Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

REPRINT RIGHTS FOR SALE
(Click here for permission.)

Guerrilla Business is part of a series of HMI celebrity business products. Other packages in the series are by superinvestor Peter Lynch, management cheerleader Tom Peters, and Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the original "guerrilla" title, "Guerrilla Marketing." I liked the Lynch and Peters packages. I'm less enthusiastic about this one.

The program guides you through the very basic stages of creating a document. It contains prefab financial planning sheets that allow you to project income and outgo, break-even analysis, profits and losses, a balance sheet, and marketing and organizational plans. It places great emphasis on form -- how your title page, table of contents, etc., look -- while leaving the subtle problems of business plan content to you to sort out.

I was interested to see that, instead of packing the disk with usable information, HMI included a pretty complete Excel-compatible spreadsheet and Word-compatible word processor. Yes, those are what you use to make a business plan, but most businesses already have these tools.

And isn't guerrilla business plan sort of an oxymoron? When I think of guerrilla, I think of people guided more by a goal than a long-term plan. When I think of plan, I think (here's my bias) of something you do when you don't have a true goal. I have worked for companies whose only "goal" was to "make plan." The last thing those businesses were were guerrillas.

Now, planning is valuable. Having a plan on paper helps keep a fledgling company from drifting from its core purpose. Practically speaking, you can't borrow money without a business plan. Four of five business startups fail, and "poor planning" is the single most-often cited cause for failure.

But I have been in business myself much of my adult life, and written about it all that time, and the "planning" that this program helps you do is not the planning that will save your business. This is planning that makes you look credible on paper, period.

It's fine to have a plan projecting revenues of $100,000 the first year, $200,000 the next, and so on. And hurray for you if you make those numbers. But the nature of business today is so crazy (Tom Peters said so on his HMI CD-ROM) that rigid adherence to even a terrific plan may prevent you from adapting to sudden shifts in the marketplace.

What plan do you have in place for your entrepreneur owner having a nervous breakdown, or a customer misusing the product and suing for $40 million, or your company simply experiencing too much growth too soon, and being unable to deliver?

Capital has always been king in business, but the king today is not the king of old. Money is cheap these days, and banks have lots of it. Small companies are swallowing up much larger ones because money is no longer the primary constraint. It's not that money doesn't matter, but that it isn't the sole driving force it used to be.

What businesses run out of before they run out of cash are the less quantifiable things that should be in the real business plan:

· Customers. How are you going to get good ones to come in, and keep coming?

· People. Where will you get good people to help you do the work? What will you do when the best of them leave?

· Ideas. How are you going to come up with the next product, the next wrinkle, that will put your current cash cow out to pasture?

· Resilience. What will you do when the unforeseen crisis occurs, and Mike Wallace stands between you and your parking space?

These are issues not of cash on the barrelhead but of the human commodities of resourcefulness, versatility, and nimbleness in the face of change.

Thankfully, Guerrilla Business consists not just of the CD-ROM but a book, Anatomy of a Business Plan, by Linda Pinson and Jerry Jinnett. The book goes where the program cannot go, leading the user through the business plan writing process, dealing with the do's, don't's, how-to's and what-if's that the program can't address. It talks about what investors are looking for, and how bad writing can wreck a first impression. To me, the book is the best part of the $50 package. But many people don't like, or can't read, books.

Guerrilla Business is simply not intelligent enough to understand what business you are in, or what your needs will be as you grow. Maybe someday we will have an artificial intelligence engine that will contain the best planning practices of the top 500 businesses in your specific industry. It will do more than run numbers and put section heads in boldface type. It will challenge your assumptions, and engage you in a Socratic dialog about survival in the marketplace. It will be smart enough to know that what worked yesterday may be a disaster tomorrow.

But this isn't that.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.