Eric Eikrem’s Blog

The business plan has been treated in an endless number of publications. So why do I? Because I believe there is a lack of focus in a lot of what is written about business plans. The important things are often lost in the details. In fact, a business plan can be very brief.

I have seen compelling business plans in the form of a few PowerPoint slides, a couple of scribbled pages, and a brief video. What matters is having all the required ingredients (or a road map for getting them), not the exact form of communication. William A. Sahlman [1]

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I have 4 years experience as an entrepreneur. As my time as an entrepreneur has come to an end, at least for this time, it is natural to reflect on the things I’ve worked with in the context of entrepreneurship in general.

Some call it the entrepreneurial purgatory. Personally, I think that it has been too much fun to earn the designation “purgatorium”. Entrepreneurship does entail a relatively high stress level, and things change very much from one day to another, and sometimes from hour to hour. The best term is the ping-pong-life: work, good times and bad, opportunities and obstacles, and your mood, varies widely. In such a situation is very difficult to maintain focus, and to prioritize correctly is a big challenge. You are in a constant time squeeze and, quite often, what is urgent takes precedence over what is important. Another challenge in such a turbulent life is to see your own limitations, and to obtain expertise when needed.
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In the latest edition of Computerworld Norway, the main feature is a report on the informatics cluster in Sandefjord, a town on the southern coast of Norway. This cluster generates a significant part of the total norwegian turn-over related to computer equipment. The whole cluster came about as a result of 4 entrepreneur establishing a company called Santech in 1986. These entrepreneurs have since invested in a several other ventures in the municipality, and many of these have become successful companies. This has happened without much involvement from the municipality, except for a policy of supporting entrepreneurs as such, with no particular focus on specific clusters. There are lessons to be learned from this case, in particular that entrepreneurship is principally about people, see also “Closing Doors“.