Como Hacer Un Plan De Negocios

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 andarticles 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-beentrepreneur 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, infact, 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 intelligent investors. As every seasoned investor knows, financial projectionsfor a new company – especially detailed, month-by-month projections that stretch
out for more than a year – are an act of imagination.
An entrepreneurial venture faces far too many
unknowns to predict revenues, let alone profits.
Moreover, few if any entrepreneurs correctly anticipate how much capital and time will be required
to accomplish their objectives. Typically, they are
wildlyoptimistic, padding their projections. Investors know about the padding effect and therefore
discount the figures in business plans. These ma-

Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

July-August 1997

Business Plan

neuvers create a vicious circle of inaccuracy that
benefits no one.
Don’t misunderstand me: businessplans should
include some numbers. But those numbers should
appear mainly in the form of a business model that
shows the entrepreneurial team has thought
through the key drivers of the venture’s success or
failure. In manufacturing, such a driver might be
the yield on a production process; in magazine publishing, the anticipated renewal rate; or in software,
the impact of using variousdistribution channels.
The model should also address the break-even
issue: At what level of sales does the business begin
to make a profit? And even more important, When
does cash flow turn positive? Without a doubt,
these questions deserve a few pages in any business
plan. Near the back.
What goes at the front? What information does a
good business plan contain?
If you want to speak thelanguage of investors –
and also make sure you have asked yourself the
right questions before setting out on the most
daunting journey of a businessperson’s career–I recHARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

July-August 1997

ommend basing your business plan on the framework that follows. It does not provide the kind of
“winning” formula touted by some current how-to
books and software programs for...