How To Create Your Business Plan Without Excel - Part 2
Recap
Alright let's recap, there are 3 key ideas which I want you to take away from our training:
For this to happen, we covered the 3 key questions to plan your customer lifecycle
- How do you create leads?
- How do you convert leads into paying customers?
- How do you grow your paying customers?
... and we covered the 4 metrics to “see the forest but the trees” at play at each stage of your lifecycle.
Overcoming hurdles
Now, at this point you're probably thinking that's all great but now you've got 2 big hurdles ahead of you …
- How or rather who is going to create the customer lifecycle business plan and also ensure consistent quality going forward...
- How do you handle all the leg work of setting it all up - building the business plan, validating the assumptions, presenting the numbers, and all the rest…
This is where Lean-Case comes in and this is why I started this company.
Lean-Case takes care of creating high quality business plan for you and – if you want - we can handle all the leg work from end to end.
As I said, Lean-Case eliminates those 2 bottlenecks when it comes to assembling and presenting your business case.
Our service allows you to set up a customer lifecycle business plan including all the key metrics and dashboard in a few hours and share the dashboard with peers, investors, or your board.
If you need our help, we can do the job on your behalf from end to end – creating and discussing or validating the business case with you.
Now, let me briefly reiterate why your business needs a plan based on customer lifecycle model.
Whether pitching your startup to investors, presenting your project to your manager, managing your sales forecast or simply testing a new business idea, you'll need to be able to answer the 3 essential questions and understand the impact of changes.
Benefits of a Customer Lifecycle Business Plan
You know the benefits of having a Customer Lifecycle Business Plan in place.
Then why should you use Lean-Case to create it?
- 1st and foremost it is quality: when you create your own Excel business plan you have to be an Excel pro. Using templates also comes with limitations. Maybe the template is only set up for 2 years, maybe it only has 2 product categories.
With LEAN-CASE you have top quality and peace of mind. Our service combines different revenues types, forecast models, conversions, automated headcount planning, dashboard and if you don’t find what you need, we can add it in in a few days.
On top, our team of consultants and partners have a unique process how to interview you and we get inside your mind to form a model that will truly resonate. - Then, of course, it is the time factor - this is a big one if you ever tried to create your own business plan. I’ve seen companies spending weeks deriving all the assumptions, vetting them against benchmarks and building a consistent and understandable model.
To come close to matching what Lean-Case provides, you spend weeks sifting through formulas, fixing errors and projecting data. Not to mention the time that you are taking away from your business. - Next is cost - the opportunity cost of you not being available for your business or the cost to hire a consultant is a 5-figure investment per year but the result doesn’t come close to what you get with a Lean-Case Business Plan.
Plus, you are creating dependency on typically 1 expert knowing your model with all its undocumented secrets - bugs, backdoors, traps and workaround formulas – which he will keep for himself when gone. - Finally, we come to process or as many more clients say. It's the hidden benefit behind Lean-Case. We've built and refined a bulletproof process that works like clockwork.
Answering critical business questions
For startups and projects, Lean-Case is a much better way than spreadsheets to get fast, easy and effective answers to the critical business questions:
- Creating smart revenue stream combining more than 10 Revenue types and forecast models and connecting them with conversion rules, they can answer, what is your revenue potential?
- Being focused to flexibly enter all elements for COGS and CAC, they can calculate Critical Customer Lifetime Economics and answer if their business is viable and ready to scale?
Customer Lifetime Economics
- Adding assumptions for individual jobs, hiring plans for groups of similar jobs, team roles and manager roles which are automatically calculated and other expenses, you create an Automated Profitability & Cash-Flow statement, to understand when their business turns profitable and what the investment required are?
Automated Profitability and Cash-Flow
- With Simple Reporting and Tracking features and our future Lean-Board, they learn to track their actual business performance against plan and can run efficient monthly stand-ups.
Excel Is An Investor Trust & Deal Killer...
How to Create Your Business Plan Without It!
Discover the Viability of Any Business Idea in 20 Minutes...
Game Changer for Decision Makers
And Lean-Case is also a game changer for decision makers like consultants, business managers, investors or incubator and accelerators. Lean-Case puts them in drivers’ seat:
- They are Finally In-Charge and can manage their startup and project portfolio in their own branded workspace.
- They can apply Your Standards - to Modelling and Tracking to finally be able to compare and gain insights
- They can boost the Metrics Literacy and qualification of your project managers and portfolio companies – become a trainer and use our standards for Metrics-which-Matter training and mentorships.
- They can introduce Simplified Processes and Take smarter decisions – speeding up and improving screening, decision making, and investor demo.
Simple Steps with Instructions and Examples
Lean-Case breaks the business planning process down into simple steps with instructions and examples
- Lean-Case provides Step-by-Step Guidance – you just need to follow instructions and verify your assumptions against industry benchmarks.
- With Lean-Case you can build realistic business plans – you can easily model and simulate the real world based on different rev streams, forecast models, cross-selling, up/downgrades and virality mechanisms, and all the relevant cost drivers – all this without worrying about formulas, cell references and lookups.
Simulating Real-life Conversions
- Nevertheless, Lean-Case provides Excel-like flexibility – check, filter, slice, and export your data and adjust any of your assumptions over time.
- Lean-Case enables you to share and stay in control – you can easily share your financial plans with your peers, board members or investors making them editors or viewers and give them the power to simulate.
Investors and Managers get what they want
Finally, your investors and managers get what they want:
- Investor-Ready Dashboards – investors can explore all key financial data in one dashboard...
- Unit Economics – it becomes easy to Understand the viability of business, critical issues and sensitivities and answer the magic questions...
- Standard Financial Reports – Lean-Case creates all reports which investors expect to see...
- Finally, Insights – all of a sudden, you have business plans which you can compare because, metrics and ratios all use the same definitions.
On top of Lean-Case as-is
If you don't want to use Lean-Case as is, we can give you a broad range of support. Our Professional services come in different flavors:
- We can work for you on a project basis: Creating a Lean-Case business plan from scratch, converting your Excel or business model idea into a Lean-Case Customer Lifecycle Business Plan, validating your own model, helping you to raise fund
- We can run a training and mentoring program for your company train your project managers, investment analysts, startup founders to use Lean-Case
- Or, we can even run joint development projects - Lean-Case is a platform and we are able to customize tenant specific functionalities or develop your own modules.
Again I'm the founder of Lean-Case - Eckhard Ortwein.
I co-founded two companies – one was acquired by Sybase/SAP, the other by Ping Identity.
I work as an M&A Advisors, Advisory Board Member, Business Angel, VC Partner and I want you to avoid all the mistakes I’ve done in my past and all the mistakes I am seeing so many others doing on a daily basis.
I'm based in Frankfurt, Germany.
Our team of partners, consultants and mentors are spread out across globe and we also have a team of customer success reps and software developers which can even build out your own business plans into Lean-Case (if you might not find what you need.)
Excel Is An Investor Trust & Deal Killer...
How to Create Your Business Plan Without It!
Discover the Viability of Any Business Idea in 20 Minutes...
