If you read this blog regularly and/or work with me in a coaching or workshop capacity, then you know I make no bones about the fact that I face many of the same challenges my clients face running my own business. One of these challenges has been convincing clients to actually write their business plans.

I got to thinking…how can I get more people to do their business plans?  Why are most of us so &(#$&%(*U#% resistent?  The answer finally came to me: I’ve been selling a feature, not a benefit.  I’ll illustrate:

Suppose I asked you in an enthusiastic voice: “How would you like to have a business plan?” Unless you need one because you’re going to ask someone for money, you would probably say, “Hey, great idea, but no thanks, not now. Too busy. Have it in my head already,” and a bunch of other excuses.

Now imagine me asking you, ”How would you like your business to increase revenue by 62 percent?” (A real number from one of my clients who wrote her plan.) Or “How would you like to know who your perfect customers are and how to find and talk to them?”

Having a business plan is a feature. Earning more money because you have one is the benefit. It’s important to distinguish between these two things so you can effectively market–and sell–your product or service.

Human beings (also known by market researchers as consumers) want to know how x, y, or z product will make our lives better, faster, easier, etc. Here are other examples of features vs. benefits. The examples with links are from some of my coaching clients:

Examples of Features vs. Benefits

Feature: Clean your carpets

Benefit: Extend the life of your carpets; create a sanitary environment for your kids to crawl around on; create a hygienic environment for your home.

Feature: Invest your money in stocks and bonds
Benefit: Create a secure financial future for your family and you.

Feature: Sell you a house
Benefit: Find the perfect house for you that meets your needs, fits into your budget, in the neighborhood you want, and feels like home.

Feature: Teach you to pronounce American English

Benefit: Teach you to pronounce American English so that your friends, colleagues, students, teachers, can understand you perfectly without having to get rid of your accent.

Feature: Plan a company meeting for you

Benefit: Create a meeting for you, and your employees and stakeholders so everyone gets to know each other on a more personal level and people leave the meeting able to work together more collaboratively and productively.

Feature: Prints 30 pages a minute

Benefit: Prints at a speed that guarantees your employees won’t waste time standing around the printer waiting for it to finish.

Feature: Do your email newsletter for you

Benefit: Do your newsletter for you so that you get it out regularly, communicates important information to your clients and prospects, and generates leads.

How to tell if you’re talking about a feature or a benefit:

If you’re wondering how to tell the difference between features and benefits in your business, try this: State what you think is the benefit. Here’s an example: “Edit your book.”

Now add “so that…” For example, “Edit your book so that there are no embarrassing typos, it flows logically and well, and a publisher is more likely to buy it.”

See how “Edit your book” is the feature, and “No embarrassing typos…etc.” are the benefits?” Easy to tell the difference, isn’t it?

Perhaps I’ve been hanging out in Northern California too much (the land of the woo woo), but I think I actually had some psychic influence over the fact that it took six rounds and 45 days to get an error-free proof of my book from the printer (a process that should have taken two weeks, max).

I was really afraid for the book to come out. I wanted the people who bought it to use it, and to receive tangible benefit from it. Specifically, I wanted them to earn more money by working through the exercises in the book.

As any reader of the Aesop Fables (or your mother) can tell you—you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In other words, I can’t guarantee anything. Even if 100,000 people bought the book (which would be very cool), I couldn’t guarantee that one of them would read it, or do the work, or earn more money in their businesses as a result.

I can only provide the water. You have to do the drinking.

I experienced a raft of pain while working in some of my previous businesses, mostly centered around not earning enough money. It was awful. I want to save the rest of the world from experiencing that level of agony. That’s why I was so worried about my book coming out.  What if my book doesn’t save all the other people in the world feeling the same pain about their work?

Coincidentally, my raft of pain happened to be the perfect amount, at the perfect time, to get me to change; to sell my IT business and to go into coaching and writing. If there had been less pain, I might still be talking to people about computer network support.

Pain was (and is) my friend.

And although I hope my book does alleviate a lot of pain for all of you out there who are passionate about your work and your businesses, but aren’t earning enough money, the truth is, you might need to be in the pain you’re in to motivate you to change.

And if you are ready to change, you have to do the drinking. It’s up to you. Not me.

I did my part to provide part of the water for all you thirsty small business owners. The rest is your responsibility.

Here’s my question to you: are you standing at the water, but not drinking? Go to your favorite coffee shop and set aside 15 minutes to look around at your life. Are you in pain about something that has a solution? Has someone or something lead you to the water? Are you standing in it up to your knees, or armpits?

What can you do to go ahead and drink?

Business Plans: Great idea or scary tool that will point out things you don’t want to look at?

My book, Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business, will be out in three weeks.

If I get my wish, this book starts out as a book, and ends up being a catalyst for people to really do their business plans, to talk to each other about it, and even to find other people to do their plans with. After the book comes out, I’m going to revise my website so people who want to write a business plan they’ll actually use, can find other people who want to do the same thing.

Business plans have a (deserved) bad reputation. Small business owners, especially, think one of three things: “Plans are for big businesses,” or, I “know I should do it but I’m too busy”, or “I’m carrying it around in my head; no need to write anything down.”

Because if you actually write something down, you might discover what my friend Fred Hepperle, a talented and funny IT guy, sent me. Here’s what he said about business plans when I told him I had written a book about how to do one:

The South Park Business Plan

“I enjoy the animated series “South Park” on Comedy Central… This definitely-not-for-kids cartoon often weighs in on various socio-economic and political issues, and pokes fun at them while doing so.

Anyway, there’s an episode where one of the usual characters (a 4th grader) keeps losing undergarments. One night he wakes up to catch garden gnomes stealing from his dresser drawers. He follows the gnomes, to find a whole pilfered-undergarment gnome industry, with huge piles of stolen undergarments. He asks the gnomes what they are doing.

One of the gnomes explains, “This is our livelihood! Phase one: Steal underpants! Phase two: Profit!” When the 4th grader asks how they get from phase 1 to phase 2, the gnomes all just shrug their shoulders, avert their eyes, and kick the dirt at their feet.

It seems the gnome’s business plan was missing a few steps. I occasionally use the “Phase one: Steal underpants! Phase two: Profit!” slogan to remind myself that there’s more than just a couple of steps to success. It keeps me from trying too many shortcuts.”

So if any of you out there have a business plan similar to the South Park gnomes, there is a better way.