For a specific example, think about graphic artists, consultants, attorneys, accountants, bookkeepers, restaurants, and so on. Somebody comes up to me after a talk, saying he or she can’t be a graphic artist because there are so many of them, and I say of course you can. Do it.

These are displacement businesses. They’re looking to pick up some of a market that already exists. They churn. New restaurants appear, old restaurants go under. There is lots of opportunity.

You don’t have to be alone in any market. Nobody is the only one out there. You don’t have to be first. And just because there are a lot of other people offering similar services doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed. And if nobody else at all is doing it, maybe you should get a clue.

Do what you do well. Give value. Open up the doors on time, answer phone calls, get stuff done. And you can succeed.

In the world of entrepreneurship we talk too much, in classes, books, blogs, and so on, about the interesting new businesses. As if every new business needed a new idea. Start in an existing business, and displace the ones that aren’t doing well. Do it better.

(Image credit: istockphoto.com)

To be honest, I thought it was a joke; irony, perhaps, or sarcasm. But no, to my surprise, I clicked on Love Your Business More Than Your Family, a column on entrepreneur.com, and he’s serious. Author George Cloutier says:

Your cell phone is for keeping in touch with clients and sales managers in the field, not for taking calls from your spouse throughout the day about what groceries to pick up on the way home. Cutting out early to take your kids to baseball practice three times a week, or picking up your Aunt Tilly or Uncle Ned from the airport, are unacceptable interruptions to success.

You can keep doing these things and waste dozens of hours each week. Or you can focus on the financial future of your business and work all day, every day. You are the only person responsible for fixing your business and making it better, and that isn’t going to happen while you take 14 personal phone calls a day and attend local Cub Scout meetings three-times a week.

That is extremely bad advice. I have absolutely nothing against George Cloutier. I’m even a fellow columnist on the same entrepreneur.com site, where I do a column on business planning. But sheesh, how can I read that, and not write about it? What would Bob Sutton (author of the book on business a**holes) say about this?

How

That’s where I’ve put up a full curriculum/syllabus including lesson plans, exercises and assignments, online videos, and even more than a dozen PowerPoint slide presentations complete with slide-by-slide notes and distribution-friendly photos and graphics.

This is material I’ve worked on for years, originally just for my own use as I taught a course in starting a business for undergrads at the University of Oregon. I’m not going to be teaching that course this spring, after 11 years of it, because I’m more involved with angel investment via the Willamette Angel Conference. But I do want to make it available to others. Why not?

The whole curriculum is free to professors on that site. And, just so you understand the motivation, yes, the coursework requires Business Plan Pro, Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and my books the Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, and 3 Weeks to Startup (co-authored with Sabrina Parsons). So my company,

eBook wars, you say? On one hand, it’s about time. On the other, wow, this is strategy in action. And interesting spectacle too. That’s why in athletics the championship games are more interesting: two big winners squaring off.

Mashable lead over the weekend with Apple vs. Amazon: The Great Ebook War Has Already Begun, a post by Ben Parr, whose work I like a lot. It was posted Saturday. It’s about amazon and Macmillan. It’s hard to tell who’s making the move on whom here, but the announcement was that amazon.com was removing Macmillan books from its web store:

According to the New York Times, the reason the books were pulled was the iPad. Macmillan told Amazon that it wanted to change its pricing and compensation agreement, upping the price of some books from $9.99 to $15 and splitting sales 70/30, the same model Apple uses for the iPhone app store and its upcoming iBooks store. Amazon’s apparent response was to flex its muscle and pull countless Macmillan books off the virtual shelves.

Last Friday I posted how the competition is win-win for all sides. We get a choice: Kindle books, just text, for one price, or Apple iBook books (pizazz) for a higher price. You get to decide. Ah, the magic of commerce.

But with amazon.com and Macmillan biting off each other’s noses, it’s not so clear. Ben Parr

Measurement, metrics, and accountability are everything. Except when they aren’t.

Yes, I contradict myself. No, I don’t mind. Contradiction and paradox are reality in business as in life. As soon as you develop a general rule, you find exceptions.

And I have posted here both the magic of metrics, and do we undervalue marketing we can’t measure. Like the old folk song says, both sides now.

So with that in the background I read with relish Management by Imagination on the Harvard Business Review’s The Conversation blog. Here’s the lead:

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count”; “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”; “If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen”? We like these sayings because they’re comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of

(Note: This is part 3 of my planning fundamentals review. Here are the links to Part 1: Form Follows Function and Part 2: All Business Plans are Wrong.)

Cash flow is the most important mystery you have to solve. Cash flow is the real heart beat of business. And unfortunately, cash flow isn’t intuitive. It’s tricky.

We think in profits. It’s part of our culture. Take the sales and subtract the costs and expenses, and if the result is positive, then hooray, we’re okay.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. Because of the accounting rules, sales are sales we made for this month, and costs are what it cost us to produce what we sold this month, and expenses are what we incurred this month. But–and here’s the brutal mystery and trickery of it–we might have paid those costs and expenses months ago; and we might not get paid for those sales until months from now.

So we can easily be profitable and broke. Not intuitive, but it happens a lot. Most produce businesses need to spend on building or buying the product, plus packaging, assembly, and distribution, long before they can sell it. And most business-to-business sales involve waiting months to get paid.

If we could only get the research to prove it, we’d find that a surprising

There’s a sudden increase in what they’re now calling Boomerangers, according to MarketingCharts.com, in Young Adult ‘Boomerangers’ Head Home in Numbers:

More than one in 10 US parents with grown children say at least one of their adult sons or daughters has moved back home in the past year after living away, according to research by the Pew Research Center, which found that the recent recession has created a bumper crop of “boomerangers,” particularly between ages 18 and 34.

Why do we in the United States act like there’s something wrong with single adults living with their parents? That happens a lot in most other countries, and nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with it. Here, however, there’s stigma attached.

Why? Single people living along vs. single people living with parents … who says one way is better than the other?

One thing most other cultures do better than ours is simple integration of generations.We separate generations. Kids with parents, teenagers with other teenagers, then college students, then single adults. Older people go into homes for older people.

Aside from the U.S., I’ve lived in Mexico, and I’ve lived in Austria. In both of those countries a lot of single adults end up living with their parents after college. It’s often a win-win situation.

I”m pushing getting going today, with the idea of starting a new business. Some highlights:

1.  Don’t wait until all the lights are green before you pull out of the driveway.
2. The right business for you is one that matches who you are, what you like to do–but always with the eye on what people need, want and will pay money for.
3. Do focus from the beginning on giving value, offering something people want to buy.
4. Don’t get lost in the details in the beginning; think about directions, which way to go, without having to have every step set in detail.
5. Major error: not having all the people involved in the start all understand who does what and who owns what. Get this agreed upon and written down in detail. Never underestimate the value of having a written document, in normal business non-legalese terms, that sets these basic agreements down so everybody can see them.
6. Avoid trying to offer the lowest price. Offer value first, and price accordingly. Low-cost, high-unit strategies require a lot of capital.
7. Find a good business lawyer you can trust. That doesn’t mean you don’t research your legal options yourself and cut down legal costs by knowing the basics before you start, so you can ask questions and understand the options; but you want a relationship with a lawyer.
8. The most important concept in marketing is focusing on a well-defined target market. This is especially true at the beginning.
9. Match your strengths and weaknesses. Do what you do

Of all the “best of” blog posts I’ve seen this month, Bob Sutton’s Work Matters: The Best of 2009 posts is the best.

No coincidence, I suppose, that he writes very well and has a great blog, teaches at Stanford, and is author of several important books. But there are other great blogs around.

What I really like about Bob’s best list is that he goes month by month, specifies one particular post for each month, and — really nice touch — he also comments on the comments.

So his list is a great read. Bob writes about work matters, the whole no A**hole thread, and smart business.

This is one of those classic “do as I say, not as I did” posts. As our the company grew, so did I– around the middle.

I’d been pretty good about regular exercise before then. But when our business took off, I couldn’t wait to get into the office early, get my coffee, and start my work. And I woke up early, eager to go. And I had trouble going to sleep. Sometimes it was worry, sometimes excitement, a lot of times just plain loving my work, but always, it was lots of things to do.  Helicopter mind kept me awake. The computer and the coffee were irresistible, and exercise and sleep totally resistible.

I’m not talking about a few days during crunch time. This was years. I’ve recovered again, taking care of myself again for about three years now. And I can tell you, from my own experience, that it’s way easier to maintain a minimum level of exercise than to let go completely and then try to recover later.

And the metrics? Yes, the damned bathroom scale. There were some years there in which my measurements on that metric grew in proportion to our sales.

All of this was preventable. Here’s where you should do as I say, and not as I did. Don’t give up regular exercise for your business, no matter how exciting, or stressful, good, or bad, the business. The time you spend on exercise, you get back in productivity. And manage the stress.

I’ve learned all this the hard way, by doing it wrong. I’m better now, thanks; I figured it out, finally. But just 2-3 years ago, and I did it wrong for about 12 years. I am doing as I suggest these days. But I regret all those years I did

I really like how they’re specifying the business plan for the contest. This may not be the final version, so check with Howie or the Duke Startup Challenge website; but here’s the rough idea we talked about last night :

• No more than 10 pages of text.
• The main financial tables (startup costs, pro-forma income, pro-forma cash flow, and pro-forma balance sheet) should be included but don’t count against the 10 pages.
• Business charts, bar charts, line graphics, pie charts and so on don’t count against the 10-page limit.

As a frequent reader of business plans, and a frequent judge of business plan contests, I like this. Yes, the length of plans should be limited for the contests, but way too often the limit means that we lose the important financials. And I love having the financials made visual with some good bar charts.

Not that the 10 pages of text couldn’t be 15 or maybe even 20 (although I’d rather have 15 than 20, and 10 is fine). But without special treatment for the tables and charts, they are the first thing that the plans leave out; and the worst thing to leave out.

I am very impressed, by the way, with the Duke Entrepreneurship Program, and the startup challenge, and a really intriguing social entrepreneurship class I visited, taught by Christopher Gergen. The questions,

I’ve been thinking about this Free business a lot. There’s Chris Anderson’s book Free, and the debate around it. There’s free content everywhere. I find great free photos on Flickr. I read free blogs every day.

It’s not like free is all that new. I grew up with free radio and television, funded by advertising. And the free prize in the Cracker Jacks package. And free weekends for people naive enough to think they weren’t just an opportunity for sales pitching the condos. Free drinks, free lunches, and free seminars were never really free.

I compete against free. Since 1995 I’ve made my living with software that’s for sale, not free. It gets pirated a lot. And it competes with a lot of free stuff.

And I market with free. My company’s business plan resource site  Bplans.com is free. My last book, which sells in bookstores and Amazon.com as a book, is also free for reading from start to finish at PlanAsYouGo.com. I’ve done about 2,000 blog posts since 2007, all for free.

Still, today, in this new world, you still have to be able to distinguish real free, like a great photo on

(I posted most of this in 2007, but it’s even more important now)

Business plans are always wrong. That’s because we’re human. Business plans predict the future. We humans are dismally inaccurate when predicting the future.

Paradox: nonetheless, planning is vital. Planning means starting with the plan and then tracking, reviewing progress, watching plan vs. actual results, correcting the course without losing sight of the long-term destination. Planning is a process, like walking or steering, that involves constant corrections.

• The plan sets a marker. Without it we can’t track how we were wrong, in what direction, and when, and with what assumptions.
• Use this marker to manage the constant conflict between short-term problems and long-term goals. You don’t just implement a plan, no matter what. You work that plan. Use it to maintain your vision of progress towards the horizon, while dealing with the everyday problems, putting out fires.
• So the plan may be wrong, but the planning process is vital.

The truth is that forecasting is hard. Nobody likes forecasting. But

Two things strike me about this: first, that it’s there now, and the Mac version is coming. You can put your name on a list to be alerted when that’s available. Second, business ideas are like this. When I was posting about it a few months ago, amazon.com was already working on it. It was that obvious. Which shows again that the thing to do with a good idea is implement. Make it happen. Don’t think the idea itself has any

(Author note: I’ve been asked to go over some business planning fundamentals, and maybe collect those into a series. Consider this a first installment.)

Your business plan isn’t necessarily a document; it’s what you want to do in your business or organization, what’s supposed to happen, and why. It’s a combination of goals, directions, long-term strategy, and, more important, dates, deadlines, steps, tasks, responsibilities, and basic numbers.

Don’t confuse output with plan. That business plan document is just output. So too are the elevator speech, the summary presentation, the pitch, and the summary memo. They’re just the latest output.

So how long is a business plan? Long enough to serve your business needs. How well edited, formatted, and presented? Enough to serve your business’ needs.

Think about the difference between the business plan document requested by a potential investor and the business plan document requested by a banker, and the business plan you create because you want to manage your company better. Who’s the audience? What’s the business purpose?

I like this (and you can quote me on this, because if I heard it from somebody else, or read it somewhere, I’m sorry; I’ve forgotten. I think it’s original) because it is important:

You don’t measure a business plan in pages. You measure it in business results.

I don’t believe in the business plan in your head, or the one-page business plan, because neither of these serves the