Business Plans Versus Business Models

From Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company (K&S Ranch, 2012). The line is Blank’s adaptation of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s military maxim “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy,” which Blank cites by name at the top of his April 2010 essay of the same name. The argument is the founding insight of his Customer Development methodology, first laid out in The Four Steps to the Epiphany (2005).

The argument underneath: a business plan is built on customer-side assumptions about who will buy, at what price, through what channel, and why. Until those assumptions have met a real customer, they’re guesses, however many quarterly reviews have signed off on the slides. Blank’s prescription is to leave the office and test them, in interviews and prototypes rather than another round of refinement. He pairs the line with another mantra: “get out of the building.”