Writing Your Owner Bio - You Are the Business’s Biggest Asset

Do you have the management skills and expertise to implement this plan? Can you demonstrate that you have the personal leadership characteristics needed to keep your business going when the going gets tough? Have you surrounded yourself with the support that shows you know you can’t do it all yourself?

You may be wondering if this section of the business plan applies to you if you are starting this business by yourself. What management team? By the end of the chapter I hope you will be convinced that it will take an entire team of people to help you make this happen.

In this section you write a biographical sketch (bio) on yourself, your key employees, and other people who will round out your team.

Don’t underestimate the importance of you and the people surrounding you to investors and lenders. Loans are made to people, not to ideas. It is critical that you take a look at your strengths and weaknesses as a business owner. How can you make the most of your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses? Be sure to present your qualifications in light of the job ahead and demonstrate your ability to lead.
“You” in this case means anyone who owns more than 20% of the business – you, your partners, or your major shareholders.
A key mistake in your plan would be not showing that you have assembled the talent to make your plan work. Lenders and investors know that almost 50% of new business failures are due to managerial incompetence. This section is as critical as any and requires some real thought and scrutiny.

To the extent that your background is not a perfect match with your new endeavor, you must show that you have a team of people around you whose skills and experience compliment yours and add in what you are missing.

You will best convince an investor or lender that you are key to your business success if what you’ve done in the past exactly fits what you will be doing in the future. If you are opening a restaurant and you have managed a restaurant for ten years, you are more likely to convince others to invest in your ideas. Notice two things about my last sentence: this person had both leadership experience, and experience in the new businesses’ field of endeavor. This is the ideal background from a lender’s perspective.
Having said that, virtually no one has all the skills needed to successfully run a business him or herself alone. Very few can be a one-man band and play all the instruments simultaneously. The aspects in which you need experience to run a business include
• finance,
• marketing and sales,
• operations,
• hands-on experience with the product or service, and
• people-leadership experience.
And the level of experience you need in each of these areas varies by the size of business you have or are contemplating starting. However, there are people starting businesses who lack most of these types of experiences. If this is you, I have to ask why you have chosen this new business to start. The more experience you’ve had the better your chances for success in your new venture.

If you have partners, you and your partners should have a partnership agreement that clearly states roles and responsibilities, and how the debts and profits are to be divided. In the best partnerships, partner skills are complementary so that more aspects of the expertise necessary are covered.

If you were a banker and your job was to select who would receive loan money from your institution, how would you decide among all the applications you would receive? Would you look for someone who you felt was honest, responsible, and resourceful? Of course. But how would you know who had those characteristics simply by reading their loan application and their business plan? The answer is that it is not easy to tell. However, bankers use what they have and what you have given them to answer that question. They look for what you have done in the past. If you worked at the same company for 5 years, the banker would probably assume you were honest and responsible or that the company wouldn’t have kept you on. If you had had six jobs in that same 5 years, the banker might assume you don’t stick with things and that might make it difficult for you to run your own business. If you told the banker in your bio that you had helped a small business weather an economic recession and were key in making some tough decisions to lay off staff, that might give the banker the impression that you were someone who could be counted on to go through difficult times and not give up. In the banker’s eyes, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

If you want to run a retail clothing store, the most relevant kind of experience you can have is a number of years as the owner or manager of a retail clothing store. There is no substitute in knowing exactly what the job will require and that you have what it takes to do it. There are two types of experience that will count in your bio – specific experience to the business you want to run, and people leadership experience.

Let’s say you want to start a pet store. Maybe you love animals and have worked in pet stores for other people. Even if you haven’t owned a store or managed it, maybe you have done some management level tasks that you will want to list – negotiating with vendors, purchasing decisions for inventory, overseeing staff, financial decision-making, or relationships with important customers.

The other kind of important experience is leadership. Can you show you have made high-quality decisions in difficult situations, attained goals, created a new product or opened a new market, pulled together a team of people? Even if you’ve never held the title of manager, these are management-level tasks and should be listed in your bio.

If you haven’t been working in your new business field, or you haven’t held positions of leadership before, think about preparing yourself first. Perhaps that means waiting a few months or a year to start the business, but it will be well worth the wait. Get experience working for someone else in your industry. Get experience supervising people. Volunteer for a nonprofit in your community and set up a team to accomplish a specific goal. Get additional training in your field from college courses or trade association seminars. All of those things will look good to lenders, and may make the difference in success for your business.