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Tim Berry
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Tim Berry is president and founder of Palo Alto Software, co-founder of Borland International, and founder of bplans.com. He writes about business planning, entrepreneurship, and small business on his blog Planning Startups Stories and focuses on business planning on his TimBerry.com website. He's on twitter as Timberry.

He is the author of The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, published by Entrepreneur Press in 2008; and several other books on business planning and starting a business. He is the conceptual author of Business Plan Pro.

He spent the 1970s as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City, where he wrote for Business Week and Financial Times, among others. In the 1980s he got a Stanford MBA and was involved in the early Silicon Valley. He consulted to Apple Computer in business planning from 1982 through 1994.

Tim is a nationally known expert in business planning and has been interviewed by CNN, MSNBC, Forbes, Money Machine Television, and Inc. He's spoken on business planning to audiences in 14 countries, most recently as a guest of eBay at its annual conference. He teaches a course in business planning at the University of Oregon.

Blog Entries by Tim Berry

Concept Meets Code: 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs Dealing with Developers

Posted August 16, 2011 | 10:49:40 (EST)

I've seen it too many times: starry-eyed would-be Internet entrepreneur meets real developer, dream in hand. This is culture clash. More often than not, it ends up with wasted time, wasted money and dashed dreams. Concept meets computer code.

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Involvement vs. Commitment in Small Business

Posted June 21, 2011 | 18:39:52 (EST)

It's an old joke:

Question: In the classic bacon and egg breakfast, what's the role of the chicken, and what's the role of the pig? Answer: the chicken is involved. The pig is committed.

Good joke or not,...

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Y'Want Jobs? Small Business? Then Fund Education

Posted January 27, 2011 | 12:36:48 (EST)

Everybody agrees that small business is good for an economy, that it promotes jobs, and so on. But what does anybody want the government to do about it? And what can governments really do about it, effectively?

More small business loans, perhaps? Lower taxes? Cut regulations?...

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How Bad? Top 10 Lies About Business Planning (PHOTOS)

Posted November 23, 2010 | 11:50:36 (EST)

It's really a shame. As the world moves faster and faster, tools get better, change is more rapid, people, businesses, and organizations need good business planning more than ever. Unfortunately, as the need has grown, so too has the size of the whoppers that experts who should know better tell....

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True Or Not? Top 10 Election Talking Points On Small Business

Posted October 25, 2010 | 01:47:30 (EST)

As the November 2nd elections near, every politician is suddenly small business' best friend. Every problem in small business is caused by the opposing party, and every new proposal is going to rejuvenate small business and entrepreneurship in this country, they say.

The question is: do you believe it?...

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WSJ vs. NYTimes on How Dumb You Are or Aren't

Posted June 8, 2010 | 11:27:43 (EST)

Imagine a large auditorium with a boxing ring in the middle. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer's voice echoes, "in this corner, we have the Wall Street Journal, saying computers make you smarter. And in the opposite corner, the New York Times, saying they make you dumber."

Sure, you might have...

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Why Facebook and All Social Media Privacy Is Oxymoronic

Posted May 20, 2010 | 13:01:10 (EST)

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to complaints about Facebook privacy, or, actually, lack of privacy. I get it. Facebook felt like a private medium in the beginning, especially to the college students who gave it its sizzle. I don't like Mark Zuckerberg as Big Brother any more than I liked...

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In Business and Speaking, Silence Can Be Golden

Posted March 31, 2010 | 15:04:03 (EST)

Do you recognize the Simon & Garfunkel song, The Sounds of Silence? It's a sad song about loss. But silence is also golden. It's a powerful tool in business and life. Learn to use it.

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A Startling Reminder of Gender Bias

Posted December 15, 2009 | 15:14:06 (EST)

There's a place for truth in writing. And there's a place for writing in blogging. Sometimes truth happens, even in blogs. Sometimes, when it does, it's startling.

Honestly, I never cared that any writer was man or woman. What...

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5 Ways to Break Up a Bad Work Day

Posted October 29, 2009 | 13:47:15 (EST)

It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s...

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3 MBA Tricks to Shorten Boring Meetings

Posted August 26, 2009 | 16:22:49 (EST)

On the bad days, in off moments, it seems like my two years in business school were mostly about learning the definitions of a few key buzz words to use in meetings.

1. ROI

Stands for return on investment, as in profits divided by total investment. For fun in boring...

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Moonshot, Columbus, Now Woodstock a Myth Too? Oh No!

Posted August 17, 2009 | 12:06:40 (EST)

We baby boomers have lost too many cultural icons. Don't take away Woodstock.

Some nut shot John Lennon. Good journalism -- or was it reality? -- took away our faith in institutions. We've pretty much lost Ford, Chevrolet, General Motors, Wall Street, faith in television news, trust in doctors, air,...

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Small Business: It's About Health Care, Not Taxes

Posted July 29, 2009 | 17:06:33 (EST)

I just read Scott Shane's First, Do No Harm to Small Business on the New York Times blog. And this is awkward because I like Scott, I've read and recommended his books, read his posts, and like his analysis. He does business numbers very well. But he's off...

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Who Should Decide What News is Important?

Posted July 23, 2009 | 13:33:21 (EST)

Back in the old days, editors decided what was news, not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called "news values." Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence.

...
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Journalism, Tech Crunch and Stolen Information

Posted July 22, 2009 | 11:55:31 (EST)

This -- the TechCrunch publishes stolen information flap from last week -- is why I worry about the gradual disappearance of journalism as newspapers and traditional advertising disappear.

You may or may not have read about it. Somebody stole documents from Twitter's computer and sent them to TechCrunch. They...

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Is Software Management Obsolete?

Posted July 21, 2009 | 12:30:24 (EST)

Committees don't make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don't do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I'm pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh...

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A Great Debate About Ideas

Posted July 1, 2009 | 12:29:30 (EST)

Here's an exciting development: a true debate on ideas, on the web, spontaneous combustion, involving some very well known great thinkers of our time: Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, and Ellen Goodman.

Chris Anderson gathered the wood and laid out the fire. He's editor of Wired...

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Venture Capital: Innovation, or Big Business in Disguise?

Posted June 29, 2009 | 12:11:35 (EST)

Is venture capital new, innovative small business, or just big business disguised?  Steve King at Small Biz Labs this morning has a good summary of the debate about venture capital and government-funded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

Last year 3,600 smaller...

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5 Points on Selling Without Selling Your Soul

Posted June 25, 2009 | 11:37:42 (EST)

You know who you are. You hate selling, but here you are, making your way as entrepreneur, having to sell or sink.

Me? I'm a terrible salesperson. I'm also bad at networking, cocktail parties, and small talk with people I don't know. Do I seem stuck up, aloof? Not really,...

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Big Brother vs. Social Media vs. Basil Fawlty

Posted June 3, 2009 | 11:55:13 (EST)

Secret cameras, secret Web utilities tracking employees' Web use, secret phone recording and IM monitoring: that's creepy. That's BIG BROTHER: the Orwellian 1984 nightmare. But bosses reading your tweets and Facebook? What's creepy about that isn't that bosses might do it, it's the rest of us complaining about...

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