{"id":92,"date":"2009-03-30T21:18:39","date_gmt":"2009-03-31T01:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sammy\/?p=92"},"modified":"2009-06-24T21:23:40","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T01:23:40","slug":"article-summary-how-to-write-a-great-business-plan-by-sahlman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/2009\/03\/30\/article-summary-how-to-write-a-great-business-plan-by-sahlman\/","title":{"rendered":"Article Summary: &#8220;How to Write a Great Business Plan&#8221; by Sahlman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>This is a summary I have written for Sahlman\u2019s article \u201cHow to Write a Great Business Plan\u201d, originally as part of my Harvard Innovation and Business Transformation class assignment.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Business plans are not a good predictor of a venture&#8217;s ultimate success. There are many unknown factors that influence revenue and profit, making financial projection beyond a year irrelevant. Unjustified optimism also adds to the inaccuracy, so projection numbers should appear in the form of business model and be used to demonstrate the drivers of the venture&#8217;s success and failure. <strong>Investors systematically look for the following in new businesses: Competent, experienced people who can execute, attractive business model with a large\/growing market, favorable context and possible positive intervention, and finally, manageable risks.<\/strong> Sophisticated, experienced investors are more likely to help a company to solve its problems. Acquiring enough capital is essential, and should be treated as a dynamic process that consist of a series of experiments to assist decision making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a summary I have written for Sahlman\u2019s article \u201cHow to Write a Great Business Plan\u201d, originally as part of my Harvard Innovation and Business Transformation class assignment. Business plans are not a good predictor of a venture&#8217;s ultimate success. There are many unknown factors that influence revenue and profit, making financial projection beyond [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6260,439],"tags":[749,1422],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews-summaries","category-harvard","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-strategy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sammy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}