About Tim Berry

Tim Berry

Founder and President of Palo Alto Software and a renowned planning expert. He is listed in the index of "Fire in the Valley", by Swaine and Freiberger, the history of the personal computer industry. Tim contributes regularly to the bplans blog, the Huffingtonpost.com as well as his own blogs, Planning, Startups, Stories, Up and Running, and others. His full biography is available at timberry.com.

Tim Berry

Finding the right sample plan for your business

I understand what you’re after. You want to lever off existing work and not reinvent the wheel. When we make a database of more than 500 sample plans available, you want to find “the right one” for your business. But the truth is that what you can get here at Bplans is tons of help [...]

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Cite the Source of your Plan’s Statistics

During 2009 we saw the attack and counter-attack of Internet platforms as [a mainstream media consortium] decided to take on the blogosphere, and bloggers’ frequent quotations from the [mmc]’s posted stories. There were demands for the take-down of various blog pages, and attempts to collect fees-per-word of quotes, as well as rapier-like witty ripostes. You [...]

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Be Realistic When you set your Measure of Success

All of us plan for success in our businesses. That IS the goal after all. To be successful. But how exactly do you determine IF you have succeeded? Regardless if you are a start up or an established business, you need to establish, right up front, during your business planning process, what success will look [...]

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Due Diligence is Necessary When Hiring Consultants

“Being big egzpurt, I am.” Just because someone bruits themselves this way doesn’t mean you should simply take them at their word. It saddens me that I have to be mistrusting of people, but as one of my favorite aphorisms says, “Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” We start our [...]

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Precise, Accurate Estimates are more than Guesses

When you are in the midst of creating your business’ planning forecasts, do you use Guess, Estimate, Accurate and Precise interchangably? I don’t. I believe there are very distinct differences in these words — they are not synonymous. Here’s how I see them. Guess: Pulled out of thin air. “Oh yeah, sure, no problem, easy-peazy! [...]

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Does your business have a disaster recovery plan?

That is a scary question for lots, if not all businesses. We spend so much time focused on getting our businesses started, and then successfully running our businesses, that we give very little thought to disaster recovery planning. Really, planning for disaster sounds like we are betting on failure. Betting against ourselves. Yet we think [...]

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Pay Attention when your Business Plan says NO

I’m sure almost everyone is familiar with the story that Thomas Edison discovered 99 ways to NOT make a light bulb. That’s 99 no to reach 1 yes. The point here is that a negative result, proving something didn’t work or was not so, is just as valuable as a positive result. Sadly, scientific research [...]

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Establish a Records Retention Schedule for your Business

All of us know, or should know, that we need to save and safeguard our business records. When we start up it’s easy to hang on to every document, receipt, invoice, and business record. But after a few years we find that all these records we’ve been keeping are taking up more floor space in file cabinets [...]

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Getting Investment, Key Factor: Initial Valuation

If you are going to get outside investment to start your business, you need to know your initial valuation. Valuation is essentially price. Say you want to bring in $150,000 from an angel investor. The immediate question from the investor will be something like: “at what valuation?” Sometimes that’s called “pre-money valuation,” because the instant [...]

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Competitors are a Fundamental Reality of Doing Business

One of the most overlooked, forgotten, and intentionally ignored sections in a business plan is the analysis of the competition. Don’t kid yourself. You have competition. Everyone has competition. It’s a fundamental reality of being in business. Here at Palo Alto Software, we have read hundreds of business plans over the years. Our Business Plan [...]

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