Do you really need all these plans?
Yesterday I had discussion with my good friend who is a vice president of marketing in a big corporation. I asked his opinion about my business and he answered that it is bullshit. He said I will never be successful because I have no mandatory documents that every business must have to be successful. Documents like detailed plan of development the company, strategy of entering the market, plan of positioning in the minds of customers, calculations of financial flows and all other documents which like to require banks and investment companies. So I wrote this answer to his argument.
All marketing textbooks hammer in to their readers that the most important thing for the development of a company is a detailed strategy, well-developed positioning plans in the minds of customers, entering the market, financial flows, etc.
But if we descend from the heights in which abstruse theorists hover, and look at the real world, on how real companies grope their way to success, we will find that almost everyone succeeded in those areas where they did not even think about moving at the beginning of their development. I will not even mention that the absolute majority of successful companies were not the first attempts to start a business for their owners, and all previous attempts had died and remained in obscurity. Lets see how the world famous companies began.
After the founding of Microsoft, Bill Gates could not even think about the fact that his company would dominate the global office software market, he began from development the BASIC interpreter for the firmware of one of the then-released computers, and continued with the release of an operating system clone. That is, no strategy, in those terms in which it is now required from marketers and startupers, he did not have at all.
Sakichi Toyoda started his business with the invention of an automatic loom. He founded the Toyota company 13 years later, when he was already a successful businessman and rich enough to invest in the automotive business.
The authors of Flickr planned it as a tool for storing screenshots from their MMO game Game Neverending and no one at the beginning planned to make it a separate business, and no one expected that it grows so huge and become so successful. They never panned to develop a world famous photo hosting with social connections.
Nokia started from production of paper, then started to produce electricity and electrical cables, then started production of rubber products, then shoes, then TVs and other electrical goods, then digital switches, and only in 1987, 122 years after its foundation, Nokia introduced its first mobile phone. Something this 122 year long wanderings does not look like a clear business plan with a clear, well-developed strategy.
I don’t mean that any plans are senseless. I want to say don’t make plans that you don’t need, write in your plans only useful things, don’t write more detailed plans than you need. For example I provide custom software development service, I don’t need so detailed plans as people write for investors because I don’t need for investments. I don’t need so detailed description of marketing strategy as write retailers when they launching a new brand of soap. I don’t need any calculations of financial flows because structure of my expenses and income are so primitive that it is possible to describe them in several lines. This is a known mistake in software development. People reading books about how to develop a huge software system and then start to write a primitive software calculator by using of all these hundreds of documents which needed for development of something like Microsoft Windows or Oracle RDBMS. I guess they never start to write the calculator because they get tired somewhere in the middle of writing of some very important big plan which is definitely required in Rational Unified Development Process or some other monstrous set of documents which required for development of huge software systems.
