Depend­ing on who you lis­ten to, a busi­ness plan is either a waste of your time or an essen­tial doc­u­ment. A good com­pro­mise could be Peter Hilton’s idea to cre­ate a con­cise, icon-based busi­ness plan visu­al­i­sa­tion:

Inspired by the sim­plic­ity and suc­cess of the Cre­ative Com­mons icons, which con­dense pages of infor­ma­tion that no one ever reads into an easily-understandable sym­bol accom­pa­nied by a sen­tence of text, Peter pro­poses to apply that exact same logic to busi­ness plans. In real­ity many sub­mit­ted busi­ness plans are sim­ply not read by investors – they are too long, too bor­ing, or too con­vo­luted. Nat­u­rally, the entre­pre­neurs who write them want to go into as much detail as pos­si­ble in their plans while the investors that read them just want to see the very core points.

In his talk pre­sent­ing the idea (pdf, local mir­ror), Hilton pro­poses a series of icon-description pairs for a num­ber of busi­ness plan sections:

  • About the team (e.g. We can build the prod­uct — our CTO is a genius).
  • The idea (e.g. We plan to exe­cute a proven concept).
  • The prod­uct or ser­vice (e.g. We have a demo or prototype).
  • Rev­enue mod­els (e.g. We plan to mon­e­tise our ser­vice later on).
  • Fund­ing (e.g. We need series A funding).
  • Part­ner­ships (e.g. We need an investor with a busi­ness network).
  • Return on invest­ment (e.g. We have a cash-flow prognosis).

The idea was appar­ently not intended to be taken seri­ously, but it seems to solve a problem.

Update: Hilton’s now cre­ated the Plan Cruncher.