Business Plan Planning

The owners of one of the biotech companies that leases space in my research building have been allowing me to use their company as a focus of several of my MBA class projects. Over the summer, I wrote a Business Plan for a class about Launching Technology Ventures, based upon their company. This semester I will likely again use their company as a basis for an assignment in a Real Estate for Entrepreneurs class I’m taking to compare the advantages and disadvantages of different biotech space for lease in town. This has been a great opportunity for me  to apply what I am learning to a real company. It’s apparently beneficial for the company as well since the owners recently gave me a small number of shares in the company as a Christmas gift. Thus, last night I went to my very first shareholders meeting where the CEO of the company gave an update to the other stakeholders on the proof of concept experiments that have been conducted to date. It is really exciting to see their initial “idea” coming to fruition.

The CEO and I recently went to an introductory meeting about the Business Plan Competition sponsored by the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship. I was very relieved to learn that we are qualified to enter. We are planning to completely revise my draft plan from last summer. Given that it was my very first attempt as such a document, it needs a lot of work. One difficulty I have is retaining scientific accuracy (if someone who is knowledgeable in biotech reads it) while making it accessible to  non-scientists. The CEO took the original version to a group of business advisers who could not make it through my executive summary due to several words of scientific jargon that I did not catch/define early enough. I ordered a number of books from Amazon last night to help with this project. One thing that is not entirely clear to me is the process of taking a private company public; this lack was clear in my first draft of the plan. The books I ordered should help to fill in these knowledge gaps. All in all, I think this is going to be great fun.