In Australia, only around 5% of new businesses survive past the 5 year mark, and make money in excess of the cost of capital.

Scary, because most of them had a business plan, certainly if they ever borrowed any money from a bank, they had one that probably doubled as a door stopper.

50 pages of assumptions, rosy projections and financial outcomes delivered via by a suite of complex excel files to the wazoo. It is essential to recognise that the purpose of a business plan of the lender is to ensure that they get their money back with interest commensurate with the risk, and to weed out the dreamers. That is why banks insist on Directors personal guarantees, mortgages over personal assets, simply to ensure that you do not risk their money.

So much for business plans.

Seriously, why would you waste the time and energy?

Most start with what they think is a great product, without realising that a product is just the starting point.

You also need at least a hypothesis about who the customers are, how you will find them, what sort of prices they may pay, how do you deliver the product, what the competitive reaction might be, and on, and on, and on.

Finding a way to turn all this stuff into a business model that makes sense is challenging, but it is what turns a product idea into a business.

A traditional, templated business plan makes sense when there are a lot of knowns, there is an existing market, ruling prices, you know who and where the customers are, and how they might be reached, and there is not much going on. Then plan to deploy resources for productivity and efficiency, but this is rarely the situation with start-ups with an innovation to bring to the market.

Being an entrepreneur setting about marketing a product with few direct competitors is experimental, requiring iteration, practice, persistence, and preferably mentoring from someone who has been there, seen the traps and is able to navigate around at least some of them.

Planning for the unknown is a touch different from planning for the known.