Businessmen are a hardy bunch, and Capitalism is a demanding mistress.

You see, no matter how cool a businessman thinks an idea may be, or how enthusiastic they might be for the concept, they still want to know a couple of things:

• what will it cost to do?
• what kind of money will we make?
• how long will it take to become profitable?

We creative types often balk at those kinds of specifics. “The sky’s the limit!” “We can make millions!” “This idea is too cool to worry about insignificant things like profit and loss!”

Um…wait a tick. Profit and loss is where the rubber meets the road. Unless we’re talking about doing something for the sake of doing it, (or even worse, altruism) the central question we must answer is, “how will this idea make money?”

In my business, I’m either writing business plans (Arrrgh…the pain! The humanity!), or telling clients they need one. A business plan in and of itself is rarely that useful. Most finance guys read the executive summary, skip all the parts you slaved over (the business case justification) and skip to the numbers. No, the real value of writing a business plan is it makes you think everything through, and deal with all the ‘gotchas’ before you even get started in earnest. That’s hugely valuable…in fact, it’s absolutely essential. A well-researched and written b-plan will stop you from making fatal mistakes, and help you pull your head out of the clouds and get your feet grounded in reality. That’s pretty useful stuff.

Now a business plan will not guarantee success. It won’t guarantee that you get financed. And it won’t gurantee that you have covered every possible circumstance in the future. What it WILL do, however, is to make sure that you’ve thought of as many things that CAN go wrong as possible, and have a plan to deal with every worst-case scenario that you can postulate.

If you’re a marketer, have you looked at your company’s business plan? Do they have one? If you run your own business, do you have one? I’m the first to tell you that writing a business plan is the literary equivalent of dental surgery without the benefit of Novocaine. But the results are worth their weight in gold. Keep this in mind, without paying attention to the business side of marketing, marketing isn’t much of a business.