I love nature. I loved studying Biology at school. There’s something elegant about much of it. It’s not all elegant though, some aspects of it are dysfunctional. But that’s the essential quality of a work in progress – it’s never perfect. So it is that I think we can learn a lot from nature about business, particularly some of the weirder ways that nature goes about the basic processes of surviving, growing, evolving, reproducing and dying.

For example, have you heard of auto-cannibalism? This is where an animal eats part of itself. It’s well documented, for example, that snakes sometimes mistake their own tails as other snakes and start to eat themselves. Or they start eating their own shed skin and perhaps because of the scent of prey on it, they get carried away.

Don’t Be Like the Snake

As a business owner, does running your business sometimes feel like this. You’re running around so fast it feels like you’re chasing your tail. Suppliers need paying, employees have constant questions, customers want to deal directly with you rather than your staff and there’s never quite enough time to do all that admin that’s piling up, let alone do “strategy” or planning!

At some point all businesses reach a plateau in their growth because of this. The ones that breakthrough break the vicious cycle by getting their employees do most of the heavy lifting with customers and suppliers leaving the directors free to develop and implement growth strategies. Getting started can be as simple as having a consistent delivery and distribution system in place.

Instead Emulate the Sea Squirt

A more elegant form of auto-cannibalism (yes, elegant cannibalism!) occurs during metamorphosis. The sea squirt for example consumes its own brain. In the larval stage it swims around filtering food and it needs a rudimentary brain to move around and sense its environment. At the end of the larval stage it attaches itself to a surface and never moves again. It consumes its nervous system and re-purposes the brain sac to help it feed. If the larval sea squirt didn’t consume part of itself it wouldn’t mature and wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

What part of your business do you no longer need? Is it stopping you moving to the next stage in your business cycle. It’s not unusual, for example, for businesses to continue offering products and services to customers well beyond their profitable or strategic life.

There can even be an emotional attachment to these services, particularly for people who started their business because they were good at something. For example, starting a web design business because you’re good at building web sites is great. But it can be difficult to scale a business if you’re spending all your time building websites. The strategic thing to do might be to switch to website maintenance. It might not be as sexy to deal with hacking threats, platform updates and shifting security trends, but there is long-term value in building a business around this rather than one-off website building. Continuing to supply websites could stop the business from offering maintenance programmes just from sheer lack of time.

Changing technology might signal a need for auto-cannibalism in business too. Accountancy, for example, have been transformed recently by the rapid adoption of cloud accounting software. Those practices that embrace the move to cloud accounting are having to re-purpose their people, consuming the technical accounting departments and creating departments to offer other services, such as business advice.

Escaping A Trap

Finally, some animals will chew off a limb to escape a trap. It’s not really auto-cannibalism because they don’t eat the limb, but close enough… Do you need to chew off part of your business to escape a trap? Maybe a supplier who won’t give you credit? A customer who won’t pay on time, an employee who is disengaged, or maybe a whole department that isn’t performing or that has been left behind by the competition? Maybe it’s time to take the 72 hours of pain involved in making and announcing the decision you know you should take but are avoiding. Bite off the trapped limb – your business will grow faster afterwards because you’ll be able to focus your efforts on more productive parts of your business.

Pareto’s principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort, 80% of profits from 20% of your products, 20% of your customers or 20% of your employees, 80% of problems stem from a different 20% of products, employees and customers. Ditch the 20% of problem customers, products and employees and focus on the rest.

In Conclusion

In summary, your business may be failing to thrive or move to the next level of growth because you’re eating your own tail or because there are parts of the business you should be cannibalising that you’re not or there are parts of the business trapping you in the present that you need to bite off in order to move to the future…

Auto-cannibalism is a natural process in the life-cycle of growing organisms (and organisations) but don’t be a snake, be a sea squirt!

Do you need investors? Looking for a loan? Do you want to apply for a grant? Or has the time just come to do a self-analysis of your business? Are you expanding your business? Looking for new markets? Seeking the next level in your business? These are all times that you need a business plan? What are the nuts and bolds of a business plan?

All business plans have more or less the same sections some even have the same content.
However, when they arrive at the investor’s or lender’s table some remain where they are and others pass to the “I’ll read them later” pile or worse still the trash can! So how do you make your business plan readable and memorable for all the best reasons.

Let’s look at what really is at the heart of a business plan. A business plan is a methodology that defines and integrates the activities that are necessary for a business idea to become a company and provides expectations that prove it will be profitable. In other words, it is the hook to get an investor and tell them that your idea is innovative and will be very profitable. Note those two important words: innovative and profitable. No investor will be interested in a company that is not going to be profitable enough to give them their investment back plus a very healthy profit. Now the what could be an interesting word – innovative. For a company to be successful it must have something that is different to all the other companies working in the same market. After all if your company is going to be the same as all the others, they are hardly going to move over and let you take their customers. No, your company needs to have something different that will attract these customers away from what they buy all the time. So innovative in some way, be it products, business model or service.

Lets add another word that your need to prove within your business plan – viable. Your investor or lender wants to see that you company is going to be viable. If you do a Google search about the “Internet Bubble” of circa 1995 you will see that thousands of investors invested and lent to new fangled internet companies that promised to make them millions of dollars in easy profits. Memories are long and now investors look to see that new companies are going to be viable for the for seeable future so that they continue to receive an income stream and have a good chance of getting their loan or investment back.

Your business plan should be a communication tool selling an original idea that serves to attract and convince people that you have the ability to implement the plan by establishing and managing the company.

At the beginning we highlighted other reasons for business planning. In addition to raising funds, your business plan is also the best tool for you to assess the viability of your business.

So that is the NUTS of a business plan, lets look at the BOLTS that hold it together:

Professional: Internally it should be well structured with an index, page numbers, headings and bulleted paragraphs that explain complex matter. Plenty of graphics break up the boredom of too many words. Externally it should be expertly bound and have a colorful and attractive cover page. It stands to reason that full company details and contact information should also be on the front cover.

Tempting. Written in a way that encourages the reader to assess the possibilities of entering the business. Take care of the writing style, be concise but not brief and certainly not so wordy that tiredness beckons. Keep to the point, zwoding extraneous information that does not support your business planning or business model. Avoid jargon and if you must use initials ensure that the first example is spelt out completely with the initials in brackets afterwards.

Dynamic. You have to be creative, but with some restraint. It is best if you tell a story but not one that is found in the fiction section of a library. If the business you propose does not invite big flourishes, save them. It can be counterproductive to distract the reader. Creativity is important as long as you highlight something about the business and is there to keep the attention of the reader. Creativity must only be used to paint a picture of how the business will operate in the future.

Accurate. Clarity is fundamental, but so is accuracy and truthfulness about the current state of your company and its future aims. A little bit of license is offered by the reader but they do expect you to be truthful about your figures, customer numbers and state of the production of your goods.

Ordered. Guide your reader through your business plan and put supporting documentation within the appendix of the report. Although the key information should be in the main sections of the report, in the appendices you can include secondary data, market study results, resumes of professionals and any letters from recommendation or favorable report.

The last big BOLT that will hold your business plan together is CARE. Your business plan is not just something you have to rush through in order to get your funding. It is the description of what your business looks like now and what you want it to look like in the future. Most business plans start at about 20 pages long for a small business setting out in the world to a maximum of 50 pages for a business seeking major funding. Whatever the size of your business plan, and please practice writing complex ideas succinctly, it should be written with care – after all a good business plan is a roadmap to company success!