by Lindsey Enloe
Business Success Coach

Whether you are starting a new business or growing an existing business, this is not a game. It’s real life, everything is on the line, and there is no room for error. You walk onto the field each day, armed with a business plan as your playbook, and the motivation to succeed, but when you are in the middle of the play, who can help you see through to the end? A coach.

Nothing is more exhilarating than the anticipation of starting up a new business idea or growing a business to the next level — until the details and day-to-day challenges start to seem daunting. Business planning is a tornado of required actions mixed with emotions that can sometimes seem to whirl around at breakneck speed. One day you just want to get started, another day you might stare at a blank computer screen wondering what the point of a business plan is anyway. Still other days, the ideas start to seem overwhelming and it seems much easier just to give up. The problem is that you have this entrepreneurial spark that sits in the back of your head spinning yet another idea to create or grow. So how do you keep going? How do you see through to the finish line? How do you really get into the business game?

Any athlete who really wants to compete gets a coach. You can gather a strong team of advisers, but they won’t hold you accountable to a set plan of actions and goals. You can read every book on business there is, but the books can’t provide detailed feedback on your unique ideas. You can write a plan, but the plan itself doesn’t challenge you to push further than you thought possible. A coach can provide that extra set of eyes that can objectively see the holes or potential pitfalls or even the strengths that you haven’t yet considered.

We can’t always do it on our own with just pure will, even when we have a great idea. So many things can get in the way. Lack of knowledge on where to start; inability to manage time and resources; inability to identify challenges; or the inability to look objectively at an idea to which we’ve become very emotionally attached. This is where a coach steps in.

When you are tired, coaching can reignite passion. When you are unclear, coaching can dig deeper into your potential by clarifying values and purpose. When you are feeling overwhelmed, coaching can discover your strengths and mobilize your talents. When things are moving too slowly, coaching can provide the fuel needed to push you and your business back up to speed. When you are stuck behind barriers, coaching can help identify and clear the obstacles to success. When you have reached a stalemate, coaching can revitalize you and uncover new opportunities.

You may very well be a brilliant entrepreneur and business owner. If so, have you reached your full potential? Have you reached every one of your business and personal goals? Have you considered expansion? Have you considered a new business? Are you equipped with the tools to make it happen? Do you know all the right questions to ask? Have you aligned your team with the best that there is? The world’s best will seek help while answering these questions.

Just as coaching is used from little league to professional sports, it can help on all levels of business development, from conception to expansion, and in small to large ventures alike. You can set your pace faster, set your goals higher, achieve success and perform better. Everyone benefits from that bird’s-eye view, which is what a coach provides. People come to business coaches for a variety of reasons. You may need an expert who isn’t blinded by the industry or by too many years of staring at the same numbers. You may need the accountability created by reporting to your coach weekly after setting personal commitments. Many times we get bogged down in the day-to-day operations and forget that there is a much bigger picture to look at if we want to grow. With ever-changing markets, you may need a coach to bounce ideas around with, in order to grow through the challenging times. You may simply need to rediscover the passion that created your brilliant business idea in the first place. You may need guidance to find the proper people to support your business and advise you in proper strategy. Finally, you may be looking for greater profits or returns with less work. Anyone can hang a shingle and be open for customers, but it takes more than a name and idea to really own a business.

In the end, however, coaching is more than just the bottom line. Coaching can help you discover a life of balance that works for you, especially important since a business can, at times, take over every aspect of your life. It can guide you in making better decisions about life and business. It can help you find ways to get more done in less time, and overcome the many potential barriers to success. Coaching will help you set and attain goals in life and business, and then push you to become the person and business owner that even you didn’t think was possible. If you really want to be a player in the game of business, don’t sit on the side lines; don’t wish and dream. Get a coach and make it all reality.

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 has become so expensive, and so heavily subsidized/sponsored by corporations, that it has become the expected norm that every result must be a commercially marketable yes result.

That “always yes” attitude has come to shade the development and use of business plans as well. It’s gotten to where people think that every business plan has to show exorbitant profits and wild success. And to reach that end, all that they need to do is overestimate the financial tables a bit, or a lot, until the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet show the desired results. This is a bad and dangerous tack, in my opinion.

For instance, we saw one plan for a tennis club with indoor court rentals. The financial tables looked good until we divided the rate per hour into the sales forecast. Seems those courts were rented continually, 28 hours a day, every day, 365 days a year. Not possible I’m afraid.

Or the mobile auto oil change business in a large mid-western city. Again, closer inspection of the sales forecast showed that the one worker was changing the oil in a car every 45 minutes, with no travel time between jobs, in all weather, every month of the year. Now, I’ve tried to change my oil in Illinois in January, outdoors, lying on my back in the snow and below-freezing temperatures. Let me tell you from experience that 45 minutes is painfully unrealistic.

Final example: there was the apartment rental company with five vice-presidents but no employees in the personnel forecast, and they never showed how or when they paid for the buildings they said they purchased.

These business plans all said YES in the financials — if you didn’t look too closely.

Now, I say that NO is an acceptable result from a business plan. A business plan for a start-up company that shows huge losses, or negative cash flow is an OK result. It tells you that the business as planned will fail. It tells you that some of your basic assumptions are wrong. It tells you that you are missing something immensely important.

And this is better than OK! Rather than starting up with unrealistic expectations and then hitting bottom in an excruciating crash, you can stop right now and reassess, before you make a financial commitment. Don’t ‘embellish’ the financials by boosting the sales forecast. Look at your market, your competition, your expenses, and everything about your plan and be realistic.

Honest reflection may tell you that this isn’t the business to start right now. Or, you might revise the plan and discover if you put some of those vice-presidents out on the production line, it reduces your costs of goods to a point where you really can make a modest profit on steady sales, without hockey-stick growth. After your revisions, you still might not make a profit until year three. But in going through this process, you may become convinced that the business is viable with adequate start-up funding and second-round investment.

NO is an acceptable result for a business plan if the plan exposed the flaws and showed the way to a realistic YES.

Last night we were talking about getting angel investment, and valuation, which is one of if not the most important points in the discussion. 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 the deal happens the valuation will change into post-money valuation, which is always higher — because your company just got some new cash.

Your answer sets your deal equivalent of an asking price. If you say $500,000, then you’re offering the investor 30% of your company for $150,000. If you say $300,000, you’re offering 50%. If you say $1 million, then you’re only offering 15%.

Which leads to the question:

So how do I know? How do I set valuation appropriately? What is that based on? Is it some multiple of sales, or intellectual property, or what?

And that’s a good question, and very hard to answer. Sure, you want some compromise between what you want to give, as a percent of ownership in your company, and what investors would want to buy. Investors will simply say no if it’s not an attractive offer. But that’s still very vague.

• In the case of an existing business, with some history, you do have some formulas you can use. For a great site on that business interpretation of valuation, for existing busineses, I suggest bizequity.com, the zillo of small business.
• When we’re talking about startups, however, you don’t have history and you can’t really apply formulas based on sales, or revenue, or even intellectual property (although that could be more relevant).

So here’s my concrete suggestion:

1. Calculate starting costs. That’s two lists, the expenses you have to incur and the assets you have to have at the starting point — except cash. Leave that blank for a bit.  Add those all-except for cash assets to the starting costs, to get an amount, a number in dollars.  Click here for a lot more on that.  

   So, for example, in the illustration here, that would be about $40,000. Yes, I know it says $38,750, but this is just an estimated guess; always round up. You never guess just right.  

2. Calculate cash flow through the lean period at the beginning, before your sales cover your costs.  Make a good guess at how much money you need to cover the deficit spending to get you to an operational month-by-month break even level of cash. That’s where the cash requirement number in the illustration came from: it seemed like this company would need about $400,000 to survive from startup to break-even.  You can’t see much in the chart below, because it’s small, but it shows a projected 12 months of cash flow (in blue) with a minimum balance, a deficit (in red), of about $400,000.

   

3. That gives you a number. In this case, it’s $400,000. That’s what your cash flow shows you you’ll need to get to cash-flow break-even. In the last two months, the cash flow is positive, so the negative balance starts shrinking. With that estimate as a best guess, you go back into your startup costs calculation, and add in the cash required. It’s $400,000. You can see what that does to the startup costs worksheet in the next illustration here.
4. Having done that, you now know that you need about $500,000 from investors (again, technically it’s $458,750, but you’re using best-guess estimates, so round up.) Set that as the amount of investment you’re seeking. Then — and here it gets hard, to be sure — you need to decide how much of your company you’re going to offer to an investor in exchange for that $500,000.

5. Get some help here if you can. Ask somebody with experience in startups, or dealing with angel investors, or both. Ask an attorney you can trust, who should also be somebody with experience. The thing is, how much of your company you offer to investors is about a compromise between what you’d like — none, free money — and what will entice the investors to write checks.

   At this point a lot depends on your overall business offering, the cards your company brings to the table. Investors want as high return as possible, with as little risk, but in relation to return. How experienced is your team? How defensible is your product? How rich is the market? All these factors determine what kind of a deal will be acceptable to investors.

   • Let’s say, in this case, you’re new at startups, you have very little track record, and you want to attract an active angel investor as a partner. So maybe you set your initial valuation at $750K, meaning you’re offering to give away 2/3 of your ownership to get the money you need. You’re being realistic about what will attract an investor. You better really, really, like that investor, because he or she will essentially own your company. But this is a hypothetical case, and without a lot of experience and defensibility, that may be the best you can do.
   • Or maybe you’ve got better cards to play: you’ve got a team with startup experience, and a defensible new product, with some intellectual property, and it looks like an attractive market. That makes you able to set a stronger valuation, and maybe — we hope — still make it an attractive offer to investors. So maybe you say you’re valuing it at $1.5 million. You’re offering investors one third of your company for $500K.

So there’s a quick and (I hope) simple summary of how you set the initial (pre-money) valuation when you want to attract investment.

In the real world, you know your so-called elevator speech and you use it when appropriate. Every time you do it, you and it get better. I’d recommend taking time out and working on it, but you probably won’t; you’re too busy. Think about it in the shower. Think about it when you’re stuck in traffic, or waiting in line. Rehearse it in your head.

That said, I’d like to focus in this post on elevator speeches as delivered by MBA students in venture competitions. I’ve seen a bunch of these, probably more than 100, but who’s counting. They’re fun to watch, and I’d think fun to compete in. But some students take them as torture.

The last one I watched had 20 competitors and a large clock, about six feet high, ticking off 60 seconds. Each 60 second speech ended with a very loud buzzer. No going overtime with that buzzer there.

Of the 20 competitors, three failed to get all the way through. They choked up, got caught on some phrase, panicked, and crashed. They stepped off the small podium with half the clock’s minute, and most of their memorized speech, left unspoken.

The moral: please don’t memorize your elevator speech. Not ever. It just doesn’t work. It’s at least 10 and maybe 100 times harder than knowing it thoroughly and rehearsing it well without ever trying to get the exact same words twice. You need to make points, not memorize a speech. Know your points, and their order.

You’re supposed to know your business and enjoy a minute to talk about it. Real businesses do.

Interesting moment: after the embarrassing failures in that last contest I watched, the moderator got up and asked if anybody else would like to try. His point was empathy, wow, it’s hard to make an elevator speech. But he didn’t make his point very well: there wasn’t a non-contestant entrepreneur in the room who wouldn’t have loved to have 60 seconds at the microphone with that audience. If you don’t like to talk about your business, find another business.

But you’re in a contest, you know this is coming, so practice. Use your computer and record, over and over, and listen.

Don’t rush.  Believe it or not, 60 seconds is plenty of time to describe that person with a situation, your unique abilities to come to the rescue, what your solution is, and what you want from your listener. Pause in between each of the four main points, breathe, and emphasize. Look at your listener.

You do have to make eye contact, but you don’t necessarily smile. Describing somebody with a problem isn’t always the right time to smile. If you start with some humor, then smile with that. Sincerity and conviction is a lot more important in an elevator speech than good looks and a smile and a twinkle in the eye. Trust your judgment.

If you dread it, relax, you’re young, it’s not just you; but take a deep breath, slow down, and enjoy it.

Read the other posts in this series.
Elevator Pitch Part 1: Personalize
Elevator Pitch Part 2: Why you?
Elevator Pitch Part 3: What you offer
Elevator Pitch Part 4: Finish strong

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)

This fourth of five parts in this series depends on who you are, where you are, and what you want. If you’ve personalized in the first part, sold yourself and/or your organization in the second, and established the attractiveness or suitability of the business offering in the third, it’s time to finish strong with a closing.

Your closing depends completely on context. What do you want from the person or people you’re talking to? The classic elevator speech context is a venture competition or when looking for investors. But there’s also the true elevator speech for the established company, simply describing your company to somebody who asked, with no real close.  Be honest, you’re not always asking for an order, even when you’re just chatting with the person in the next seat on the airplane. If you are trying to sell then do ask for the order. Seriously: “if you give me a card, I’ll send you a copy with an invoice.” Seriously: ask for the order.  “If you don’t like it, send it back. Here’s my card.”

For the venture competition or investment variety elevator speech, don’t try to convey too much information. Do establish in general terms where you are or what you want. “We’re looking for seed money of half a million dollars.” Or “We’re now raising round-two financing of three million dollars to be used for the mainstream marketing launch.” Or “we’re looking for serious marketing partners able to put money up front in return for privileged first-year pricing.” Or “we’re trying to establish a royalty relationship with an appropriate manufacturer.” And then, ask for a business card, and give one. “If you know anybody who might fit that bill, feel free to recommend us.” Or “please give me a call.” Don’t offer to send a business plan, and don’t ask directly when it’s about investment; reduce the awkwardness by suggesting that your audience might know somebody, not that your audience might invest.

Don’t talk terms in the elevator speech. Just establish what you want or need.

If you’re in a real elevator with a real potential investor, you probably soft pedal: “if you know anybody who might be interested, please pass this along. Or maybe you want a business card and permission to send a follow-up email.”

And if you’re doing an elevator speech in a business venture competition — close with an appropriate call for investment. Venture competitions are always keying on the would-be or hypothetical pitch to the investor, so make it clear. The better ones end up with something relatively definitive like a reference to seed capital or first-round equity investment. Stay general. Make them want more.

Read the other posts in this series.
Elevator Pitch Part 1: Personalize
Elevator Pitch Part 2: Why you?
Elevator Pitch Part 3: What you offer
Elevator Pitch Part 5: Delivery

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)

Now explain what that person or organization you’re selling to gets. You’ve personalized the need or want, identified your unique qualities to solve the problem, and now you have to put the need or want in concrete terms that anybody can see. For example:

For a Trunk Club member, when his wife says it’s time, or a new trip or new activity is coming up, or the mood strikes him, he just grabs the phone and calls his Trunk Club counselor. “I need more casual stuff for the golf course, or cargo pants for hiking, or two more slack and sports coat combinations.” She knows his size, knows what he likes, what his wife likes, and what he needs. The new clothes come three days later, with a complete money-back guarantee if he or his wife or partner don’t like them.

Business Plan Pro allows Jane jump into and out of her business plan at a moment’s notice whenever she wants. She can start with the core strategy and build it in blocks, planning while she goes, refining projections as needed. Business Plan Pro is built around a solid error-checked, financially and mathematically correct financial model, and a generalized set of suggestions for outlines, but is also completely flexible for adding and deleting topics and creating a unique business plan. Each task, whether topic or table, comes with easy to understand instructions and useful examples.

Email Center Pro lets a team share an email address like sales@ or info@ efficiently. Emails can be assigned to team members or not, and answered emails are processed and visible, and unanswered emails remain at the top until answered. Furthermore, it manages collections of snippets or text templates to build standard but flexibly customizable answers to frequently asked questions.

In each example here, following on the ones in my previous two posts, we should be able to see clearly how this meets the need or solves the problem. Forget features as much as possible, and illustrate benefits. You’ve already described the person with the situation, and built up your being able to solve it, so now it’s just about the solution. Stay focused and concentrated. People will get one or at the most two unique attributes of your business offering. Don’t confuse them with more.

Read the other articles in this series.
Elevator Pitch Part 1: Personalize
Elevator Pitch Part 2: Why you?
Elevator Pitch Part 4: Finish strong
Elevator Pitch Part 5: Delivery

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)

In the next part of your elevator pitch address ‘why you’? Why your business? What’s special about you that makes your offering or solution interesting to the target person or organization you just identified (Part 1 of this series).

This is where you bring in your background, your core competence, your track record, your management team, or whatever. For example:

The Trunk Club invented the best-possible solution to this problem. Founder Joanna Van Vleck first succeeded in sales at Nordstrom’s and then took her personalized shopping-for-other style into a hugely successful first market in Bend, OR. Now, having proven the idea on the front lines …

Palo Alto Software has dedicated itself to business planning for more than 20 years. Its founder is one of the best-known experts in the field. Its current management team grew up with business planning, in the trenches. The 8-person development team has more than 50 person years in the same focused area.

Palo Alto Software has been managing this email problem internally for more than 10 years now, and has been working with its own in-house solution for nine years. It has a very strong relationship with hundreds of thousands of small but growing businesses.

What we focus on here is core competence and differentiation. And, in the classic elevator speech, you have to say it fast. You make your point quickly and go on.

Make sure your point is the right point: benefits to the target customer. It’s not what’s great about you, but rather, what about you lends credibility to your ability to meet the need and solve the problem.

I’ve included two different paragraphs for the same company on purpose. See how the unique qualifications differ for different contexts. It’s the same company, but in the second example it’s relating its speech to Business Plan Pro, the flagship product. In the third example it’s building up Email Center Pro, the new product. The descriptions have to change for each.

You might also think of this as the classic “what do you bring to the party?” question. It’s not just your brilliance or good looks or great track record, it’s fostering credibility for solving the problem.

Its members grab the phone and call. “I need more casual stuff for the golf course, or cargo pants for hiking, or two more slacks and sports coat combinations.”

Read the other articles in this series.
Elevator Pitch Part 1: Personalize
Elevator Pitch Part 3: What you offer
Elevator Pitch Part 4: Finish strong
Elevator Pitch Part 5: Delivery

(Reposted with permission from Planning Startups Stories)

If you can’t say it in 60 seconds, you have a problem. Your strategy isn’t clear enough. Nowadays we call it “the elevator pitch,” meaning a quick description of the business that you could do in the time you share with a stranger in an elevator. It’s becoming popular in the everyday language of the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the teaching of entrepreneurship.

I don’t think its academic. I think it’s important. I think it’s a great exercise that everybody in business should be able to do. Let’s get simple, let’s get focused, let’s get powerful.

I’ve been writing lately about the heart of the plan, also called the strategy. What better way to condense it than in a quick elevator speech. If you can’t do it, worry.

Start your speech with a person (or business, or organization) in a situation. Personalize. Identify clearly. For example:

John Jones doesn’t particularly care about clothes but he knows he has to look good. He sees clients every day in the office, and he lives in a ritzy suburb, where he often sees clients by accident on weekends. But he hates to shop for clothes (The Trunk Club).

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Jane Smith wants to do her own business plan. She knows her business and what she wants to do, but wants help organizing the plan and getting the right pieces together. The plan needs to look professional because she’s promised to show it to her bank as part of the merchant account process (Business Plan Pro).

Paul and Milena live in a beautiful apartment in Manhattan, with their two kids. Paul has a great job in Soho, Milena works from home, and neither has time for food shopping (Just Fresh).

Acme Consulting has five people managing several shared email addresses: info@example.com, sales@example.com, and admin@example.com. The five of them have trouble not stepping on each other. Sometimes a single email gets answered three or four times, with different answers. Sometimes an email goes unanswered for days, because everybody thinks somebody else answered it (Email Center Pro).

Notice that in each of these examples I could be much more general. The Trunk Club targets mainly men who don’t like to shop but need to dress well, and have enough money to pay for the service. Business Plan Pro is for the do-it-yourselfer who wants good business planning. Email Center Pro is for companies managing shared email addresses like sales@ or info@. But instead of generally describing a market, I’ve made it personal.

Sometimes you can get away with generalizing. “Farmers in the Willamette Valley,” for example, or “parents of gifted children.” It’s an easy way to slide into describing a market. However, I suspect that you’re almost always better off starting with a more readily imaginable single person, and let that person stand for your target market.

Read the other articles in this series.
Elevator Pitch Part 2: Why you?
Elevator Pitch Part 3: What you offer
Elevator Pitch Part 4: Finish strong
Elevator Pitch Part 5: Delivery

You are if you don’t have a business plan first.

Seriously: how can you boil it down to the core if you don’t know your basic strategy such as your identity, market, and focus? How can you set a scale to it without some idea of reasonable expectations in sales? How can you possibly talk about investment without having figured out how much you need, for what, and what kind of return you’re aiming for?

This comes up more these days because people seem to be confusing the output of the plan — whether it’s formal document, or simple pitch, or something in between — with the planning.

Simply put, not every business needs the full formal plan, but every business needs a plan. Think through and write down (not necessarily on paper, probably on a computer, but somewhere) your core strategy, assumptions, review schedule, dates, deadlines, task responsibilities, and (pause here for breath) basic business numbers. Those basic business numbers are the sales forecast, expense forecast including personnel, startup costs, and startup funding.

Sure, a 60-second elevator pitch is a pretty short piece of information, but people expect it to contain some significant foundations. And, if you think about it for even 60 seconds, the way you figure out how much money you need is by doing those basic numbers and tying them together. You can’t just spout a figure without risking a follow-up question. What are you going to spend that money on? How are you valuing the company right now? What’s your exit strategy? What kind of returns can you talk about?

Take for example the question of how much money you need. You add up your starting costs, subtract what resources you already have, then project sales and expenses and add what it’s going to take to meet expenses during the early months, when sales are just starting.

Or as another example, your target market. Can you describe your ideal customer and can you explain in a few seconds who isn’t your target market? What if you’re asked what you’re not doing? What about your strategic focus or assumptions or whatever.

So don’t say you don’t need a plan because you’re just doing a pitch. You can’t do a decent pitch without knowing first what you’re saying. Without a plan, you’re pitching naked.

And, having said (or written that), I’m going to use this as an introduction to a five-part series on the elevator pitch, starting with part 1 soon. Stay tuned to this channel.

When I first entered the job market, all my advisors all stressed, over and over again, to be sure my résumé had no misspellings or grammatical errors. They said that employers have to screen hundreds of job applications, and would use any good reason or bad excuse to toss out an applicant. Misspellings and language usage mistakes show a lack of attention to detail at best, or worse, sloppy carelessness. Reason enough to not want that applicant as an employee.

Today I want to stress the importance of spell checking and editing your business plan. Banks, lenders, VCs and others are wary of lending any of their cash right now. Misspellings and language errors in business plans are reason enough to not want to invest in, or finance a business applicant.

Here are some short summaries from, and links to, blog posts about the importance of editing your business-planning documents.

Don’t depend exclusively on your software spell checker
First, always use your spell check software. Second, don’t trust it. We have all become complacent, trusting our software spelling and grammar check tools. These certainly help us find misspelled words, but they will let a properly spelled, incorrect word sail right on through. In writing a business plan, or in any of your other business communications for that matter, this type of error can kill your deal, sink your financing, turn away your customer.

One of my favorite examples of properly spelled incorrect words is Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (Little Red Riding Hood). “Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist.” (Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived with her mother in a little cottage on the edge of a large, dark forest.)

Grammar Rules!
We are all rather casual in our day-to-day conversations where we imply and infer much from nuances in voice tone, body posture, gestures, context, etc., but when applied to written documents, this habit has ruined many businesses, partnerships, and friendships.

• Don’t use no double negatives. Don’t never use no triple negatives.
• No sentence fragments
• Corollary: Complete sentences: important.
• Take care that your verb and subject is in agreement.
• Keep your ear to the grindstone, your nose to the ground, take the bull by the horns of a dilemma, and stop mixing your metaphors.

Gittin you grammatchicals ko-rec
In one piece from Pogo’s Double Sundae, by Walt Kelly, the characters are discussing grammar — a subject pertinent to business plans, business writing and business presentations.

“A octopus did got him? Is that grammatiwackle?”
“As grammacklewack as rain… “is got” is the present aloofable tense an “did got” is past particuticle.”
“…Mighty strange. My teachers allus learnt me that the past inconquerable tense had a li’l’ more body to it.”
“Course what he ought to holler is OCTOPOTMUS IS GOT ME!”
“He could of hollered OCTOPOTS DID GOT ME!”
“That’d be more the past invokable tense–only for use ‘gainst elephants an’ other dry type game.”
“Then, in that case he’d of hollered ELEPHUMPS DID GOT ME!”
“I’d use the present indictible tense more like this — RHINOCKWURSTS DONE IS GOT ME!”
“The future provokable would be better — more like HIPPOLOLLIPOPS IS GONE GOT ME!”

Exquisite humor…unless you find it in a business plan or presentation.

About words
English is difficult to learn and use properly, whether it is your birth tongue or a second language. Incorrect or ambiguous usage can cause you, your business plan, and your company no end of problems. It has numerous unique word categories for which we, characteristically, have special words. Here are just a few:

• Homonyms(1): Words that have the same spelling but different meanings, such as fleet (a group of ships) and fleet (swift).
• Homonyms(2): Words which sound the same but have different spellings and different meanings; there, their, and they’re being, perhaps, the most abused.
• Synonyms: Words which are different but convey the same or almost the same meaning, such as a business, a company, a venture, an enterprise, a corporation, etc.
• Palindromes: Words, phrases or passages that read the same forward or backward. “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.”
• Onomatopoeia: The formation or use of words that imitate the sound of the object or action, such as “hiss” or “buzz.”
• Malapropisms: The unintentional use of a wrong, similar sounding word, especially when the effect is ridiculous. “Be careful when forecasting profit and loss, that you properly deprecate assets.”

“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word“
The full version of the following story can be found on several Internet sites.

“At New York’s Kennedy airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, and a calculator.”

The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security believe the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-Gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed. They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in a search of absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like “x” and “y”, and, although they are frequently referred to as “unknowns”, we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country…”

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug.”

The story above is also a cautionary tale about spell checker software, and the almost-right word. Everything in that story is spelled correctly, but many words are very incorrect in the context of Homeland Security.

If you make similar mistakes in the business plan you submit, the bank, the investors, the venture competition judges, or your MBA professors will also get a good laugh … and keep right on chuckling as they send your plan to the Out box.

“This is a quality product!”
Every product, every service, everything has a quality (noun). What is missing from claims like this is an adjective distinguishing exactly what quality is being touted.

• High quality
• Indifferent quality
• Good quality
• Dubious quality
• Fair quality
• Export quality
• Premium quality
• Middling quality
• Top-drawer quality
• POS quality
• Craftsman quality
• Discount quality

Give your product or service a few superlative adjectives — if they are deserved.
Of course, you may not want (or be able, legally) to use high-quality adjectives for your product. So go ahead. Leave them out. But we’ll still know the quality…it’s scrappy.

So, choose your words carefully as you conduct your business. Proofread your plan. Have someone who wasn’t involved in writing the plan read it over. Implement the edit suggestions you receive. Correct spelling and editing are fundamental.