A Live Book: Web Links
Some things change more often than a book is printed, so I keep the content alive and refreshed on the web. You’ve got the book as a guide, but let’s optimize.
This is the 21st century. I’m not pretending this book lives alone. As I wrote this I was working three blogs myself and contributing to three others as a guest expert. I only recently stopped running a company that lives and breathes web traffic, download sales, conversion rates, page views, visitors, and Google analytics. I was working with Microsoft Office on four computers and on three different office substitutes in the web world, where my documents live online, and I visit them from whichever computer I’m on.
Of course you get that, you’re here with me now on the website, so you can see what that means to you. It’s a new world now; everything changes so quickly. Happily, most of what I have to say will last but there also will be updates, new ideas, tools, and of course new stuff on my blogs and associated websites. That’s why you’re here. This is your portal to what else is happening in plan-as-you-go business planning.
I don’t expect this book to sit static on the shelf — I expect you to use it. And I don’t expect it to sit static as it is — I expect to update it constantly on the web, on my blogs, and as it flows through the world into other books, magazines, software, and so on.
Chapter updates
Please do check in here occasionally because I will be updating some chapters from time to time. After all, if we’re doing plan-as-you-go planning isn’t it also logical that we do write-as-you-go authorship? Things change, not just in your business, but also in the business of business planning.
Information sources
Links, resources, and references that come up in the book can also change; once again, we’re living in the real world here, so we have to deal with change. I’ll keep you updated through this site.
The plan-as-you-go business plan isn’t big on supporting information that slows down your process, but it is required in some cases, so I’ve set up the links to update information sources, such as market research pages, industry information, and standard financials, as they become out of date.
Software Optional, Not Required
You don’t need software to do plan-as-you-go business planning. This book is about the planning, how to do it, why, when, and how to work with the ideas, the people, the problems, the information, the decisions, and, of course, also the numbers. It isn’t about any particular software.
Planning doesn’t require any special computer programs. Plan-as-you-go planning is about results and management, not tools, so you can do it on the back of your hand as far as I’m concerned.
By the way, I am also the principle author of the software Business Plan Pro and conceptual co-author of LivePlan, both published by Palo Alto Software. I’m not going to talk much about that in this book, but I can at least assure you that whatever I’m suggesting you do can be done within that software.
Quick Action
Jump around. This book is written with that in mind. It’s not all sequential. If you want to get going immediately, do so. (I hope you saw the sidebar in the previous section.)
I don’t expect you to read this book from the first page to the last page. I’m not writing it that way and I don’t think you’d want to read it that way. This book is about your business, and when you think about your business, your thoughts jump. You go from sales forecast to some new slant on your strategy. One thing reminds you of another.
Please read the chapters in whatever order makes sense to you. I have put links and page references all over the book. Let a thought in one place take you to a different thought in a different place. That’s what’s supposed to happen.
To help you decide where to go when, I’ve tried to make the chapter titles and headings maps to the main points in the book.
Jumping Subjects
In his excellent book Meatball Sundae (Portfolio, 2007), Seth Godin points out the growing trend of shorter content, quick jumps of attention, as part of the world we now live in. Instant gratification. Keep it short, like blog posts. You don’t want to sit through a long lecture.
Business planning is a lot like that too. You can expect a lot of short subjects. Stories. Sidebars. I want to help you think about your business, what’s important, how to do it better. Planning isn’t sequential. Thinking comes in short bursts.
The Blogs
From the portal page, you’ll find links to other resources: updates, online tools, templates, the proverbial latest and greatest. And I also hope you’ll check in and look for what’s going on at my regular posting places too:
Planning, Startups, Stories. My first blog, sort of a flagship blog. That one gets a lot of my developing work on business planning, plus stories of real companies, including my own, mistakes, occasionally interesting videos, current events, and planning fundamentals.
My consolidated blog posts site at blog.timberry.com. My blog site that automatically consolidates my blog posts on my main blog, the bplans blog. Huffington Post, gust.com, SBA Industry Word, Entrepreneur.com, and other blogs.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
