Where are these articles?

We’ve made it easy on you.  You’ll now see an ‘Articles‘ tab at the top of every page on Bizplan.com.

What kind of business advice will I find there?

We’ve done our best to build out a really comprehensive library of startup business advice including topics such as  incorporating a business idea, distributing startup equity, and even tips about how to approach an angel investor.

We’re constantly adding helpful articles as a resource to our members.  If you have any topics that you’d like us to address, please leave a comment here or contact us directly and we’ll put our team on it!

Getting to the Plan Library:

You’ll see a ‘Plan Library’ button on your Dashboard when you are logged in to Bizplan.com.  The library is available to all members that have purchased the ‘Professional’ or ‘+Funding’ packages.  If you haven’t purchased one of those packages, you can always upgrade when you need to.

How to Use It:

The plan library is where we store all of our sample business plans.  You can find plans for nearly any industry or type of business in there.  If you can’t find a plan that exactly fits your industry, you can probably find one that is close enough.  Or piece together sections from several different sample plans.  The library can’t possibly have an exact plan for every business that you can dream of creating.  If it did, then your idea wouldn’t be very good…because somebody would have already written the exact plan for it!  Every business is unique.  Sure, a restaurant is a restaurant.  But, one restaurant might be in a different city than another. And, one might be a high end steakhouse that caters to a certain demographic while another might be a fast food joint in a strip mall.  You get the point!  Even similar businesses have a lot of differences.

The moral of the story is that you should only use the Plan Library as a reference point.  Don’t expect to find a plan that exactly fits every single piece of your business.

Images:
A number of people have asked us to add a feature that allows them to upload images of product sketches, photos of prototypes, charts, screenshots of web pages, maps, and even blueprints for a building.  Now, you can upload all of the above using the Appendix section.  We accept just about every popular type of image file (jpeg, png, gif, etc.).

Documents:
For quite some time, you’ve been able to upload financial spreadsheets and charts in Microsoft Excel format within the ‘Financial Charts’ section under the ‘Editor’ tab.  This is a great place to upload Sales sheets, Income Statements, a Balance Sheet, or your Cash Flow statement.  However, if you have non-financial related documents, spreadsheets, or Power Point presentations that you want to upload, you can do that in the Appendix.

Videos:
You can now embed videos that are already hosted on another site such as YouTube.  Simply find the video on YouTube (or any other website) and copy the ‘Embed Code’.  In the Appendix section, you can select ‘Video’ as the ‘Asset Type’.  From here, you simply paste the embed code that you copied from YouTube.  It’s important that you copy/paste the embed code, NOT the URL of the video.  Sometimes YouTube hides the embed code under the ‘share’ button on their videos.

Let us know how you like the new Appendix section and if you can think of anything else that you’d like to be able to upload.

To edit the main section names on your plan, follow these steps:

1) Log in to www.Bizplan.com and click on the ‘Editor’ tab at the top of any page.

2) On the Editor screen, you’ll see a ‘Table of Contents’ along the left hand side of the screen.  These are all of the major sections of your plan.

3) To edit any of the major sections, simply click the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of the Table of Contents.  From here, you’ll be able to rename, add, or delete any sections.  You can also ‘drag-and-drop’ each section if you want to rearrange them.

To edit any subsections within a main section, follow these instructions:

1) Log in to www.Bizplan.com and click on the ‘Editor’ tab at the top of any page.

2) On the Editor screen, click on one of the main sections from the ‘Table of Contents’ along the left hand side of the screen.  From here, you will see all of the subsections in the middle of the screen.

3) At the bottom of the subsections (look all the way to the bottom in the middle of the page), you’ll see a ‘click to add a new section’ link.  From here, you can create a new subsection.

4) To delete a subsection, simply open that particular subsection and click the ‘Delete Section’ link.

5) To re-arrange subsections, simply ‘drag-and-drop’ the subsection anywhere within that main section.  You can do this any time.  But, you need to keep it within the main section where you are working.
We hope these new features help you create a better business plan!

This new look will be rolling out in about a week and should make for an even easier time creating and editing your business plan.  Plus, the new design leaves a lot of room for us to add some really cool features that we hope to be launching in the near future.

As you get settled in with the new Editor, please feel free to leave any comments about what you like/dislike.  Also, let us know which features you think we should add to make things easier for you.

To share your plan via your favorite social network, just click the ‘AddThis’ button on your Bizplan.com Dashboard or on the Share page.  You’ll need to set your plan’s privacy level to ‘Public’ before you can share it.  Don’t worry, if you forget, you’ll be prompted to do so when you click the ‘AddThis’ button.  We try to make things easy around here.

One important point: When you share your plan through the ‘AddThis’ link, the people you share it with will only be able to view your plan and leave comments.  They will NOT be able to edit your actual plan in any way.

Okay, we can already see the questions coming….

Why does my plan’s privacy level have to be set to ‘Public’?

We figured, if your plan is set to ‘Private’, then that’s the way you want to keep it.  You probably don’t want to be sharing it across a social network.  Plus, our tech team says there are about a million complications from a programming standpoint.  We didn’t want to start any drama, so we took their word for it.  If you switch your plan to ‘Public’ and later decide you want it to be ‘Private’, don’t freak out!  You can always switch your plan between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ right on your Dashboard.

What exactly am I sharing?

Again, when you share your plan through the ‘AddThis’ button on your Dashboard or on the Share page, you’re simply sharing a link to the public view of your plan.  Anybody that you share your plan with will be able to read your plan.  But, they won’t be able to make changes to your plan or alter you Bizplan.com account in any way.

Did we miss anything?  If so, just shoot us a quick note by using the ‘Contact Us’ link at the bottom of www.bizplan.com.  We promise…..we’ll do our best to help!

But, we think one of the most useful improvements comes from the ‘Latest Activity’ feed that we added.  Many of you have asked for more visibility into the changes that have been made on your plan.  So, we’ve responded.  You now have the ability to easily track the activity on your plan including any invites that have been sent, changes that team members have made to your plan or any comments that have been left on your plan.  Now, none of your revisions will go unseen.

Here are some other features that make the Dashboard pretty slick:
1) Ability to quickly invite team members, share your plan and track the status of everybody that you’ve invited.

2) Moderate Comments that have been left on your plan by people that you have invited via the Share tab. If you like the Comment, just mark it as ‘Approved’ and it will be seen by anybody else that you’ve shared the plan with. If you don’t want it to be public, you can always just leave it as-is or delete it.

3) You can also view a running list of all of the Section Notes that have been left by your team members. These notes are only viewable by people on your team and are a great way to communicate internal changes that you’ve made to the plan.

4) Finally, you’ll have quick access to a feed from this blog (in the bottom right corner of the Dashboard). That way, you can read the latest updates without having to jump out to the separate blog page.

Here’s how the new stuff works:

‘Team’ Tab: If you want to invite people to join your team and help you write your plan, this is the place to do it. Once you’ve invited a team member, you can set their permission level to ‘Team Member’ or ‘Administrator’ status. The differences between each permission level is explained right on the Team page.

‘Share’ Tab: If you just want to let somebody take a look at your plan and add comments, but you don’t want them to actually be able to edit your plan, you should invite them through the Share page. This is the perfect way to share your plan with investors or non-team members. You can see when they last viewed your plan and any comments that they wrote.

We hope you like the changes that we’ve made!  We’re always building new stuff for the site….Next on deck is the Dashboard page. We’ll be adding a number of capabilities and improved activity tracking. Look for this to launch in another week or so. It’s going to be pretty cool.

This was related to some issues with the way the system was recognizing the permissions that you granted to these invitees. Anyway, it’s fixed now. So, you shouldn’t run into this again.

Also, we made some updates that improved the way the site looks and functions in Internet Explorer 7. So, if you’re still using IE7, you should notice some nice improvements. To get the most of of Bizplan, we recommend updating to Internet Explorer 8. You can do that here.