Why you don't want ChatGPT writing your business plan: Part 2 🤖

I wrote a recent newsletter about why business plans written by a ghostwriter-for-hire, or AI, or anyone-but-you are a big ‘ol waste of money. To recap - they’re generic and boring and make you look lazy, which is absolutely not the look you need when you’re walking the red carpet of retail leasing, so to speak. 

A business plan that doesn’t paint you in the most flattering light is embarrassing, but if that’s not enough to dissuade you from hiring someone to write your plan for you, there’s an even scarier issue with ghostwritten plans: they lack the specific information YOU need to find the right space, negotiate the best deal, and actually plan for successful operations…you know, the important stuff. 

I’ve got nothing personal against business plan writers (or the robots at ChatGPT) - even if you hire Barbara Kingsolver to write your business plan, she’s not going to be able to produce the magic you can. She may be able to write a plan with such beautiful prose and compelling character development that it will blow your book club’s mind, but she doesn’t know the specifics you know.  Okay, on second thought, Barbara Kingsolver can definitely write you a great business plan, but (a) you probably can’t afford her, and (b) you’re probably not planning to open a convenience store/ junkyard in Appalachia.

So now you’re stuck with a non-Pulitzer-winning ghostwriter — let’s think about them for a moment. If a ghostwriter’s business is to write other people’s business plans, they are selling their time, so their profitability comes from spending the least amount of time/effort producing your document, right? So it’s in their interest to recycle content, use the most readily-available resources, and keep things as evergreen as possible, so that they can rinse, repeat, and move on to the next plan ASAP. 

This arrangement does not produce business plans with the level of detail, nuance, and insider knowledge that lives in your head and heart – the fuel that drives you to open your business. 

YOU see an opportunity in the marketplace, and YOU are the right person to seize it, so YOU should be the one to explain it.

Why? Because you know where it should be. You know how it should run. You know what it’ll take to make it right. And if you don’t? The process of putting pen to paper on the business plan is when you’ll figure it out… you know, before you’ve already pledged your house as collateral for a lease.

Let’s break it down:

You know where it should be.

A ghostwriter based in Minneapolis can research the consumer market in Montgomery County, Maryland. They can Google the population of Bethesda. But you know what they can’t know? That moms toting toddlers don’t mind parking in the garages of downtown Bethesda, because the garages are owned by the county and are like $1 per hour…charmingly cheap. Seriously. Once you’ve experienced the thrill of cheap, convenient parking for your SUV in the heart of one of the most desirable retail areas in the region, you don't forget it.  So what might seem like a barrier (no onsite parking) is not, in fact, a barrier if you know your market intimately (like a prospective business owner should.) 

You know how the business should run.

A ghostwriter or even ChatGPT can parrot the essential elements of running a generic “business,” but you’re not opening just any business. Only YOU have YOUR vision for how your business is going to stand out and be successful. Google can tell you how to construct a modular salt cave, but it doesn’t know what Pedal Retailer, Jenna, knew when planning her business Salt & Souls. Jenna knew that her space needed a tea lounge, two individual salt booths, AND a modular salt cave to set it apart from competitors and to offer the experience she wanted to deliver.

These aren’t just superfluous details in the plan – these are crucial operational and site criteria that determine whether a space and a lease deal will work for a business. You have to define exactly what you’re planning to do and how you plan to do it in order to assess potential locations and deals. Generic information from the internet isn’t worth its salt (haha see what I did there?!) 

You know what it’ll take to make it right.

Possibly the most egregious deficiency of ghostwritten business plans is the section on budgeting. I am actually fairly certain that ghostwritten plans intentionally leave this section blank since no one can Google accurate budgets for startup businesses, and the ghosts who do the writing probably don’t even want to bother. The budget section is the clearest tell that a plan has been written by not-the-business-owner, because there is an alarming lack of detail; the P&L projections have like six line items (sales, cost of sales, marketing, rent, payroll, “other”) and many times, the Capital Budget is just one giant total like “it will cost $500k of initial investment.”

Umm, okay. So how much are you budgeting for your exterior sign? How much for pre-opening management labor? How much is your monthly bookkeeping service going to cost? Are your sales in year one exactly the same every single month? 

See what I’m talking about? There are a lot of details that you have to think through. At Pedal, the Capital Budgeting tool that we use with clients has over 40 line items – the most common startup expenses for retailers – so our clients are sure that they’ve thought through everything that will require cash before opening day. Our P&L projections model works on multiple assumptions and forces us to think through months 1 - 12 individually, not one “Year 1” total that will take 365 brutal days of sales and expenses to achieve. 

Especially in the budgeting section, handing your business planning off to a ghostwriter is just plain irresponsible, unless she’s going to wire you cash every time you need it.

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So I know all this sounds very much like I’m aggressively wagging my finger at you saying DON’T YOU DARE use a ghostwriter, but that’s because (a) I am actually wagging my finger and (b) I love you, and I want what’s best for you. 

As we say all the time at Pedal, writing your business plan yourself is the least challenging or boring thing you’ll be forced to do as a brick-and-mortar business owner. And if you don’t believe me, go ask one.