You have a business idea. Turn it into a plan.
The idea is rarely what fails. What fails is that nobody owns it, the capacity was never booked, and no one priced what happens if it works.
In short
An idea becomes a plan when six things have answers: who it is for by name, what evidence exists that anyone wants it, where the first ten customers come from, who owns it on Monday morning, what delivering it actually costs in hours, and what it costs to stop. Most ideas die on the fourth and fifth of those, not on the idea itself. The most expensive failure is the one nobody plans for, which is the idea working and the business having no capacity to serve it.
What we take on
Pressure testing the idea
Six questions that find the weakest link before money moves. It is rarely the one the room has been arguing about, and it is usually ownership or evidence rather than the idea itself.
The operating plan
Not a pitch deck. Who does the work, what one customer costs to serve, what breaks at ten times that, and who owns it on Monday. Almost nobody writes this and it decides more than the deck.
The first ten customers
Where they come from by name and in what order, what they are actually being sold, and what has to be true for the tenth to cost less to win than the first.
The stop condition
A result, a date, and a number that would end it, agreed while being honest is still cheap. An idea with no stop condition is not a plan, it is a commitment nobody voted for.
Plans do not usually fail on the idea
Most advice about turning an idea into a plan is about the market: is it big enough, who else is in it, what would you charge. Those questions are worth asking and they are not usually the ones that kill it. Ideas inside working businesses tend to die somewhere more boring.
They die because nobody owns them. The idea gets support from everyone in the room, which feels like momentum and is actually the problem, because a thing that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. Six months later it has had eleven conversations and no first customer, and it fades without anyone ever deciding to stop.
They die because the plan borrows capacity it never books. The new line runs on the same operations team that already runs flat out, and every time the two compete, the business already paying the bills wins. That is the right call each time and fatal in aggregate.
And they die by working. This is the failure almost nobody prices. Demand shows up, delivery was never staffed for it, quality drops in the new line and then in the old one, and a good idea takes the core business down a notch with it. Winning is a scenario that needs a plan too.
So the useful work is not a longer document. It is answering six questions honestly, converting the ambition into hours and then into people, and finding out which single thing is weakest while it is still cheap to fix. That is what the tool above does, and it is most of what the first two weeks of the engagement does at a larger scale.
Where the answers are strong, the recommendation is usually to start smaller than what was being contemplated, with a date attached. Where they are weak, the recommendation is to buy evidence before buying anything else. Neither of those needs a consultant to run for a year.
Six questions a plan has to survive
An idea that answers all six is fundable, whether the money comes from a bank, an investor or your own operating account. An idea that answers four of them is a hypothesis with a budget.
| The question | A weak answer | An answer you can act on |
|---|---|---|
| Who is it for? | Anyone with this problem. Any company that needs this. | A group you can count, or better, a list you can name. If you cannot list twenty, the segment is a guess. |
| What evidence is there that anyone wants it? | Everyone we describe it to says it is a great idea. | Somebody gave up something to get it: money, a signature, a date in their calendar, a pilot slot. |
| Where do the first ten customers come from? | Marketing. We would run some ads. | Named sources in order, with the first three reachable this week. Selling to people you already serve is a different business from selling to strangers. |
| Who owns it on Monday morning? | The leadership team. All of us, really. | One person, by name, with hours actually cleared and something else taken off them to make room. |
| What does delivering it cost? | We would figure that out once it takes off. | Hours to serve one customer, times the number you want, converted into people. Then check whether those people exist. |
| What does it cost to stop? | We have not really thought about that. | A number and a date, agreed now while being honest is still cheap. Written down before anyone is emotionally invested. |
The fourth row decides more outcomes than the other five together. An idea that everybody supports and nobody owns will be discussed warmly for a year and then quietly dropped.
Pressure test the idea before it costs anything
Six questions and two numbers. It names the weakest link in the plan, and works out what winning would cost you in people you have not hired yet.
How many customers would you want in year one?
The number that would make this worth having done.
Hours to serve one of them, for a year
Everything: delivery, support, billing, the awkward calls. Guess high.
Winning would take, in people
0
Where this stands
Answer the six
The weakest link
Before it goes to the board
Want the plan read by someone with no stake in the answer?
Send it over and you get back the question that decides it, what the plan is missing, and what the first two weeks would test. Your answers travel with it, so there is nothing to explain twice.
Goes to one inbox.
Questions we get
We have the idea and no time to work on it. Is that fatal?
It is the most common reason ideas stall, and it is fixable in exactly one way: take something off the owner. Adding an idea to a full plate is a decision to do it slowly while pretending otherwise.
If nothing can come off, that is a real answer. It usually means this is a next year idea, and saying so is better than a year of guilty half progress.
Do we actually need a written plan?
You need the six answers written somewhere. Whether that is a document, a page, or a table depends on who has to act on it and whether outside money is involved.
What you rarely need is the thirty page version. Long plans are usually a way of feeling prepared without committing, and they go stale the first week anything real happens.
How much evidence is enough before committing?
One person giving up something real beats fifty saying it sounds great. Money is the clearest signal, but a signed pilot, a blocked calendar slot, or an introduction to their own customer all count.
The test is whether they gave up something that costs them if they are wrong. Encouragement costs nothing, which is why there is so much of it.
Should a new line sit inside the existing business or beside it?
Inside is cheaper and slower, because it inherits your systems, your approvals and your calendar. Beside is faster and more expensive, and it duplicates things you already own.
The deciding question is usually whether the new line needs to move at a different speed than the core business tolerates. If it does, inside will grind it down no matter how good the intent is.
The idea competes with something we already sell. Does that rule it out?
No, and it is often a reason to move rather than wait, because if it is a good idea somebody else will do it to you eventually.
What it does change is who should own it. Handing it to the team whose numbers it threatens is a way of arranging its death without having to argue against it.
Everyone in the company likes the idea. Why is that a warning?
Unanimous support usually means nobody has been asked to give anything up for it yet. Agreement is cheap before budget, headcount and calendar time are attached to it.
A useful test: ask which existing project should be paused to make room. The answers are more informative than the enthusiasm was.
Is this useful before there is any revenue at all?
The six questions are, and the delivery math is, though the numbers will be rougher. The rest of what we do assumes there is a business underneath the idea with staff and systems, because that is where the operational failures live.
If there is no business behind it yet, the honest answer is that you need a first customer more than you need us.
Do you invest or take equity?
No. We are not investors, and someone holding equity has a reason to tell you to keep going.
The value of an outside read is that it has no stake in the answer. Telling you an idea is not ready has to be as easy to say as telling you it is.
What if the honest answer is that the idea is bad?
Then that is the finding and it arrives in the first two weeks rather than the first two years. It is the cheapest useful outcome available and it happens reasonably often.
More often the finding is narrower: the idea is fine, one assumption underneath it is wrong, and the plan changes shape rather than getting dropped.
What does the first two weeks look like?
Working the six questions properly with whoever would actually own it, then converting the ambition into hours, people and a delivery shape. Then a short written plan that says what would have to be true, what it costs to find out, and what would end it.
The output is a plan you can act on Monday, not a document that gets admired and filed.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Shaheer Shaikh, operations lead at LARVOL, a San Francisco AI company working with global pharma on clinical trial data and model benchmarking. Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. More about the firm
Read next
The decision next to this one, and the work either answer turns into.