BusinessPlan

S&OP can help a company create a long-term business plan to address supply chain disruptions. Make the most of this useful process with these updated best practices.

Business idea development for new venture concepts is a mixture of art and science. There are playbooks to follow that ensure ideas are validated objectively to ensure financial and opportunity cost risks are minimized.

The key to a successful business plan is a coherent story built around financial projections and external context.

How can businesses and shareholders think about ensuring their survival in an evolving pandemic? Business continuity plans have gone out of the window. How can they be adapted to survive the current situation?

Entrepreneurs have been hardcoded to aim at billion-dollar sized markets with their solutions. However, such lucrative markets will appeal to many others and thus, are hard to succeed in. Going after smaller market sizes may be the more logical path to success.

As a venture investor, Natasha Ketabchi spends most of her day evaluating tech startups as potential investments. In early-stage investments, Natasha finds that the three things that matter most are team, product, and sales and marketing approach—including their go to market strategy. In this article, Natasha lifts the veil on what venture investors look for in a solid GTM plan.

We often hear about business plans in the context of early-stage companies; however, constructing excellent business plans is difficult and time-consuming, so many entrepreneurs avoid them. But, is this a mistake?

While most people may be aware of the “soft” arguments for and against writing a business plan, in this article, a Toptal Finance Expert takes a data-driven approach to addressing the debate. In it, he finds strong evidence to support the notion that writing an excellent business plan is time well spent.

Companies, like castles, need a line of defense to repel the invaders’ advances. Economic moats, taking a cue from their watery namesakes, are long-term and sustainable competitive advantages that protect others from seizing market share. But on the flipside, are they actually just lazy, passive strategies that shun innovation?

Of the three functional categories that drive value in business—i.e., the “hard,” the “soft,” and the “intangible”—mission statements comfortably reside in the third, alongside such concepts as brand and culture.

But despite the skepticism that is often associated with this category, and having uncovered some of the greatest gems in the corporate arena, this article argues that mission statements, when crafted and utilized effectively, are capable of driving billions of dollars in value.