Defragging Entrepreneurship

36 companies & 4 non profits are now set to present on Tues. @ the now sold out ACS. Figure there will be around 400 people there off and on during the day. Based on the number of companies presenting, this is the largest event of this nature ever in Colorado - maybe in the whole of the U.S. And we've high confidence that these are some of the best companies in CO.

How did we manage this much info this fast & well? Let me break it out for you...

In the beginning, there was the Business Plan. And it was good. It helped organized information about a business in a form useable to the entrepreneur for business planning purposes and to the investor for due diligence purposes.

But all solutions create new problems. By example, when we were doing the initial research for the Entrepreneurial Standards Form we Googled & reviewed 199 business planning templates before we dropped from exhaustion & boredom. There are a lot of options out there when it comes to building business plans. These options are not easily comparable, and the in the universe of business plans built using these templates it's next to impossible.

What to do, what to do...

The 'Eureka!' moment came when we started looking for statistics about what worked in business development. Our search yielded nothing of value. Let me repeat that: There are no good statistics out there for entrepreneurs to use to build in developing their business concepts. We couldn't buy them as they didn't exist, so we had to build them. After about 3 years of skull sweat we came up w/ the Benchmark Survey. This is a market facing resource that helps entrepreneurs figure out how they stack up relative to their successful peers.

The ESF Benchmark Survey is not a guru telling you what you're doing right and wrong. It's the market itself. Guru's charge $23.99 for their books. Right now the Benchmark Survey is free. Do take advantage of it.

Want other reasons?

The Benchmark Report is objective and comparable. Business plans are not. Wrap some other user generated information around it like we have in the ACS application process and you've some great stuff to work with.

The ESF's Benchmark Report is graphic and can be reviewed effectively from across the room in 30 seconds. Business plans take hours - sometimes days - to unpack, and because of their subjective nature the quality of the assessment is directly tied to the quality of the assessor - and is also limited by that same thing.

So we conceptually & collectively abandoned the use of business plans in the ACS Pool deal screening process almost before we even got started. Simply put, almost no one asked for them. This was because we had enough quality info to work with in the ACS applicant files to make the determination whether or not the company in question was good enough to move forward. And this was a talented group. All of them could be considered subject matter experts. 3/4 of them are C level professionals that have been through this process before. About half of them are angels, VC's, investment bankers or some other kind of conduit to capital.

Note also the number of people involved in this process - 40+. That's a lot. That's collective intelligence. Give a collective intelligence access to something like the deal flow management system used by the ACS and the result is that not a single deal was screened in or out of the Pool by people who didn't know what they were looking at. Not one. The deal screening process was not constrained by the experience of the people doing the screening. Imagine that.

The result of this was that we've high confidence in the fact that all of the presenting Pool companies are good companies run by competent managers. Again, these are good companies. Run by good people. They've all earned the right to your attention.

I hope you're all going to enjoy this event as much as I am.

Cheers,
Kevin