Business plans are necessary. They keep you on track with your goals and keep you accountable to your vision. But as I have shared over and over, business plans don’t have to be evil. Streamline your business plan with one of these alternate models: 

1.Pinterest – I love the idea of a visual business plans. Pinterest is my absolute favorite way of creating a business plan. Not only does it capture the spirit of your dream, it gives you tangible things to look forward to. It is a constant source of inspiration. 

The fallacy of most business plans is not that they are terrible, even though they are, it’s that you never revisit it to remind yourself of your goals and benchmarks. You will WANT to revisit your Pinterest Business Plan to see the pictures and assess how far you have come. It is an easy visual checklist for your goals. 

2. Powerpoint – Creating a slide deck is  a intuitive way of organizing ideas. The slides are simply thought streams. In addition, it keeps your ideas clear and concise. Due to the spacial limitations of a slide, you can’t really belabor a point. Rather, you are more focused on completing the thought stream and moving on to the next slide. 

I love to “trick” myself into productivity. I’m a terrible saver if I have to PUT money away. The trick I play on myself is having my savings money automatically drafted from my accounts so I never miss it. Powerpoint helped me create a similar trick for business planning. By design, Powerpoint is about making presentations for other people. Creating a Powerpoint business plan forces you to be clear because it makes you explain everything as you would to an audience.

3. Mapping – As I said earlier in this post, I love a visual. Mapping is setting your business up like an org chart or those spider brainstorms you did in 2nd grade. This type of plan is especially useful for people who have multiple streams of income. Drawing arrows and lines between all the bubbles will help you see how all the pieces of your business play together.

It will help you weed out the riff raff and see the big picture. If you find something in your business that doesn’t play well with others, you should probably minimize or eliminate that piece of the business. Conversely, if one item has multiple lines connected to it, you should probably invest more time, as it is clearly an important part of your business. 

This list is just the beginning. You can use any medium to create a business plan. The point is to do it, but not to the point that you forget why. Set your goals and move on already.