Bobadilla v. Business Plans
On the two sides to the business planning coin, why most founders should be more selfish about their planning, and how to get it done with a single project.
Understory Advising PLLC offers business plan development as a flat fee project. For $2,500, you leave with two documents: an external business plan written for the banks, investors, and grant committees who need to be convinced your business is worth their attention, and an internal working document built for you, the person who actually has to run the thing. Three sessions, two deliverables, one price. If you want to know more before reading further, the interest form is at the bottom.
For founders enrolled in or considering Business Foundations for New Entrepreneurs, both documents are developed as part of the program curriculum. The standalone project is for everyone else.
Why Most Founders Avoid Writing a Business Plan
Business planning has a reputation problem.
When founders hear ‘business plan’ they picture the document someone else wants. The bank. The SBA. The grant committee. The landlord. A formal, polished, multi-page deliverable written for an audience that doesn't know your business and needs to be convinced it's worth their money or attention. That association makes business planning feel like homework for someone else's benefit, which is why most founders either never start or write the external version once, file it somewhere, and never look at it again.
The avoidance also has a second cause that doesn't get called out often enough. A business plan requires committing to answers before you feel ready, and it’s not always clear how those answers will be used. It surfaces the questions you haven't resolved yet. It makes things real on paper in a way that keeps them conveniently abstract when they stay in your head. That discomfort is not a reason to avoid planning. It's the whole point of doing it.
The Dual Plan Approach
Instead of the external plan being the only deliverable, we create two plans - one for them, and one for us (the people with a business to build and run).
An external business plan is written for an audience. Its job is to establish credibility, articulate the market opportunity, demonstrate financial viability, and give whoever is reading it enough confidence to say yes to whatever you're asking for. A bank loan. An SBA application. A grant. An investor conversation. The external plan is a persuasion document and it should read like one. Clear, structured, specific, written with the reader's questions in mind rather than the founder's enthusiasm.
An internal working document is written for the founder. Its job is entirely different. It's where you store the strategic thinking that doesn't belong in a formal plan but drives every decision you make. The scaling considerations you're working through. The risks you've identified and the mitigation you've built or still need to build. The ideas that aren't ready to act on yet but shouldn't disappear. The decisions you've made and why, so that six months from now you remember what you were thinking and can evaluate whether it still holds.
The internal document is not a cleaned-up version of the external plan. It's messier, more honest, and more useful on a Tuesday afternoon when something goes sideways and you need to know what you already decided about this category of problem.
Founders who have only the external plan have a document that opens doors and nothing to run the business once they're through them. Founders who have only the internal document have operational clarity and nothing to show when someone asks for the formal plan. Both are necessary. Neither substitutes for the other.
What The Internal Document Actually Contains
The internal working document has no standard format because it doesn't have a standard audience. It has you. What it contains depends on what your business actually needs to track and think through. At minimum it should include your strategic priorities and the reasoning behind them, a risk inventory that identifies your exposure and what you're doing about it, your scaling assumptions and the triggers that would change them, a decision log so you can reconstruct why you made the choices you made, and an idea repository for the things you want to revisit when you have more capacity or information.
It should be updated regularly. It should be honest in a way the external plan can't always be. It should contain the thinking you'd never put in a document you're handing to a bank.
What The Avoidance of Planning Costs
The founder who pivots without a record of what they decided and why rebuilds context from scratch every time a decision comes up. The founder who scales without a risk inventory discovers the exposure after the fact. The founder who can't articulate their plan in an investor conversation loses the room not because the business isn't good but because the thinking isn't visible. The founder who keeps everything in their head creates a bus factor of one and a succession plan of none.
Business planning feels optional until it isn't. The founders who do it consistently aren't more disciplined or more strategic by nature. They stopped treating the plan as a deliverable for someone else and started treating it as a tool for themselves.
The Flat Fee Business Planning Project
The business plan development project is available as a standalone engagement for $2,500. Here's how it works.
We start with an intake session. You leave with two templates, one for the external plan and one for the internal working document, along with enough context to start drafting.
You draft. We both review independently. We meet to go through what you've built, identify the gaps, answer questions, and sharpen the thinking together. You leave that session with clear direction on what gets finalized.
You leave with both plans finished, formatted, and ready to use. The engagement is governed by a limited scope agreement, which means a defined deliverable, a defined process, and a defined price with no ongoing obligation unless you want one.
If you're ready to get started or want to talk through whether it's the right fit, the interest form is below.
Both Plans. Different Jobs.
The external business plan and the internal working document are not competing versions of the same thing. They serve different audiences, require different levels of honesty, and get used in completely different contexts. One opens doors. The other keeps the business running once you're through them.
Treating them as interchangeable is why most founders end up with neither. Treating them as two distinct tools, each worth building well, is how founders run businesses that are both fundable and functional.
Neither is optional. They just demand different attention, different focus, and different versions of the truth.
- m
