Burn the Business Plan Quotes

“Reality suggests that the value of this type of detailed and rigid planning is minimal. Most entrepreneurs dig right in, start their businesses, and plan as they go along. Success won’t yield to a plan. Rather, success is more likely the product of the entrepreneur’s motivation, experiences, and readiness to learn and adapt—a path that reveals itself only after he takes the leap of faith in the first place.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“As you read this, about nine million Americans are thinking about starting a company. On average, they will kick the idea around for at least three years. Only about 500,000 will start new companies this year. Starting a business is an exciting prospect. Yet, as the numbers suggest, many shrink from choosing to become entrepreneurs.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Many entrepreneurs have told me they retreat to a quiet mental space where they can work through a problem away from the hubbub.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“While every coach and every startup manager has to make decisions on the fly, there are tricks that can help you in managing through the chaos. The first is to make brutally efficient use of your time, and figure out a way to get as much of it as you can. In the last minutes of a tied championship game, with thousands of fans yelling and all your players desperately looking to you for the right play, managing the clock is critical. Every coach caught up in a tight game knows that the best weapon can be a “time out,” where she can change the flow of the game, disrupt the other team’s momentum, and re-establish her own strategy.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Great entrepreneurs start companies to grow companies, not to sell companies.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Eighty percent of firms fail before getting to the magic ten-year mark when, on average, they become self-sustaining and begin to experience scale growth. Those that survive are seldom sold. Over ninety percent of twenty-year-old firms are still owned by their founders.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“There is something in the success of a new venture that correlates with the motivations of the entrepreneurs. From the outset, most successful entrepreneurs know they are creating businesses that will define their lives—and not just by how much money they might make. Without this intense personal connection to the idea behind the company, a startup founder will have a hard time summoning the persistence necessary to plow through the inevitable rough patches. And persistence, we know, is one of the hallmarks of successful entrepreneurs.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Of the thirty percent of startups that survive past five years, most are not profitable until they reach their seventh anniversary. Successful companies that go public sell shares on average after they are more than eleven years old.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The difference between those who succeed and those who fail seems, in large measure, to be an individual’s inherent sense of how the innovation process works and how to implement that process. Good ideas take time to appear and be refined. They emerge slowly from what the innovator already knows, reflecting his ability to plug diverse pieces of technology or information together in new ways. Once a new idea has crystallized, it feeds the ongoing synthetic process. Innovation begets innovation. Again, this is why so many entrepreneurs are in their forties when their inspiration comes. Years of exposure to relevant technologies have shown them how innovations unfold from combinations of existing products and processes to make something new. And, once entrepreneurs like this have one good idea, they are more likely to have others.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“While it is hardly a “law of entrepreneurship,” a good rule of thumb is that great ideas always find sufficient capital to be realized.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Loyalty is a paramount consideration in deciding to keep an employee. Startups are yeasty places that breed ambition. You must be watchful that a highly self-regarding employee doesn’t attempt to run away with your idea, customers, co-workers, or investors. Any seasoned investor, myself included, has seen a variation of this scenario enough times to know that honest dealing does not always pertain in startups.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Your people will and should command more attention than any other resource. With no room for error, you have to select and manage your first hires with great care.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“knowing whether your startup will survive and then flourish generally takes from seven to ten years.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Yet, contrary to a commonly held view, studies show that entrepreneurs are more risk-averse than the population at large.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Strategic decision-making in most large corporations generally is reactive.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The planning process in a startup can be described more accurately as situational decision making, an imperfectly informed, just-in-time, default strategy. The rapid and likely erratic evolution of events in a startup is so unpredictable that any other type of planning just won’t work. Entrepreneurs must make decisions—often ones that prove, in retrospect, to have been of enormous strategic importance—on the spur of the moment, with little or no information, let alone algorithmic analyses of likely outcomes of one decision versus another.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“For startups, this type of strategic planning is useless. A startup exists to search for its niche in the market; then, its founder’s initial idea, once tested and revised, will determine if the new company will even have a history.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Every big company has a history that defines what it makes, the industry in which it competes, its relationship with customers, and its historic growth rates. In big companies, planning is strategy. It is the formalized process, well understood by all involved, of how companies determine which paths to choose to achieve corporate goals. Thus, if the question is whether to build a more efficient factory, to invest in more innovation relating to a specific product, to jettison a line of business, or to acquire a competitor, such alternatives can be quantified and evaluated, one against the other, using financial and risk measures.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“As we’ve now seen time and again, the secret lies not in writing formal plans. Planning, however, is a critical skill for every successful entrepreneur.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“An aspiring entrepreneur who spends a year in an incubator is no more likely to start a company than those entrepreneurs who skip the incubator and go directly about the business of organizing a new company. Because the culture of incubators is designed to be encouraging, supportive, and mostly uncritical, an aspiring entrepreneur can spend weeks and months working on ideas that previously have been tried and failed or that have little prospect for market appeal. In that environment, it seems less, not more, likely that an aspirant will confront the reality of business startups and redirect his energy to potentially more productive work.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“An aspiring entrepreneur who spends a year in an incubator is no more likely to start a company than those entrepreneurs who skip the incubator and go directly about the business of organizing a new company. Because the culture of incubators is designed to be encouraging, supportive, and mostly uncritical, an aspiring entrepreneur can spend weeks and months working on ideas that previously have been tried and failed or that have little prospect for market appeal.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Consider that Rice University’s business plan competition—the Super Bowl of such contests—awards in some years as much as $3 million of prize money, mostly in the form of offers of capital from wealthy investors. More than a thousand entrepreneurs apply to compete, but only forty-four are invited to Houston for the finals. Tellingly, only about thirty-five percent of all winners of the Rice competition have ever started a company. What little follow-up data exists on other university competitions suggests that an even lower percentage of those contestants turn their plans into startups.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The presumed strength of patent protection in the United States has been gradually eroding in the face of multiple challenges, including from foreign competitors whose home jurisdictions may not recognize U.S. patent validity. For a startup, protecting and defending against patent infringement can involve expensive litigation that can drag on for years, a kiss of death for a lean startup and a system that now operates in favor of large companies that can afford teams of expensive lawyers. Is there a better way to mitigate the risk of having your idea stolen? Increasingly the answer lies in developing your idea very carefully, testing markets as quietly as possible, and working through your startup’s production and distribution mechanisms in anticipation of an all-in start, one that makes clear your intent to own the market that your innovation is targeting.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Changing focus early to exploit a better idea often is the best way to mitigate the risk of failing. This is yet another reason not to have investors involved with your company until you have found a scale opportunity to exploit. If you have no choice but to bring on investors, minimizing their control can be very difficult.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Many of today’s best-known tech companies began with completely different futures in mind. YouTube started as a website for people looking for dates; they could post videos and relate a little about themselves. When that formula wasn’t working, its founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, decided that a wider audience might share videos of anything and everything.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“It is almost impossible to find a company that succeeded by making and marketing an unchanged version of its entrepreneur’s original idea. New companies, like their new products, do not spring from the head of Zeus, perfectly formed.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“But, the logic of invention is not absolute. Many inventions appear for which there is no need at all. Thousands of products that are invented every year solve problems that don’t really exist. No one needed the patented device to hard boil eggs into squares so they would be easier to slice, or a cell phone with the built-in razor.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“By their very nature, startups exist to bring new ideas to the market. In their quest for unique products, however, many entrepreneurs fall into what might be called the “technology trap.” Because technology permits something new to be accomplished, the entrepreneur presumes that a need for that something new will emerge. This often appears to be the “logic of invention.” The cell phone comes to mind. We didn’t know we needed it until it appeared.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“All startups face generic risks. Knowing this suggests a better way to improve your startup’s odds of success: Don’t focus on the specific risks, but anticipate the generic risks and attempt to mitigate or minimize their impact ahead of time.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The problem of analyzing startup failure with notional lists of reasons for startup failures is a snake biting its tail; a too-well-schooled entrepreneur may begin to see success as the product of cautiously steering his venture around potential land mines. The job of the entrepreneur from this perspective becomes one of not making mistakes, of keeping her company from failing. While every entrepreneur faces the task of nurturing her idea, focusing on failure avoidance is not a winning strategy.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do