Study Finds Business Plans a Waste of Time
Entrepreneurs who slave to craft a perfectly-articulated business plan expect the effort will pay off with better odds of getting funded. But they're probably fooling themselves. That’s the finding of a study conducted by two professors and a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Management and entrepreneurship professors David Kirsch and Brent Goldfarb, along with doctoral student Azi Gera, studied business plans and found quality had zero impact on the amount of VC funding raised. According to the summary that hit my inbox this morning, the group studied business plans of more than 700 dotcom companies from the late-1990s to early-2000s. They compared characteristics of each business plan – including the contents, team make-up and business model – and whether the plan received venture capital funding.
