I am not saying I know everything about owning a business; I am saying that I have developed a healthy scepticism for some of the theories that I learned in school. Perhaps, this is because the real world does not bend to the will of theory.
