JANINE'S STORY
After a 35+ year corporate career, I have started up my own venture with a mission of inspiring and educating professionals who are looking to start up their own service-based business. In this next chapter of my career, I found my passion helping professionals get inspired by a business idea; get ready by developing a plan and acting on it; get connected to other professionals to accelerate their growth; and get growing their business with well-honed sales and delivery skills. My true satisfaction comes from knowing that many of my clients are still running successful consulting businesses 15 to 20 years after I coached them to get started – despite an 80% failure rate of all small businesses within 10 years.
HOW I GOT STARTED ADVISING ENTREPRENEURS
When I joined Knightsbridge in 2002, I was an obvious choice to assume responsibility for the flailing entrepreneurial program – given my experience at Hallmark Cards helping retail start-ups for several years and my role at Ernst & Young helping start-ups draft business plans to secure venture capital funding during the dot com era. When I took over the entrepreneurial program, I delivered the one business planning course that was offered at the time, which was attended by professionals who were impacted by a downsizing and considering entrepreneurship as a career option.
In the first two years, I completely revamped the existing business planning course, and designed and launched two new courses to respond to the clients’ needs for help with choosing a business idea and selling consulting services. All three courses were wildly popular - helping hundreds of professionals every year to take control over their career. Since then, I have been providing coaching to numerous Executives to transition out of their corporate roles to start up consulting businesses.
THE CHALLENGE
Based on my experience coaching start-ups in the last couple of decades, traditional business planning doesn’t work for entrepreneurs. It’s time consuming, overly conceptual and static. I noticed that most people gave up trying to draft their business plans - often within the first week.
When I started planning my own entrepreneurial venture a few years ago, I also struggled with traditional business planning methodology - and realized a better approach was desperately needed.
After months of tinkering with different formats, the solution hit me!
THE SOLUTION
Agile has delivered to software development EXACTLY what people want from business planning!
When technology projects were consistently late and overbudget, agile software development was created - an innovative approach that significantly accelerated the time it takes to develop software products.
By applying proven agile principles to business planning, an alternative approach to business planning was created that is faster and better than traditional business planning.
Agile Business Planning is an ideal alternative for today's entrepreneur to plan their new venture since it starts with the daunting questions that every entrepreneur asks themselves when starting up a business. It teaches entrepreneurs how to answer them in order to avoid the common traps that most fall into – that causes them to give up on their planning efforts.
Building an Agile Vision Map can help you to visualize the business you want to create – providing you with a clear focus and direction for your future.
And Agile Business Planning accelerates your planning efforts, so that you can get on with starting your business sooner!
Plan faster. Learn quicker. Succeed sooner.
3 REASONS WHY AGILE IS BETTER THAN
TRADITIONAL BUSINESS PLANNING
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PRINCIPLE 1
PROCESS LIGHT
When you follow the Agile Business Planning process, you'll have a comprehensive plan in less than a month as compared to traditional business planning that can take many months - so you can get started on your business sooner!
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PRINCIPLE 2
DOCUMENTATION LIGHT
When you generate your one-page Agile Business Plan, you'll have a dynamic tool that is easy to update. Refresh it in minutes, rather than the hours or days that most traditional business plans take to update - giving you more time to implement your plan!
