They Don't Have To Be Scary

"An MT-Friendly Business Plan"

If you saw that as the title of a workshop, what would you expect from the workshop? What information would it convey? What questions would it answer?

The vast majority of us do not have a business plan for our businesses. From my experience, there's a couple of reasons for that:

* We don't understand the terms and sections of the standard biz plan.
* We're scared silly of them.
* They seem much too complicated for a modest business, like ours often are.
* We don't know what we'd do with it once we had one.
* They look like they take way too much work.

I think these are all valid reasons not to do a business plan and I think they are all correctable.

I've had a business plan for 7 or 8 years now in my practice. I use it to get clear on what my mission and vision are for my practice. Once I had done that, I could figure out how to get where I want to go. It's been very useful.

And mine is a whopping one-page long and only uses language that I understand.

I want to present a workshop on MT-friendly business plans at the 2012 AMTA convention in NC. I'm working on the proposal today and I'm coming up against some writer's block about how to organize this workshop. What would you want to see in a workshop with this title?