Dave Lavinsky Podcast Transcript
Dave Lavinsky joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dave Lavinsky. Dave Lavinsky is the founder of PlanPros, and over the past 25 years has earned a reputation as a distinguished authority in the field of business strategy and new venture development as a pioneering figure at Growth Inc. Dave has crafted numerous business strategies and plans mentoring a team of strategists who collectively wrote thousands of business plans.
His expertise has been showcased in various educational settings, including guest lectures on business strategy at institutions such as UCLA and NYU. Additionally, Dave’s insights have been featured in a multitude of webinars and podcasts. Notably his guide on business planning once gardened recognition as a mandatory text at Dartmouth College esteemed Tuck School of Business.
Well, good afternoon, Dave. Welcome to the show!
Dave Lavinsky: I appreciate you having me on.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, Dave. I appreciate it and appreciate you making the time. We’re traversing two time zones today, Kansas City to Bend, Oregon, which is awesome. Done all the 50 states, but thank you again. And Dave, I’m gonna jump right into your first question here.
What inspired you to establish Plan pros.ai and how does it differentiate itself in the business planning landscape?
Dave Lavinsky: Well, I appreciate the question. Thanks again for having me on. So I’ve been helping companies develop business plans for over 25 years and actually started right before the.com boom. So I’ve been doing this for quite a long time and we’ve been writing business plans and literally, I myself have written hundreds of business plans and my firms have written thousands of business plans.
And with the advent of AI, it was pretty clear that. AI was the future, particularly as far as writing is concerned. ’cause AI, when done properly, can write very good prose and save people a lot of time. And so that inspired me to create Plan Pros ai, because I said, Hey, we’re writing business plans and I’ve also created business plan templates that over a hundred thousand entrepreneurs have used.
I said, well, it will save everyone and all these entrepreneurs so much time if we’re able to use AI to complete their business plan. So that’s what prompted me to, inspired me to create Plan Pros. And in terms of the main differentiation is that there are other business plan tools out there using ai.
Now clearly there’s, you know, chat, GBT and the other LMS that you can actually create a business plan on your own, but it turns out that those actually don’t create. A good business plan. They just don’t. And, but there are a couple other firms that are using AI to create business plans. But what they’re not doing is, is two things.
One is they’re not creating a customized financial model. So a business plan at the end of the day really serves two purposes. One, it lays out your vision. It gives you a roadmap to follow to grow your business, and a lot of times the purpose of your business plan is also to raise capital. And so in order to do that, you need financial projections that show you know how much money you need and how much money you’re gonna make, and how much money investors or lenders might recoup.
And that’s what really differentiates us, is that we have a very robust financial model. That is built into our system and that is very, very hard to replicate. ’cause it took me 25 years actually of testing and writing business plans and working with entrepreneurs in order to build that financial model.
And also differentiation is the, the text and the pros in the business plan. Most people don’t understand that the vast majority of business plans are put together incorrectly, unfortunately. So if you actually go into chat, TBT. Ask a lot of business plan questions. Unfortunately, you’re gonna get incorrect answers a lot of time because the internet is littered with a lot of false information on business planning, and not that I didn’t know the right information when I first started 25 plus years ago, but through trial and error and literally spending countless hours in meetings with clients and myself, with angel investors, venture capitalists, lenders and investors, and reviewing business plans with them, I got firsthand knowledge of what.
Investors, lenders are really looking for and what makes a a business plan successful And that really differentiates Plan Pros ’cause it’s based on business plans that actually raise money and business plans that actually became successful companies. And I don’t know how anyone else could do that.
Because it took me 25 years to do that, and literally thousands upon thousands of companies and seeing which ones were successful and which ones were not. And that’s unfortunately what chat, GBT doesn’t have that information. Chat. GBT has hundreds of thousands of business plans that have been published on the internet.
It has no idea which ones were successful and which ones were not. And, and the ones that were successful, it doesn’t understand why.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that and you bring a lot of experience. Of course, you went through trial and error to get there, but I appreciate you highlighting some of your experience over 25 years of writing great business plans and your idea to create Plan Pros is really to take that knowledge you have and leverage AI to build some of the better business plans that businesses can use today.
And your differentiator. I love it. You know, you need a customized financial model, as you said, that lays out your vision, creates a roadmap with financial projections, and you can’t normally get that off a chat GPT or Gemini, and I’m glad that you built this platform so that businesses can scale and grow and get some investment capital.
Dave, your next question here, with over 25 years in the industry, how have you seen business planning evolve, particularly with the integration of AI tools like Plan Pros?
Dave Lavinsky: Sure. So the main difference over the past 25 years that I’ve seen, and as I mentioned when I, you know, 25 years ago. It’s crazy. It was 25 years ago, but that was the the.com or 20, it was 25 years ago.
And at that time, the goal was to quickly create a business plan so you can raise funding to start to start your.com business. And that’s what, when we first started running business plans, that’s what everyone was like. Speed, speed, speed. Get us to business plan. Just map out my vision. Don’t care about the financials as much.
Just say we’re gonna grow like crazy and you know, we’re gonna raise venture capital. And a lot of our clients were very successful in raising capital back then. Some were very successful in growing their businesses, but others were not the main thing. There’s been a sobriety, we can use that word over the last 25 years where we started 25 years ago.
With’s just gimme a business plan quickly and that’ll work. And pretty much everyone now I. Probably knows every entrepreneur probably knows an entrepreneur or two or more that are successful and other entrepreneurs that are not successful. So I think entrepreneurs are a little more sober now in thinking about their business plan as, as not just something to try to quickly raise funding, but something that they want to use to vet their business idea, make sure it’s a valid business idea, make sure that they have a proper roadmap, that if they raise capital, they can actually grow successful business.
And then. Finally to raise capital in most cases. So that’s where I’ve seen the industry shift over the last 25 years. And then particularly recently with the integration of AI tools, we’re seeing that entrepreneurs want to accomplish those last three things being, once again, roadmap for success, validate and vet their business idea and raise capital using ai.
And the good news with Plan Pros, AI and AI tools in general, is that you can accomplish much of that. Using ai, you can, you know, vet a business idea and identify certain pitfalls. Using ai, you can use the AI to write better so that your business plan is more attractive to investors. And this is a key thing that I talked about about 20 years ago, is that your business plan is a marketing document.
And no one understood this, and I was the first one to say this 20 plus years ago. It says your business plan is a marketing document. You’re using your business plan to market your company to investors, lenders, employees. Others, et cetera. And one thing that AI does really well is write good marketing copy and better than most people can write.
So AI has been really helpful for entrepreneurs to allow them to write their business plan in a way that’s actually really compelling to readers.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. Again, leveraging your knowledge through the school of hard knocks, as they say, but over the years you’d mentioned that people realized back then it was about getting that investment early on, but over the years people realized that it’s about financial sustainability versus just raising that money.
And of course, what I really will like to highlight here is. Using your platform plan pros.ai, you can present a better business plan, which is your marketing tool to grow and build your business and and get that funding that you need when you need it most. Exactly. So thank you. And Dave, next question.
Your book emphasizes reverse engineering business plans. Can you elaborate on this approach and its advantages for companies aiming for rapid growth?
Dave Lavinsky: Sure. So my book, the title start at the end, and that’s why it, what it emphasizes is reverse engineering, which is, let’s start at the end. And I grew up as an athlete and I was a college athlete, and in athletics and sports, it’s very easy what you’re trying to accomplish, right?
We want our team to get more points than our competitors team so that we win. In business, it’s a lot more complex. Yes, you want to increase sales, but or increase profits, but that’s you. That’s not. The only goal, a lot of times your goal of your company is to eventually sell your company and selling a business.
You know, revenue and profits are a big portion of it, but that’s far from everything. There’s a lot of other factors that, in a lot of cases are mo way more important than revenues and income. So what I like to do is start at the end, say, Hey, where do we need to be? In X years or say, Hey, I want, we we’re starting this business in 10 years.
We wanna sell the business. And then we say, okay, in 10 years we wanna sell the business for X dollars. What does the business need to look like? How many employees do we have? How many locations do we have? What systems have we built? What are our revenues? What are our profits? So there’s all these different attributes of this business that we wanna sell in 10 years.
And so we start there at that end game. This is what we’re trying to build. And then we say, well, what do we need to accomplish in the next year? To put us on the trajectory to meeting that 10 year goal or that five year goal, and now you know what your one year goals are. So, hey, we want to get to 20 million cells in five years or 10 years in year one.
We need to get to seven 50,000 cells by the end of year one. We need to have eight employees by the end of year one, we need to have these systems in place, et cetera. And then you can reverse engineer even further and say, Hey, well if this is where we need to be at the end of year one, well where do we need to be at the end of this next quarter?
Where do we need to be at the end of this month? And that’s what I’ve found in working with thousands of companies is the best way to plan to do strategic planning is to start at the end, figure out where it is you want to be. Then work backwards. And if you ask most entrepreneurs, uh, I’m saying 90 plus percent of entrepreneurs, you know, where they want to be.
They haven’t fully thought through it. They’re so entwined in day-to-day struggles of growing their business. It’s hard for ’em to think through that. Now when they start a business, a lot of entrepreneurs have that vision of, Hey, I’m gonna grow this great business and sell it and make. Make a gazillion dollars.
But once you start that business, that sort of goes out the window. ’cause you realize, you know the hard work involved in growing your business and staying in business. And that’s why that reverse engineering has proven to be extremely successful for existing companies for planning.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I think that’s so helpful for our audience.
We have a lot of entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs in our audience, but I love that about your book. The book is about reverse engineering. Start with the title at the end. Think that’s so cool. There is so many factors in running a business, not just a profit. You’ve got goals, maybe selling the business 10 years, that sort of thing.
And by working backwards with your reverse engineering, you can better plan and attain your goals. I really appreciate that. Dave, last question of the day. Given your recent focus on AI with Plan pros.ai, how do you foresee artificial intelligence reshaping business strategy and planning in the next decade?
Dave Lavinsky: I. I think that artificial intelligence will dramatically reshape strategy and planning in the next decade. I think that when used properly, AI is an incredible tool to help companies plan and improve their strategy with a huge caveat, which is garbage and garbage out. Right now. Ai, whether it be Gemini or Chat, GBT, or Clot or anything else is still a garbage in, garbage out system if and when.
There’s a lot of garbage going in. So a lot of times you can ask, um, a medical question and get very good advice ’cause they’re only pulling information from authoritative sources with strategy and planning. Those sources, Gemini Cha, ccpt, et cetera, are still pulling a lot of information from websites that is cis incorrect.
And so it’s still a garbage in, garbage out phenomenon. So what you need to do the way AI has to be done. Is feeding in the right information. So for example, if you’re able to feed in information about these a hundred companies use these strategies and they were successful, then AI would do an incredible job in saying, okay, how do we apply these success stories?
To this other business. But if as is it’s trying to apply all the stuff, much of which didn’t work, then you’re gonna get bad strategy. So the core is making sure that AI becomes very, very focused and there are more and more tools out there, even using tools like Chat, GBT, et cetera, where you can. Upload documents, and they’ll basically do the AI just based on those documents.
Once that is done more that you control what the input is, so you’re not getting garbage in, you’re getting quality in, then AI will really reshape business strategy and planning because you’re basing it on quality information. This is the information that helps all these other firms succeed, and that’s why, and here’s how to apply that to your firm.
That’s the key, is making sure that you have quality inputs into the ai.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate that and I’ve heard that as well, and we do see it. I get exposed to AI every single day and I can see some of the pitfalls there, but AI can certainly help ’em plan, improve business leaders their strategies, of course.
But again, we need to look at these LLMs. A lot of ’em are just garbage and garbage out. They now have access to the internet, which is. As you know, it’s a wild, wild west. But anyway, if we get that right and we feed in the correct information and provide those successful strategies, we’re gonna have a really awesome tool at our hands to be able to help people grow and scale their business.
So I really appreciate that and Dave, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Dave Lavinsky: Excellent. I appreciate being on. Thank you so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Dave Lavinsky Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
