Emira & Lauren: Do You Need a Business Plan?
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007Emira Mears & Lauren Bacon will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.
When we first decided to go solo and start out own design studio I cringed everytime someone mentioned writing a business plan. I had so much else to think about, why did I need to write this weighty tome that no one would look at but me? As images of late night paper writing from university days gone-by haunted my head, I knew this was one task that as a newly minted entrepeneur I was most likely to procrastinate on. Then a miracle happened: I realized I didn’t need a big formal fancy business plan. I was off the hook.
How did I get off so easy? Well, I had already done the important parts of the business plan process (details in a second here) and I really didn’t need to bother putting it all together into a formal document, because no one else was ever going to see it. We didn’t need a bank loan or any outside investment to start our business, and I dind’t need to prove anything to
anyone but me and my business partner. As such, our scribbled on the back of a napkin brainstorm about how we were going to find clients could in fact serve as our marketing plan. There was no need to polish it up into something slick and convincing for anyone else.
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People often ask me what I would do differently if I could go back in time and leave my steady paycheck all over again. As I say in 
When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege. While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants. A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, 
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