Cornell Cup USA presented by IntelHow to use a Business Plan (Bplan) to write an Abbreviated Business Plan (ABplan)

Many business schools teach as part of their core curriculum how to write a full business plan (Bplan). However, many venture capitalists in today’s market only require an abbreviated business plan (ABplan) in order to gauge their interest and establish initial meetings. As part of your final entry for the Cornell Cup USA presented by Intel’s optional Entrepreneurship Award your team is required to submit an ABplan as detailed in the rules. This document helps summarize the difference between a Bplan and an ABplan.

Many colleges or entrepreneurship groups may have many business plans in their libraries that you can examine for free and you are strongly encouraged to review.

A full Bplan can quite lengthy, but your ABplan should be much shorter.o Your ABplan is to be 15 pages in total, 10 written plus 5 about the financial forecast.o Graphs are not included in the page length requirements, but should be confined to the

minimum needed to make your key points in your ABplan.o The ABplan does not include an Executive Summary (4 pages in the Bplan).o You are encouraged however to submit a separate and updated final version of the

Executive Summary – Pro that you will submitted near the time of your mid-review. The updated final version of the Executive Summary – Pro should be submitted as a separate file along with the submission of your ABplan.

Many Bplans may intend to raise millions of dollars via several rounds of venture capital.o Your ABplan business may be smaller and thus require less financing, o However, you are encouraged to think BIG on how you could best capitalize on your ideas.

Many Bplans often aim on attaining an initial public offering by Year 5.o Try to create an ABplan whose financial size is large enough to go IPO (Initial Public

Offering). Think BIG. This would require at least $25 million of Sales in Year 5, preferably more.

If you go for IPO, include your estimate of how much your company would be worth at IPO.

o Your ABplan must extend through 5 years, however it is still acceptable if it isn’t large enough to attain an initial public offering.

If your ABplan is too small to go IPO, then propose which large corporations would be candidates to purchase your startup and estimate how much they would pay to acquire it, (including the 1st product & its intellectual property that you came up with).

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Many Bplans include a formal survey of potential customers that have been done after several informal surveys.

o Your ABplan survey(s) can be less involved but should include at least one survey of potential customers who answer a short list of questions (around 6 or so) including how much they would expect to pay for your first product.

The Operations section of many Bplans includes extensive descriptions of the Technology and Engineering of their first product.

o Your ABplan is to abbreviate those sections and may rely on the other Cup competition documentation for elaboration of technology and engineering of the first product.

o However these ABplan’s abbreviated sections should be able to stand alone from the other Cup documentation, i.e. a reader shouldn’t have to refer to any other documentation to understand what is written in any of the ABplan’s sections.

QuickUp™ has been used to create the forecast of financial statements for many Bplans.o You are highly recommended to use QuickUp for the ABplan financial forecast, although

other equivalent means of performing the calculations is acceptable.o Using and presenting the results from QuickUp are a good way to ensure you have done all

of the needed calculations to create an ABplan. The Expenses per Employee in QuickUp are good example of one of the important QuickUp calculations required in an ABplan forecast.

Pay special attention to reducing redundancy and repetition between sections of your ABplan. That will greatly reduce the word length of the document.

Write your ABplan professionally, and be careful of spelling, slang, etc.

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