Why does it take so long to write a business plan?

At the start of this year I put together a project plan for setting up our bar. It was by far the most detailed and thought-through project plan I've ever written, even though my actual job is pretty much entirely project-based. I was really proud of myself for having done it, and it was the first thing that really felt like progress. 

One of the first items on the project plan was 'draft business plan'. At the time I estimated this would take three months, and I considered that a conservative estimate, at least for a first draft. Well, that was in January, and it's now September and I reckon I'm only about half way through. I think there are probably three main reasons why I'm so slow:

1. I'm slow. Like my mum said once 'ah Benny, you've always been slow, right from when you were little. Even when you were hurrying you were always slower than everyone else.'

2. I don't really do 'drafts'. I had this idea that I'd be able to basically just do a stream of consciousness draft of whatever was in my head, and then we'd be able to use that as a basic plan and refine it as we went. But that's not really in my nature. I can't help thinking over each and every sentence to make sure it really says what I want it to say, and that means it might take me an hour just to write a single paragraph. That also makes it quite a draining process, so often I don't have the energy to do much more than an hour at a time. 

(In the same way, I'm hopeless at skim reading. I just don't take anything in. Everything I read, I need to do it slowly and deliberately. People send me large policy documents at work all the time - sometimes several in a day - and for the most part all I do is throw them on an already teetering pile of stuff I plan to read 'one day'. It's a bit of a handicap.)

3. Life. Trying to do this in my spare time has really hammered home for me the fact that it takes almost 100% of my time just to take care of the basic 'background' stuff I need to do as part of normal life. Sleeping and being at work take up the bulk of my of time - there are 168 hours in a week and I calculate about 101 hours of that is spent sleeping and working (not at the same time... For the most part). That still leaves 67 hours, which seems like a lot, but really it isn't - especially when you take into account points 1 and 2 above. I need to squeeze a lot into that 67 hours - house stuff like shopping and cleaning, exercise, eating (though a fair amount of that is done at work), seeing friends and family, fighting with the Internet or the coffee machine or whatever hallmark of modern civilisation has packed it in this week. And then of course there's reading, an activity I love but at which, as we've already established, it takes me a long time to achieve much, as well as watching a few hours of TV (more in footy season). Tally that all up and I'm left with just a few hours each week to do wine bar stuff, including the business plan.

The most frustrating thing about this is work - as in the actual job that I'm paid to do. I now in a sense have two jobs, one paid and one unpaid, and unfortunately the amount of time I want to spend on each is inversely proportional to the amount of time I actually spend. I find myself growing resentful of work - especially when I'm stuck there late or have to work on the weekends, which has happened a bit recently - because I feel like it's stealing time from me. Time that I NEED, dammit! 

This is a dilemma faced, I'm sure, by almost everyone wanting to start their own business. You need to keep doing paid work so you can keep saving money towards your business, but doing that means you have to spend less time than you'd like on actually getting your business off the ground. At the same time, you have this sense of disconnection from your day job, because what you really want to do is elsewhere. At some point you need to resolve that dilemma by basically jumping out of the plane and hoping your parachute works - hopefully that's not too strained a metaphor. But we're nowhere near that point yet.

The materials list

How much do you notice when you walk into a bar or restaurant? Think about your favourite place or the one you go into every morning for your coffee. How well could you describe it to someone? Your could probably tell them the layout, maybe a bit about the decor. You could talk about the atmosphere, and what's on the menu - that seems pretty comprehensive right? 

I thought so anyway. Then I went to talk to this company that sells equipment to hospitality businesses and helps them with fitouts. The guy I met with asked me what kind of place we were thinking of, and I showed him a sketch of the layout we had in mind. He said cool, and what kind of flooring were you thinking of? Just like concrete or something? I said uh, yeah, maybe just concrete. 

What about the bar? Stone? Marble? Wood?

Um... wood I think?

Ok. And how thick would you want it to be? And what about the sides of the bar? How many fridges will you need?

Ummmmmmm...

It turns out there's more you don't notice than what you do notice. Now we're trying to think through all those things that go into fitting out a venue - from obvious stuff like kitchen equipment, furniture and the bar itself, to less visible stuff like the point of sale system, shelving and so on. The list is getting pretty long already, and I'm sure there's plenty we still haven't thought of. We've set up all these boards on Pinterest where we're collecting photos of stuff that has the look we want, and the fitout guy I spoke to has offered to look through our list and give us some advice on what's missing and how much things are likely to cost. It's also starting to give us an eye for detail when we go out - now when I go into a venue the first thing I look at is what material the sides of the bar are made from. Then I look at the floors. I haven't quite gotten to the stage of pulling out the measuring tape, but only because I don't want to attract weird looks from other patrons. 

Sponge mode

Talking to people about our plans, I hadn't anticipated how often we'd hear something along the lines of "Oh, my cousin/friend/mum's next door neighbour is a winemaker/sommelier/distributor/started his own bar..." or whatever... "and he/she/they'd be totally happy to give you some advice." So many people! Our strategy in response to this has been to always say "yes" and talk to as many people as are willing to give us their time.

I think about our preparation as happening in five phases: information gathering and planning, training, financing, finding a venue, setup and fitout (and then... profit! Jokes...). Well, we are definitely in the information gathering phase at the moment (and the planning, which I'll write about in future posts). I remember a friend in the corporate world telling me a story about how he was in a meeting once where  everyone was talking except this one guy who was just sitting back with his arms folded and a look of concentration on his face, and eventually someone else took notice of this and said "Hey Steve, you're very quiet today." To which the guy replied "yeah, I'm just in sponge mode."

Sponge mode. Total corporate buzzword expression which I would never, ever use... except I keep thinking that's a perfect name for what we're doing now. Thanks, faceless corporate exec dude, for providing me with a useful analogy for our wine bar blog. 

So far, 'sponge mode' (last time I'll use it I promise) has really paid off. We've talked to people with lots of different backgrounds who've given us lots of different perspectives - people who run their own bars, cafes and restaurants, people who've started service businesses after being in office jobs their whole life, a wine wholesaler and former sommelier, a shop fitter - and there are many others people have suggested who we haven't talked to yet. Everyone we've spoken with has given us useful advice - some have been positive, others less so, but all of it has been valuable and has added to our knowledge in some way. Tips are great, because we're still trying to understand everything that's involved. Encouragement is great - of course - although it's always tempered with realism about how hard it will be. And warnings are great too, because they help us to be better prepared for the challenges we'll have to face (one contact told me "Do you understand just how much money you WON'T have??). 

Something else we're hoping to get out of these meetings is to start things moving on our second phase - training. Because if we're going to run our own bar it would probably be a good idea for us to have worked in one first - unfortunately I don't think my teenage experience as a Customer Service Agent at Ampol Road Pantry Drummoyne is going to help much, nor Georgy's job at Esprit. So the idea is that we maybe do some shifts at a few places but also spend some time observing how all the back end organisational stuff works, too. Kinda delicate, because it's not like we'd be helping much (at least at first) and you don't want to get in the way, particularly when someone's doing you a favour. But we do have a few possibilities already, and hopefully we can turn those into something - all the more reason to keep talking.

"Don't do it"

One of my work colleagues is married to a guy who started his own bar last year. Every since I found that out I'd been keen to talk to them about their experience and get some advice on how we might go about things ourselves. A few months ago we caught up with her for an after-work drink and peppered her with questions. Her husband was working and unable to make it, but she told us he'd be in a much better position to answer a lot of our questions about cost management, rostering, suppliers and so on. Did she think he'd be willing to talk to us?

"I think he feels like he HAS to talk to you."

Uh oh, I said, he's not going to say "don't do it" is he? "Oh no no no, nothing like that. He just wants to make sure you know what you're getting yourselves into."

A few weeks later, we met up at his bar. He sat down with us and started talking.

"Ok so I'm happy to answer all your questions and help however I can but I just need to say this first.

Don't do it."

So, ok. That was a good reality check. We have this dream about doing something we love and building something of our own and being our own bosses etc etc... but we can't be under any illusions that this will be easy, or some kind of road to riches. We already knew that, but this conversation really drove it home for us - hospitality is a hard business. Margins are low, failure rates are high - really high. And for two public servants with absolutely no experience in the industry? Well.


So what the hell are we doing??


I guess the best answer I can give to that is, most things in life aren't easy. You can have job security and a good salary in a big organisation like we both do now, but if it's not fulfilling then is it really worth it? Is the point of life to be comfortable? I actually think it's up to each of us to decide what the point of our life is; and being comfortable is not it for me. For me, it's finding out what you're interested in and putting all your effort into achieving that - following your dreams, I guess, although I usually try to avoid that sort of starry-eyed talk - and you have to be prepared to take risks and confront challenges to make that happen.  I don't want to get to the end of my life and think "well, that was mildly interesting. But at least I never did anything risky!"

So we're going to have a crack. We might not get there; we might get there and fail; but we're not going to die wondering. And at this early stage I can definitely say that I feel a sense of purpose and energy about this that I've never had with anything else. Of course, we haven't started on any of the hard parts yet...

And that's kind of where this blog comes in to the picture. It started as a thought bubble one day when we were driving to the Blue Mountains and listening to the podcast Startup, which documents a guy starting his own company. Highly recommended for anyone reading this (IF anyone reads this...) who hasn't heard it. We thought, well, we have lots of friends ask us all the time now "how's it going with the wine bar thing?" - so this could be a way of answering that question with a bit more detail than what you'd get in your standard chit-chat type situation. Of course, it depends on how much time I can find to actually write posts (I'm trialling a new time management strategy. It involves taking lunch breaks at work. So we'll see how sustainable that is). But yeah, that's the theory.

Not fun. Hard. Hard hard hard. But we work hard now - better to do it for ourselves than some big, impersonal (and sometimes, frankly, ridiculous) machine. And that hard work will make it all the more rewarding if we can get it right. In that light, it's probably fitting to finish with the next thing Our bar owner friend told us after "don't do it":

"But I can't tell you not to do it, because I'm doing it. You guys are crazy to do it, I'm crazy to do it - anyone who does it is crazy. But honestly, being your own boss is awesome. Just awesome."

Let's see how far we can go.