I find myself a little bit befuddled by the idea of business plans. Or maybe I should write it as, Business Plans.
From what I've heard and read, if you're starting a business and you need to borrow money from a bank, you have to have a business plan, which you've written (typed) and show it to the bank -- they see you have a realistic plan to make profits, and they loan you the money.
Or -- they say, This isn't realistic, it doesn't look like it could work, and they don't loan you the money because they don't want to lose money.
The part of it I don't understand is, you can write a Business Plan -- I could write one right now -- (researching first, of course) -- but how would I know what the business could develop into, or how much it could make, without doing it first?
I guess you wouldn't know, you would make an educated guess -- is that it?
Maybe my issue isn't business plans, but learning styles. My learning style, I don't know necessarily how I am going to do something until I do it. I find out in the process.
I remember in childhood -- maybe around 5th or 6th grade, playing board games -- Parcheesi, Clue -- and when trying a new board game at my neighbor's house, and reading the directions for how to play it, I was left thinking, "What?!"
So we just figured out how to start the game, and then we learned how to play it by playing it.
Someone I know refinishes or paints furniture and makes nails (decorated artificial fingernails) and puts her products on social media accounts -- Instagram; Twitter; Facebook, etc. and then people buy them.
I imagine she just puts them up there and see what happens. But then for that, you probably wouldn't need a bank loan, so you don't have to give them a Business Plan. Right?
But even for a bigger business where it makes a lot of money -- I had met someone who had built up a very profitable business and I asked him if he had it all in mind when he started, several decades before -- he said, incredulously, "No -- do you think I planned all this?"
Though still, if he got a bank loan at the beginning, he probably wrote a Business Plan for the vision he had then. But not for all the additions and changes in the future years, right? Because how could you know...?
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And this puzzlement recalled that news story from last night where Donald Trump is being sued by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) -- it's alleged that when requesting loans, he was overstating the value of properties he owned, to let himself be eligible for higher amounts of money. (Apparently he said an apartment he had was 30,000 square feet when it was really only 11,000 square feet.)
And -- this is not the same, but similar: the Trump case reminded me of something Ike Turner used to do: in order to build credit so that he could borrow larger amounts of money, he would go to the bank, borrow money (maybe a hundred thousand dollars), bring it home and put it in a safe for a week -- or a month, or something -- and then take the money out of the safe and pay the bank back, in full.
Then do the same thing again with a larger amount of money.... If I remember correctly, he built a recording studio -- Bolic Sound -- with the money he was able to borrow.
After I read that, years ago, I spoke to someone I knew who was a small business owner, I told him about what I read and I asked, Is it OK to do that? And he said No.
I thought it sounded -- too easy, or something -- like, wouldn't everyone do it, and then every person in America would have a line of credit worth a billion dollars or whatever. (Would that be good? How would that work?)
Although -- come to think of it, I don't believe Ike Turner had any legal trouble over that -- he spent time in prison at one point, but I think that was for drugs.
Maybe the serial borrowing-and-paying-back to get more credit isn't against the law, but just not a good practice. (As Ross Geller would say, "it's frowned upon.")
Ike Turner had some serious problems as a person, but he was also a musical genius: he did the arranging of all their songs....
♪♪ ♫
...You take the good -- along with the bad
Sometimes you're happy, and sometimes you're sad
(One more time!)
You know you love him, you can't understand (Tell me 'bout it!)
Why he treat you like he do, when he's such a good man?
-30-
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