December 19, 2025 – Simplero Calvin Correli and Borland Software Founder Tim Berry

0:04 Intro
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion.

0:24 Jim Beach
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re ready for the holidays. They are just around the corner, and I hope you’re done with the year. I guess that’s the most important thing. Here we are at the very end of the year, maybe only 10 days left. There’s not much you can do at this point. Hopefully you’re, you know, ready and have gotten your goals met and all of that, and can plan for next year. I just hope you had a good year, personally, professionally, fiscally, physically, mentally, emotionally, romantically, and podcastily. We’ve got a great show for you today. First up, we have Calvin Corelli. We’re going to recode minds, talk about limiting beliefs, see how you create your self-image, and how you can change it. It is an amazing conversation, and Calvin is unbelievably great. It’s just a great, great conversation. And then, on our greatest hits, we are going to bring Tim Berry out. He was the founder of Borland Software, one of the original big, great California companies from the 80s and 90s. Tim will be with us to share his insights as part of the greatest hits. We’ll be back in just a second to start.

1:52 Jim Beach
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. I am really excited to introduce my first guest today. He did something that no one else has ever done that I’ve ever met. This is really fascinating. He was actually born dead. I don’t know what that means, but he had to get his butt slapped a little bit harder than the rest of us for the blood to start flowing, I guess. And it turned out that he lived through it, and he turned out okay, so he thought. And over the years, he realized that his wiring was wrong and he needed to debug his mind. He spent years studying all of the greats, the Tony Robbinses, and the Eastern sages, and all of that, and he figured out how to debug his mind, and he’s going to share that with us. After that, he built a $5 million business that focuses on SaaS companies. I think, Andy has a book called We Can Do This: Overcoming the Political Divide and Creating the World We Want to Live In. Calvin, welcome. How are you doing?

2:51 Calvin Correli
Sounds about right, man. Yeah, I’m doing amazing. How are you doing? I am—

2:54 Jim Beach
I am Well, and also a podcast host as well.

2:59 Calvin Correli
That’s right. 

3:01 Jim Beach
What’s the name of the show?

3:03 Calvin Correli
You brought your mind with Calvin Crowley?

3:05 Jim Beach
Oh, that’s right. Recode Your Mind, isn’t it? Yes, you’re right. Your mind.

3:09 Calvin Correli
Yeah, see, you got it. You Better than I do. Yeah, 

3:12 Jim Beach
What’s it’s Broken With Our Minds?

3:15 Calvin Correli
Oh, man. What’s not? No, like, all right. So we all heard about limiting beliefs, I assume, by this point, right? Most people have heard about limiting beliefs. So the thing with limiting beliefs is that they live within the greater context, which is your identity, how you see yourself. And this is what it took me, like, ages to really realize and get, is that how you see yourself shapes everything. So it’s not like it’s really—the—we end up living within a container that is our identity, that is how we see ourselves, and then the limiting beliefs live inside of that container. So let me give you an example. Like that, me being born dead, not breathing, everybody panicked, blue, whatever. Finally, they got me to breathe, right? But then, to make sure that I was gonna survive, they put me in an incubator for 48 hours. And I’m grateful that they did. I was like, I’m alive and well, and like, I was taken care of. But like, that version of me, that infant version of me, decided, “Oh, shit. This means I’m discarded. I’m not wanted. It means they’re like, why would that be? There must be something wrong with me. I must have done something wrong. Like, I must be bad. Clearly, I don’t belong.” Like all of these, like, identity pieces that— At this point, obviously, I don’t have words for any of that other stuff, but like, that becomes part of just how I see myself and how I relate to Life and to the world, and like— Also, like, I’m not saying it’s on—

4:58 Jim Beach
Me, yeah. Like, push back. Back a little on this. Did your parents obviously tell you that story, right? At what age did you find out that you were born dead?

5:08 Calvin Correli
So this is actually interesting. They didn’t. This is something that came to me. I’m gonna say like 15, 18 years ago, I was at an event, and just this anger-release exercise. And then this image came to me after. And then I asked my mom what had happened in my birth, because I saw something and I couldn’t quite decode what it was. And then she told me— What had happened.  Yeah, so that’s how that came about.

5:36 Jim Beach
But the point is not—I’m mad about it, almost like that at all. Knowing that upset you and made you feel like less of a good person.

5:47 Calvin Correli
No, the other way around. No. It gave me an understanding: “Oh, this is what’s happening.” So it’s not about like, going back and being like, “Oh, woe is me,” and I’m broken because of this or that. The other thing: it’s more that that happens, like, whatever it is, like, that was part of my story. Whatever it is for you, there’s something that happened that you interpreted in some way to recognize, to think that you are—that you don’t belong, or that you’re not safe, or it’s all up to you, or there’s something wrong with you, or you did something wrong—whatever that—however that shows up for you. We all have some version of like, “not enough.” Like, there is not enough—like scarcity—or like, “I’m not gonna be safe and secure.” We all have versions of that. And so the point is that you decide that unconsciously early on, and that becomes the world that you live in. And so if you’re coded with, “I’m not safe,” and it’s all up to me to make sure I am safe, like, that’s going to be your reality until we see it. And then the moment you see it, it stops having power over you. So it’s not like, “Oh, shit. Now we gotta go cry over this and blame our parents.” Like, none of that stuff, right? “Oh, shit, I’m broken.” Like, no. It’s the opposite. Most people get into—and I did the same too—most people get into the world of personal development, like Tony Robbins and all that stuff, because they think there’s something wrong, because they think there’s somewhere to get to, and they’re, “I’m not there yet, but if I fix myself—if I do all this work to fix myself—then I’ll be great.” But that’s just reinforcing that there’s something broken in the first place, and that’s what I want to—that’s the myth that I really want to break up with. Like, no, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just that you misidentified as the story in your head versus the soul, the spirit that you are.

7:37 Jim Beach
Okay. At what age are you talking about? I had horrible teenage years, just horrible. Yeah, you know, I was convinced that I was a loser and all of that, right? And, you know, it took me years, decades, to recover from the high school years. So, right? Is that what you’re talking about, or is it beyond that? Because, you know, a lot of us go through that kind of stuff in the teen years, with the zits and everything and the braces.

8:09 Calvin Correli
For sure. What—the way that your teenage years happen for you will tend to be a reflection of what got installed earlier. But we’re talking about stuff that gets installed, like, very early in your life.

8:24 Jim Beach
At two and three years old, those things get beaten into you, right?

8:28 Calvin Correli
Yeah. Or zero, or one. Or even like—the way I look at it is, actually, we come into this world with like—we orchestrate the events in our lives so that we will discover—we will live with the mind bugs so that we can learn to realize that there are lies. Like, that’s really like—we orchestrate it even before we enter this world. That’s how I look at it.

8:53 Jim Beach
Okay. Do you know about neuroplasticity, Calvin? I think that neuroplasticity may be the coolest word on Earth. I just love that word. It’s up there with like serendipity and plethora, some of the other just great fun words to play with. Or perambulator.

9:16 Calvin Correli
Perambulator. Is one of my favorite ones, too. What was that one? Perambulator?

9:20 Jim Beach
Oh, that’s a good one. I don’t know what it does, but it sounds neat.

9:27 Calvin Correli
It’s like—it’s like, I don’t even know the actual English word, but like, the thing that you carry your kid around and then you drive your kid around in. That’s what it is.

9:43 Jim Beach
Yes. Okay. All right, so talk to me about neuroplasticity and what that means. Does that mean that I can beat the shyness out of myself, or that I can learn to become different? What does that mean to you? Yeah, exactly, right. So, so—

9:58 Calvin Correli
Yeah, exactly, right. So, so— So the phrase that I return to is: neurons that fire together wire together. So I’ll give you an example. Like one of my clients—she’s a beautiful Norwegian lady—she’s created an incredible online business teaching painting to thousands of people in Norway. And one of her core patterns was like, “People are going to leave me. They’re going to reject me.” In her teenage years, like, she had this situation where there’s a group of, like, 10, a dozen girls, and from one day to the next, they didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She was part of the group one day, and the next day she was not. And her mind bug was, “Oh, shit. They left me. They rejected me. I must have done something wrong. What did I do wrong?” And then she would like spend hours, years, decades, trying to figure, like, what am I doing wrong? What was I doing wrong? Making sure I never do anything wrong so people don’t reject me. Now, she created a business with thousands of clients, and she was constantly worried she was going to do something wrong so they would leave. And it’s just—that’s the pattern. But the beautiful thing, and where neuroplasticity comes in, is the moment you really see, “Oh, crap, that’s the pattern I’m playing, and it came from here.” There’s probably something even earlier in her case, but we don’t need to go that. We just need to see, “Oh, that this is where the energy in this pattern is coming from.” Once you see it, now when that comes up again, you have the choice: do I keep going down that same path that I’ve been down, you know, a thousand times before, or do I choose to take a step back and just be like, “No, that’s not the truth.” And so, as you make that choice more, that old highway of, “Oh my God, they’re going to reject me if I do something wrong or if I say something wrong,” and blah, blah, blah—that highway is going to start to get overgrown, because those neurons no longer fire together, and so they don’t keep wiring together. So yeah, neuroplasticity is awesome, and it’s exactly it. Like, what I love about my work is we just need to see it and really touch it once, where you really get it and you feel, “Oh, this is the pattern.” And then from that moment on, it’s shifted forever. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be a situation where you go down that path again, but you will catch yourself and just stop it real soon, because now it’s a friend, it’s familiar, you know? Like, okay, I know what I’m looking at here.

12:24 Jim Beach
Can you talk to us a little bit about your business life and the new business that you’re running? Is it called— Sim? What’s it called?

12:34 Calvin Correli
Simplero, yeah. Simplero, there we go. Yes. So I got Simplero as a platform for coaches, course creators, creators, online in general—info business, service business, consulting business—to run your whole business in one platform, right? It does all the things you need: from your website, your funnels, your email, you’re selling your products, subscriptions, memberships, courses, communities—like all of it—AI—all in one place. And I built that because I got into the coaching world some years ago, and I was like, “Oh, I need a good platform. I don’t like any other ones that are there in the market, so let me build my own.” So that’s—that’s the core of my business, is doing software for the coaching, course creator market. 

13:25 Jim Beach
Other coaches use it as well. 

13:27 Calvin Correli
Yes, tons of other coaches, thousands.

13:29 Jim Beach
Yeah. What will it do for me as a coach? What invoices and stuff, or does it—what’s it do?

13:35 Calvin Correli
Yeah, invoices, all that. Usually, like, people have a website. They use WordPress for their website, right? Then they have their—maybe Mailchimp—for their email marketing. And then maybe they have, like, Calendly to schedule meetings. So maybe they have Thinkific or Kajabi or something for their courses, and then they have ClickFunnels to run their funnels, or whatever. So Simplero is the platform that takes all of that and puts It in one place. Amazing. Okay, yeah, it’s incredible. It really is.

14:07 Jim Beach
All right. I had not run across that before. And you’re allowed to have classes and stuff, just like Kajabi and all of that?

14:14 Calvin Correli
All of that, yeah. And we’ve done something because, like, there’s this—I’m the CEO, I’m the founder, solo owner, no funding—and I’m also a coach myself, so I’m in there. I’m also a coder, so I’m in there every day. So I build these things into it that most others don’t, because they’re not using their own software in the same way. And so one of the things I’ve done is I’ve built in AI in a way that I haven’t seen any other platform do, where, when you upload your recording to your coaching call or your course, or whatever it is, we’ll transcribe it. And now your members, your students, can ask questions of either—like when they’re in your community—like all the content that’s in there, and the AI will draw on all of those sources to help you give the answer. Or you can target a specific video, a lesson in a course, and say, “Hey, pull out what were the exact frameworks that he talked about here, and how does it apply to me?” And then the AI is not just that, because it’s also your personal tool. So it gets to know you over time, like your patterns, your behaviors, and your projects you’re working on, et cetera. So when you have a course training that you take that’s on some specific thing, you’re like, “Help me apply that to my business.” And so that way, as a student, you get so much more value out of this built into the same platform without having to copy-paste, like all that stuff that you’d always have to do. And when you’re the coach, the value that you offer—the course that you do, the coaching that you do—gets so much more value to your students without you having to do anything else. I’m personally really pumped about this, and I use it daily myself in my own work. I go through tons of courses and do my own coaching and all that stuff. It’s super powerful.

16:10 Jim Beach
I will have  to check that out. That sounds like a really good one.

16:15 Calvin Correli
It is. Yeah, it’s crazy.

16:26 Jim Beach
How much can people change? A bride says she can change her man, you know, and an old bride says, “No, you can’t.” You can’t change people. How much can you really change?

16:34 Calvin Correli
That’s a great question. Well, I think the way I look at it is that there’s your essence—your, like, inherent nature—and that doesn’t change. Like, you’re a parent, I’m assuming, right? Like, if you’ve had more than one kid, you know that your kids are just completely different the way they go into the world. They’re just wired completely differently. So I think there’s an inherent nature, and then there’s all the crap that we add on top of that during our upbringing—like the mind bugs, right? So these are the things that get in between the essence of who you are and how you actually show up. It’s like, when we’re kids, one of the fundamental bargains that we make is that we make a deal with our caretakers, our parents, that says, “I will be who I think you want me to be, so that you will keep me safe,” right? “I will be who I think you want me to be, so you will keep me safe.” This happens for all of us. It happens completely unconsciously. So we will decide, “Oh, you want me to be like a nice, quiet girl that never, never, never, you know, acts out or, you know, is a burden to you. I will be that person by disowning all of the parts of me that I think are a burden,” right? Or, “You think I need to be like super brainy, super smart, non-emotional boy. Great. I will be that by disowning all of my feelings and like really living in my head.” And so we adapt. And so the journey is to recognize how we adapted and decode that so that we can become more of who we truly are.

18:17 Jim Beach
So how do I start this process? I am listening to you, and I’m realizing that I have limiting beliefs. I still trust my second-grade teacher, who told me that I’m not creative, and so I have this limiting belief. And Calvin, that really did happen. We had an assignment where we were supposed to draw a monster, and I drew my version of a monster, and my teacher, Mrs. Leeds, second grade, came over and said, “Jim, your monster has three heads. Everyone knows that monsters only have two heads.” And my monster was criticized, and I was told that I was not creative in the second grade. I remember it vividly.

18:57 Calvin Correli
That sucks. What do you make that to mean?

19:00 Jim Beach
That I’m not creative and I can’t do—and so I decided not that I couldn’t draw and I couldn’t be an architect, and, you know, because I’m not creative. Yeah, yeah. It was really weird. When I got into architecture school, I was the most creative guy in the class.

19:17 Calvin Correli
There you go.

19:19 Jim Beach
I had to recode myself, and it took me decades to do that. So how do we do that? How do I recode and get rid of this Old second-grade stuff? Yeah.

19:29 Calvin Correliz
Yeah. The trick is, it’s so freaking simple. It’s just to see it. The problem is, like, again, the work that I do is really below the level of limiting beliefs. It’s not like you go around thinking to yourself, “I’m not wanted,” or “I’m not safe,” or “I’m not good enough.” They’re not thoughts in your head. They’re just ways that you see yourself and you see the world. You see your place in the world. And so what I do is I listen to people, and I listen for what are those underlying patterns, those underlying stories that they have, or that underlying identity. And then I just point it out to people. I was like, “Oh.” Like, I had a client, Robin. She was like—like her thing was, like, “I have to be that nice girl who’s never a burden, and it’s all up to me to take care of things.” Her parents were divorced, and like, she went to live with her mom, and she had a younger daughter, and she needed to take care of that younger daughter and make sure that she was—and the younger daughter was like always a problem—and she wanted to make sure she was never a problem, always like never a burden, and that it was all up to her. And that’s the pattern that she was still running in her business. So it’s just seeing it. “Oh, crap, that’s the pattern I’m running.” That’s the identity, is: “I can’t be a burden, and it’s all on me.” And then I look at like, “Where did you learn that?” And she tells me the story of her parents and the divorce and all that stuff. And I’m like, “Oh, can you see that that wasn’t the only possible meaning you could have assigned there?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I get that.” And usually at that point there’s some tears and whatnot, but then that’s really it. It’s just a matter of seeing it specifically and clearly. And this is where me being a programmer really helps, because I’m very particular with language. It’s like, that’s why I called it mind debugging, because it is saying, when you debug a piece of software, you got to get to very specifically: what is the bug here? You can’t just, like, fix random shit, right? You have to fix it. Pardon my language here, but you can’t just fix random stuff. You have to find out what’s the specific bug here. What is the actual thing that needs to be changed? Or what is the actual bug, the lie? And so the hard part is that it’s really hard to read the label from inside the bottle, because you’re in there, you’re swimming in this. It’s really hard to see it from inside, but from outside, it’s pretty simple. And then once you see it, it’ll never be the same, because you’re like, “Oh, that’s just a lie. It came from there. I gave it that meaning at that point unconsciously, but now that it’s conscious—now that I see it—it’s not going to have the same power.”

22:09 Jim Beach
What about something that It wasn’t built into you by the outside world like that? What if you’re just lazy? Your limiting belief is just laziness. “I believe I’ll do it later and it’ll be just fine.” All right, before we get over something like that?

22:33 Calvin Correli
It’s a great question. So I— Just want to be clear: the other things aren’t actually installed from outside as much as—like, obviously, they’re events. I think you get this, but just to be, again, specific: events happen; we assign meaning to it. So I did that, right? I did that in response to the external circumstance. And there’s always going to be external circumstance. And again, if you have two siblings that have the exact same experience—they might be, you know, be twins—they will have different meanings assigned to it, and one will assign, I mean, some deep meaning. The other will maybe not assign any meaning at all to an event, right? So it’s, again, it’s totally something that we do ourselves. Lazy, I think, is a very interesting one, because it’s like, is that bad? Is that good? I don’t know. It depends. I think laziness is inherent, especially in guys. We’re always trying to conserve energy. And so it’s a calculation of: is this effort going to be worth the outcome, and what’s the perceived likelihood that it is going to be worth it, right? And so if you have a programming that says—well, you have an identity, again, that says, “I’m someone who, like, I’m cursed. Things never work out for me.” Like it’s like, “I try, but I always fail.” Like, that’s an identity that we can have. “There’s something wrong with me that makes things not work.” Then, of course, you’re going to be lazy, or you’re going to be seen as being lazy. But really what you are usually doing is conserving your energy because you’re like, you know, it’s going to be futile anyway. Or you think, you know, right?

24:06 Jim Beach
When I was in graduate school, Calvin, I lived with a guy named Mark, and coincidentally, we were number one and number two in our program, and we were always competing for grades. And we lived together, so we saw how each other was working, what they were doing. And after a year and a half, we worked our way into a rule that I was not allowed to start a project until he was done with the project for the same due date, and then we would get the same grade. And it would just tick him off to no end that I whipped it together in the last 12 hours. He spent 12 weeks on it. We got the same grade. But it did teach me that when I work, I am very effective and get work done very quickly. I am hard to get started sometimes, to get the engine going, you know.

24:58 Calvin Correli
I’m very good at getting started. I’m not so good at finishing. Team of finishers around me. So that’s helpful, and it’s good to know these things about ourselves, right? So, and yeah, like, I think— Again, like the opposite of lazy, right, is like—you know, that can be a challenge too, where you’re just always doing, doing, doing. But it’s like—a lot of the reason that we do, oftentimes, or that we get stuck in our heads thinking about stuff, is because there’s something that we don’t want to be present with. If there’s something going on inside—a little whisper, maybe a feeling, or something that’s uncomfortable—we’ll just like get in our heads and think and think and think and plan and schedule all the things. Or we’ll like do, do, do, do, do as a way to get away from that. And so sometimes being lazy can be really cool, can be really helpful—

25:55 Jim Beach
I guess. So yes, we Only have a minute left. Tell me about your book, We Can Do This: Overcoming the Political Divide and Creating the World We Want to Live In. Can we really get past how stupid the other party is? Because the other party, Calvin, is stupid.

26:10 Calvin Correli
Yeah, it doesn’t matter which side, which one you’re in, right?

26:14 Jim Beach
Pretty smart. The other side was a bunch of morons.

26:20 Calvin Correli
So the core premise of that is like, I’m applying the same principles that I apply to coaching. I apply that lens to the world of politics. And one of the key insights that I realized some years ago was that we are being played, right? And the reason that there is this two-sides thing is that there are some people who like to get us onto the two sides and fight each other, so we don’t notice what’s actually happening behind the scenes. We’re getting suckered into believing that there are two sides and that those two sides are meaningful, and the other side is stupid. Like, it’s all a play, it’s all show business.

27:01 Jim Beach
We’re out of time, Calvin. How do we find out more? Follow you online, get a copy of the book, listen to your show, get some coaching.

27:09 Calvin Correli
Yeah, go to my Instagram. That’s where I’m most live, active social media-wise. Just my name, Calvin Corelli, on Instagram. And then my website is calvincorelli.com. There’s a newsletter, there’s some goodies there. That’s the place to reach out. Fantastic. And let me know that you found me here, that you heard me here, and it’s always awesome. And let me know what resonated when you reach out. DM me on Instagram, but I love hearing from people.

27:31 Jim Beach
Thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

27:35 Calvin Correli
Thank you, Jim. It’s great to be with you. Happy holidays.

27:40 Jim Beach
We’ll be right back.

27:57 Intro 2
Well, that’s a—that’s a—that’s a wonderful question. Actually, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s—that’s—that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question.

28:16 Jim Beach
School for Startups Radio, and welcome back to School for Startups Radio. Again, thank you so much for being with us today. I am very excited and honored to welcome back to the show Tim Berry. He is one of the true industry legends. He is the founder of Borland Software Company. He has also got a new software company called Palo Alto Software, and he is very aggressive in giving back to the entrepreneurial community. He has been an adjunct professor. He is a very frequent writer and author, and has a new book out now, which is five-star rated with amazing reviews from some of the biggest names in the industry. The book is called Lean Business Planning: Get What You Want From Your Business. Tim, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?

29:08 Tim Berry
Oh, thank you, Jim. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s been like talking—

29:14 Jim Beach
Yeah, I think it’s been like two years since you were on the show. So welcome back. Thanks for coming back. What’s wrong with the traditional 25- to 30-page business plan?

29:26 Tim Berry
It’s 2015 now, Jim—going on 2016. We’re busier. Our attention span has changed. Technology has changed. And in the last two or three decades, we’ve lost track of business planning as something to help us do our business better, and kind of swallowed the myth of a business plan as a big, hard-to-do document that nobody in their right mind would do just because they want to run their business better. The only reason you would do the dreaded business plan is you have to because of an investor or a bank. So that’s suboptimal. Everybody who’s running a business ought to have a simple, clean, lean business plan that can help them—can help you, if you’re running a business—run the business. That’s what business planning was always intended to be, but it sort of got off track. And with lean business planning, I’m really trying to pull it back to what it always ought to have been and was in the beginning. It helps people run business better.

30:36 Jim Beach
You know, you’re making a huge distinction. What I’m hearing, Tim, is that people traditionally have been writing get-funded plans, and then once you get the funding, you put it in a drawer and never look at it again, right?

30:53 Tim Berry
Absolutely. And that’s for some subset of the world that has to do that. That’s okay—there’s a business purpose. But what happened, Jim, is then the rest of us hear the phrase “business plan,” and we think, “Oh my God, that sounds horrible. That’s daunting. I don’t want to do that. That’s a big honking task that I just don’t want to do.”

31:17 Jim Beach
Is there any place left for the 30-page plan with all of the graphs and charts and appendices and all of that? Is there a place for that anymore?

31:29 Tim Berry
Oh, yeah. Actually, I’m now, late in my career, a member of an angel investment group where I live in Oregon, where we review business plans—40 or 50 a year—and I’m a judge in some business plan competitions. I’ll read more than 100 of those traditional business plans a year. And there is a place for them, but that’s a subset. That’s a very small subset of the people who need to do that. And meanwhile, we have millions and millions of people who are out there slogging on the front lines, doing business. And don’t they want to prioritize and set a few bullets for strategy and have their tactics in mind and figure out major milestones and track progress towards the milestones and manage their cash flow? I mean, there’s need for lean business planning everywhere that people are doing business. And it doesn’t mean we don’t need the big business plan for some specialty cases, but both should exist.

32:26 Jim Beach
All right, let me ask you this. I’m going to ask you to pull the curtain back and tell us what Dr. Oz is doing behind the curtain when you read a 30-page business plan. Let’s be honest. Do you read the whole thing? Do you skim the first page and get a sense of it and go, “This is junk. This is not well written”? Do you only read the entire plan when it captivates you, when it’s a great idea? What are your thoughts on the actual reading of these 30-page plans? I feel like sometimes I’ve written them and they don’t read a word of it. So they read the executive summary, and that’s it.

33:02 Tim Berry
Well, let’s start, Jim. I’m fascinated by that, and that’s such a good way to put it. So we help people understand how this really works. Let’s put ourselves in the context where there’s about 40 of us who are in an angel investment group, and we’re looking at what we call submissions by startups that think they might get seed capital from us. We’re going to end up investing. Oh, we’ve done nine investments—in 1009—as much as $600,000, as little as $100,000, and we’re kind of pooling our resources. I think our process is the way it works: we’re not going to read the business plan as a first step. We’re going to look at the summary. We’re going to look at like the equivalent of a page or two. We use an angel investment platform called gust.com—like “Gust,” a queen—where they give us a profile and the startup submits to us. We’re going to get very much summary, and from the summary, we’re going to choose, oh, roughly about 10 of every 40 that we want to know more about. So with those 10 out of 40, we’re going to invite them to pitch with us—some of us—and we invite them to pitch. I’m sort of nerdy and like business plans. I may go in and explore the business plan, but few of us do until after. And from the ones that pitch, if we get 10 into pitch, probably around five will be interesting enough to us that we’ll do what we call due diligence. And there, Jim, there’s where you have that business plan, because at that point we like their summary, we like their pitch, we like them, we’re interested. Then they damn well better have a business plan, because now we really want to go in and pull it apart and talk to customers and look at their numbers and see how much cash they really need, and things like that. It’s in the due diligence process that we really go into the business plans. So it’s not first impression. It’s not when I read those business plans. I’m looking for key points. And I’m talking long here—can I go on on what I actually do look for?

35:24 Jim Beach
That’s exactly what my next question was. What are those key points? Please, please tell me.

35:30 Tim Berry
First, the management team background because as I really get into the business plan, I’ve seen the pitch. If I don’t have a sense there’s product-market fit and there’s potential growth, scalability, defensibility—like some way to differentiate—and so on, I’m probably not even there. So the first thing I’m going to look at is the backgrounds. To be successful in startups, we kind of need people who have been through stress. It’s so weird—I’ve seen your whole thrust. That’s what you and I are in complete agreement on: the strange world of startups. We don’t want to invest in somebody who’s going through that maze for the first time, right? So that’ll be one thing we’ll look for. And then we’ll really go into—and especially me, because I tend to do this a lot—I’m going to go look at their numbers and see what the drivers are of the sales forecast, and does it make sense, and see if they’ve got spending projected to give credibility to their forecast, the cash flow, so they understand business-to-business cash flow, things like that. And then we’ll look at the details. But I’m very rarely reading a business plan from executive summary all the way through to the end. I’m picking and choosing those key points. And the other things that I’ll be looking at depend on the specific business. Are we worried about intellectual property? Or when I say defensibility, are we worried that anybody can copy them and run them out of their own market? Are we worried that this is a business that doesn’t need investment because it can grow through its own cash, so they don’t need us? Things like that—more on a case-by-case basis.

37:26 JIm Beach
All right. Great. Insight. All right. Well, we sort of talked about the old world. Now let’s talk about the 2015 model. What does a perfect lean business plan look like? What are the components of that? How long is it? Does it have paragraphs in it? Give us some of the basics.

37:46 Tim Berry
Yeah, let’s start with this, putting it in context: the lean business plan exists for the business owner and his or her team, not for outsiders to read. So right there, there’s a whole lot of summary and descriptions of the traditional business plan that you just don’t bother to do. Form follows function. It’s just for you, the owner. With that as context, another context where I get into four components is the process. What makes it lean is the whole idea of lean is build, measure, learn. It’s small steps, analyze results, and take the small steps and move in the direction with a lot of small steps, rather than setting it all down and then starting out to execute in a big way. So you’re going to review and revise it every month. There’s two contexts to kind of frame it. And then I say, ideally, a lean business plan has four basic parts. The first: bullet points defining strategy, so that owners remember. You forget your strategy. You want to do everything. Strategy is focus. So a few bullet points define strategy. And then the second part: also a few bullet points—what we used to call in the traditional business plan the marketing plan, the product plan, and the financial plan. I say the highlights of those things are tactics, and there’s more bullet points. So tactics have to match your strategy, and tactics are things like our pricing, our channels of distribution. If we’re a product, our traffic generators. If we’re mobile or web-based, and so on. We’re highlighting what’s really important for ourselves as reminders when we get to the monthly review of what we thought we were doing. So that strategy is one. Tactics is two. Third: concrete specifics—major milestones—what’s really supposed to happen, dates, deadlines, tasks, responsibilities, metrics. How are we going to track whether or not we’re on plan? Performance metrics—mostly dollars, but also calls, trips, seminars, engagements, leads—there’s a lot of other metrics. And all of that concrete specifics is in part three of a lean business plan. And then part four is essential numbers. I say you can’t really run your business well without having a projection of sales and spending and cash flow.

40:28 Tim Berry And you might be wrong with them. 

40:31 Jim Beach
Overall length of this, Tim, is it two pages?

40:37 Tim Berry
It’s a lot of lists. First of all, you mentioned paragraphs. There probably isn’t a paragraph in the whole thing. So if you write it out on paper, there’s not a lot of reason to write it out on paper with the way we work with technology these days. But if you do, it’s probably a page or two for strategy, two or three pages for tactics, then a list of major milestones, a list of performance metrics, an agreement on what day of the month you’re going to review, a list of assumptions, and then projected sales, projected spending, and projected cash flow. It might be eight to 12 pages if you print it out.

41:17 Jim Beach
Okay And I think the most important thing that I’ve heard you say so far about this is that it’s updated monthly, right? Talk to us about how this is a living document. It’s not like the Constitution, where you write it once and then live by it, right?

41:37 Tim Berry
Absolutely. And you mentioned in your opening, Jim, the business plans that get done—“Oh, thank God I’m finished with this. I hope I never have to do such a hard thing again.” You heave a huge sigh of relief, and you throw it in a drawer somewhere, hoping you never have to see it. No. With lean business planning, I say in your section three, concrete specifics, a day—you know, for my company, it was always the third Thursday of every month that we would meet and review and revise and look at plan versus actual. And that’s so important. That’s the core management. See, your projections are always wrong. Business plans are always wrong. But the utility there is: how are they wrong, in what direction? What does that tell us about next month? Did we price too high? Could we do much better if we had more seminars and fewer paperclips, you know, et cetera? Every month, look at that, and you review and you revise it, and that keeps it live. Now it’s management. Now it’s actually helping you run your business day by day, month by month.

42:48 Jim Beach
I go to a lot of entrepreneurial events around here in Atlanta, of course, Tim, and there are two or three people who have been working on their business plan for six months or a year, and we all just laugh at them and roll our eyes. You know, writing a business plan for six months—not out there selling, not out there implementing—writing a plan for six months. And I just chuckle and can’t take these people seriously. How long should it take me to write a lean business plan?

43:20 Tim Berry
Well, you see, you’re always doing it. So your first original lean business plan is going to be your first set of thoughts. And why—you, I mean, we’re talking about hours, not days, not weeks, not months. We’re talking about hours to put it down on paper. The thinking process is forever, right? I so second you on the ultimate what you say with writing the plan—the life doesn’t stop while you write a plan. If you’re really engaged in a startup or small business or your own business, you’re always thinking about it. And the discipline of writing down bullet points is a matter of not that first time that it takes you two or three hours to just get it from your head onto the computer, but it’s always—it’s—that’s—it’s just the process you live by. Can I tell you a quick story, please? So I’m judging, a few years ago, a very prestigious business plan competition at the University of Texas at Austin. They used to call it Moot Corp. It was the first intercollegiate business plan competition. It used to be just grad students. Nowadays it’s very real. Most of these companies get financed. And there we are in the finals, and this brilliant woman is talking to her slides, pitching to the judges of this business plan competition. And as she puts up a slide with bar charts showing projected sales and costs and expenses, one of the judges interrupts her and says, “Wait a minute. Those numbers are different from the business plan you sent us three weeks ago.” She doesn’t even blink, she doesn’t pause. She says, “Of course. That was three weeks ago. This is today. The numbers are always changing.” She won the competition. I like the story because it’s a reminder: this is the real world. There’s no value in sticking to a plan. The plan is to help you connect the dots, to help you keep long term and short term in mind, to help you go step by step, but you always have to be reviewing and revising. It’s crazy to just do it and then think you’re just okay. Now it’s done. Now we execute. This is the real world.

45:41 Jim Beach
And you said something earlier, Tim, almost in passing, when you were describing the lean business plan. You said it’s not for investors. Then you described it. Do I ever plan on sharing this with investors, or is this something that I consider 100% confidential?

45:58 Tim Berry
Oh, here’s the thing, Jim. If you have the business need, I think there will be times when you’re going to share your plan with your investors. And nowadays, given that the process with investors starts with a summary, and then there’s a pitch, and then there’s the business plan for due diligence, the lean plan may be all you really ever need. Because when you get to that stage in your business that you have to show a business plan to an outsider, then you add summary. You probably add a market analysis. You do your pitch. And it’s all—it’s sort of, the plan is the screenplay, and the pitch is the event. And for the due diligence for the investors, your lean plan is probably enough for them to go look at what’s important, and maybe you add more background on the team and a few things. But your lean plan is, at the very least, a really strong rough draft for the plan you’re going to show outsiders.

46:59 Jim Beach
All right, let’s reverse this now. As an entrepreneur, three weeks ago, Tim, I gave an investor—a potential investor—a plan that I’m out there trying to raise money for right now. I gave him a two-page and a five-page document full of bullet points, charts, graphs—very, very similar to what you’re describing. I believe he looked at it and said, “I don’t want this. I want a full-blown business plan,” which I happen to have. Thank goodness. What does it tell me, the entrepreneur, about a potential investor that doesn’t want a lean business plan? What do you take from that situation?

47:43 Tim Berry
I think—well, I’ll tell you the way we do it, and I’m speaking for a group of 40 right now, so I take that with caution—but I think we would never be saying that. We would be saying, “Gee, you know, we want to see your cash and your sales projections, and we want to see your headcount projections. We want to see your numbers better.” Sometimes the need for a business plan can be your summary, your pitch, and your spreadsheet. I don’t know that we, these days, are really relating to the format and the length. We want the information. So I now—in—I still do these business plan competitions where part of their format is they actually want the plan that has the executive summary and the market analysis. I want the information. I think most of my colleagues at angel investment want the information. We want to know the story of the market, but we also want to know: what numbers do you really have? We want to see your traction. We want to see milestones met. But I think, Jim, what you’re saying with the two-pager and the five-pager, our group would be very comfortable with. Here’s some more about the market. Here’s some more background about the team. Here’s the projected sales and cash flow. And probably we would call that collection a business plan.

49:11 Jim Beach
All right. How important are the numbers, right? These are projections, and so many times I feel like we’re guessing. When you look at numbers, Tim, are you looking at the thought process behind them, or do you really look at the number and go, “I expect you to make 1.2 million in the first year, like it says right here on line 32”?

49:33 Tim Berry
Oh, definitely. Just as you sort of imply, I absolutely get what you’re implying. What did you say? You said the thought behind them? Yes, yes. We look at the driver. The worst way to do numbers is, “Here’s a $5 billion market, and if we only get half a percent of it, we’ll have $50 million in the program.” We hate that. We want to see drivers. If you’re web-driven, we want to see your estimates for web visits, and what are you going to get in organic visits versus pay-per-click visits? How are you going to drive traffic to your web? And we’re going to look at numbers for the visits, and then conversion rates, and things like that, so we can see where your sales come from. If you’re selling a product, we want to see sales per month, per store, and how many stores you expect—per channel, per distributor. We want it broken down into the drivers of sales so that we can see you sort of get it. If you’re selling to enterprises, then you’re going to need a direct sales force, and we’re going to be kind of looking at how many salespeople do you have? So how many deals can they close every month? We look for the assumptions underneath the sales forecast. And of course, you want a high sales forecast—you want the famous hockey stick—but you want to be able to believe it.

51:02 Jim Beach
You have your foreword of the book written by Guy Kawasaki, Lean Business Planning. Tell us about the website that goes with it, the class, the online learning center at leanplan.com.

51:15 Tim Berry
Yes, and thank you so much for asking. Leanplan.com has there in the stop page that shows you the book that’s on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and the iBooks and so on. It’s already up there and published, where you can order the book. And it also shows you the class, which is on a site called learning.ly, hosted by The Economist Group, where I have our online course in lean business planning that’s being promoted this month—a month at $9.95. Leanplan.com is a great place to go, because here’s the thing: I believe I have a mission. I’m trying to help people. The other thing on leanplan.com is everything I’m saying, including all the book, is there on that website. If you don’t want to go buy something, if you want to just look—what the hell, what is Tim saying? What does he mean here? It’s all laid out. All of this content is there for free on leanplan.com.

52:23 Jim Beach
Fantastic. And how can we get in touch with you on social media, find out more about you, that kind of thing, please?

52:29 Tim Berry
Oh yes, thank you for that. Tim Berry on Twitter, and LeanBizPlan on Facebook, and also on Twitter with LeanBizPlan. And you search for me on LinkedIn, and there’s a lot of Tim Berrys, but you’ll find me. I’m in Eugene, Oregon—founder—oh, by the way, founder of Palo Alto Software. I was on the original board of Borland International. That was a huge success for Philippe Kahn. And not to correct, but I don’t want to take his credit. He was a great entrepreneur. He did Borland. I just helped. I was on the original board and watched and applauded stuff. Tim Berry, Palo Alto Software—you search for that, and I come up a lot. I’m actually in Wikipedia as Tim Berry, entrepreneur.

53:20 Jim Beach
Wow. Very impressive. Well, thank you for the correction too. I don’t want to give credit where it’s not due, but I know that you are also being incredibly humble and had a lot more to do with it than you will say. So anyway, Tim, thank you so much for being with us today. Congratulations on the new book, and thank you for sharing this great information with our listeners.

53:40 Tim Berry
Oh, Jim, thanks for asking me. It’s always a pleasure.

53:43 Jim Beach
We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? Come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care. Bye. Now go make a million dollars. You.