How to Write a Great Business Plan

by William A. Sahlman

Harvard Business Review
Reprint 97409

Which information belongs – and which doesn’t – may surprise you.

How to Write a Great

by William A. Sahlman
Few areas of business attract as much attention as new ventures, and few aspects of new-venture creation attract as much attention as the business plan. Countless books and articles in the popular press dissect the topic. A growing number of annual business-plan contests are springing up across the United States and, increasingly, in other countries. Both graduate and undergraduate schools devote entire courses to the subject. Indeed, judging by all the hoopla surrounding business plans, you would think that the only things standing between a would-be entrepreneur and spectacular success are glossy five-color charts, a bundle of meticulouslooking spreadsheets, and a decade of month-bymonth financial projections.
William A. Sahlman is Dimitri V. d’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been closely connected with more than 50 entrepreneurial ventures as an adviser, investor, or director. He teaches a secondyear course at the Harvard Business School called “Entrepreneurial Finance,” for which he has developed more than 100 cases and notes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In my experience with hundreds of entrepreneurial startups, business plans rank no higher than 2–on a scale from 1 to 10 – as a predictor of a new venture’s success. And sometimes, in fact, the more elaborately crafted the document, the more likely the venture is to, well, flop, for lack of a more euphemistic word. What’s wrong with most business plans? The answer is relatively straightforward. Most waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to the information that really matters to