by Jerry Dorsey

Created on: January 12, 2007   Last Updated: May 12, 2008

In a former life, I was an outside consultant to small businesses and startups that were really stumped by the blank piece of paper they found when they sat down to formulate their first marketing plans.

No stranger to Empty Page Paralysis myself, I worked to come up with a plan - exclusively for young companies - that would help them put useful ideas on that page staring back at them. It is not a recipe for a marketing plan. It is a set of exercises you can run through to get the wheels turning so that you can get the most important questions answered. It focuses on who you are trying to be.

Think of this process like a birthday party. The Vision is to make someone really enjoy celebrating the day that they were born. The Strategies to do that could be to surround them with loving people, to give them exactly what they want, and to keep them from feeling any stress. Tactical assignments under these Strategies might be inviting lots of people, making the biggest cake they've ever seen, or doing their chores around the house for the day.

Plan from the top down. Here is the plan:

Vision - Who you want to be, ultimately defined by the overall group of Strategies that fit your identity

V1. Ask the owners what motivates them to come in early and stay late.

A lot of consultants, I assume in an attempt to sound grandiose, tell their clients that they need a great answer to the question, "Why did you start this company?"

The answer to this can occasionally be noble and inspiring, but it can just as often be dull, funny, or frightening. The purpose of a company is to feed the people in it. That's it. Provide value for the people that have a stake in the firm's success so that they can feed their families...even if it ends up being the great-great-grandchildren.

Asking a business owner why he started the company invites him to lie. To himself. And your if you lie about the answer to the fundamental question, then just stop now. You're never going to be convincing with the plan that results.

V2. Ask them what they want the company to be, but don't ask them about any specific time period.

"Where do you want the company to be in ten years?" is probably the single most grating question in the world for me at this point. I've asked it. A lot. Once I took the time reference out of the question, though, it yielded much better material for helping the company to find their voice.

Answers that I got using the time element included revenue projections, target IPO dates, and office

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