Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Did you know that every day there are millions of entrepreneurs who don’t have a business plan. Many don’t even know what a business plan is. In fact, I’m not just a spokesperson here today. I, too, didn’t know what a business plan was. Hello, and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative. And in this episode, we will learn exactly what a business plan is, how to create one, and why it’s important to create one, even if your business has been open for years.

The Nebraska Business Development Center is back on the podcast to help you and maybe me craft a winning business plan for free. They say that a goal without a plan is just a wish. So what is a business without a plan? Is it kind of like that? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Is it that type of situation? Where are you really a business? If you don’t have a plan, we are going to find out. Today we are joined by yet another member of the amazing team over at the Nebraska Small Business Development Center. Here we have Tony Schulz. Hello, Tony. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Tony Schultz: Well, Matt, how’s it going today?

Matt Tompkins: And you are? I’m good. I’m excited for this because we’re going to talk about business plans today on the on the podcast we had Cathy on and she I feel like she opened this whole new world that many of us didn’t even know existed with the Nebraska Business Development Center, all the different resources and personnel and experts, a lot of it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s the basic stuff you can get. There is no no cost. It’s fully confidential. And I do believe her when she says it’s the best kept secret in the state of Nebraska.

Tony Schultz: It really is. That’s that’s why we do these outreach things like this, podcasts and events and things like that. People just don’t know about us. So and we want to get the word out in the services are free, no cost confidential. So why not take advantage of them? There’s no reason not to.

Matt Tompkins: I mean, there are legitimate services. We are going to do some episodes about how to secure government contracts, funding for your business idea, a lot of different types of funding. If if you are if you hit certain qualifications, you can get different types of funding that maybe other business owners entrepreneurs can’t.

But we wanted to start with a business plan and today talk about how to create a business plan because that’s that’s a step that I think most people just either don’t know exists or they just skip entirely. And that step one, it really is like, what’s your plan? What’s your idea? How are you going to help people with this idea? I didn’t even know about business plans being such an integral part of a successful business, you know, until we had Cathy on and then she’s telling me about this, I’m like,

Wait a minute, I’m like years into my business already and we’re going to get to that. We will help people who are years in. But let’s just start with the basic premise What is a business plan?

Tony Schultz: Yeah, so I like to if I’m going to build a skyscraper, I’m going to go out and I’m going to build this skyscraper. I’m going to get the metal together and the glass together and I’m going to get some cement. And am I going to just throw everything together? Probably not, because the skyscraper is going to fall over. It’s going to crush a car or two, maybe other people. It’s not going to be good.

Matt Tompkins: I think the same person built my my tree house in the yard.

Tony Schultz: Is a line just to fall on the ground.

Matt Tompkins: And that person was me just, you know. So yeah, so.

Tony Schultz: So if you’d had an architectural drawings and engineering some schematics, maybe the tree house wouldn’t have fallen.

Matt Tompkins: Over. Maybe a few less beers involved.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, Probably make a difference to better chance. Yeah, but. But yeah, I like in a business plan to really having those those architectural drawings, those schematics for a skyscraper. You want that foundation, you want that plan before you dive into it. Because if you just build it, a lot of times that stability is not there, that foundation is not there. And that’s what the business plan is going to do.

Matt Tompkins: And really, you see this in pretty much every other facet of our everyday lives. A plumber doesn’t come in and just guess where he’s going to drill a hole, you know, I mean, maybe there’s some do, I don’t know. Again, probably more in my wheelhouse of the capabilities there if they’re just drilling holes in the in the wall. But you need to know what you’re doing.

You need to have a plan. And, you know, that’s one of my favorite quotes. You know, if a goal without a plan is just a wish, you’re just wishing, you’re just dreaming, which is fine. But it’s it’s never going to come to fruition if you don’t put down actionable things that you can do. You can’t decide what to do until you know what you need to do. Right? So we talk about a business plan just being the blueprint, basically the basic blueprint. So how do people like banks, lenders, investors look at a business plan?

How does that impact their decision to fund a new idea from an entrepreneur, perhaps their first time? Like, how much does this really impact it? Because I think a lot of people maybe don’t think it has that big of an impact. And correct me if I’m wrong, but it probably does, I’m guessing.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, Yeah. If you if you go to any lender, any any bank out there, they’re going to want to see a business plan. And the reason is they want to see are they going to get their money back? If I’m going to loan you money, I’m not just going to hand you money and go, Hey, here’s 20 bucks. See you later. I hope I see you again sometime you return it. Probably not going to mean you don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Have to pay to come on the.

Tony Schultz: Show. Yeah, well, I take your money, I slip to you a couple of bucks earlier, but, you know, whatever. But yeah, so, I mean, that’s really the point is they want paid back. They want their investment back. The same with any kind of an. Vester So they want to know the money they’re putting into the business makes sense. They’re going to want to see, does the entrepreneur know what they’re doing? Have they done their research? Do they have the experience to do this business?

Do they have the background, things like that? And really that’s what the business plan does, is it sells the idea that this can actually work. So that’s the whole idea.

Matt Tompkins: And it’s selling it in a way that I think is more measurable. Know, you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but a tangible, measurable way to show that this is a legitimate idea that will work or has a good chance of strong chance of working because it’s entrepreneurs, myself included, we get very passionate. We kind of you know, I think Joe is who brought this up on an earlier episode said, you know, entrepreneurs, they jump off the cliff and then they build the airplane on the way down.

And that’s very true. That’s very accurate. We’re kind of a kooky bunch. We just take the risks, we dream big. But the problem the problem isn’t selling the big idea. It isn’t getting people excited. It’s okay. But now you need more than just enthusiasm. You need money, you need funding to actually make this thing happen. And those people, they want the data. So it’s the the the the sales pitch, if you will. And then there’s the data, the numbers, the facts to back it up.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, and that’s exactly right, because every business starts with a problem in the marketplace. If there’s not a problem in the marketplace, there really there really isn’t a business. You have to have that solution to that problem. So it starts there. What’s the problem? What’s the solution? And if there isn’t any, start over. Find something else. Because. Because you’re not going very far. Yeah, but that’s where it really begins. And then researching it. Who are my customers? Where are they at?

Are they interested in my product or my service? You know, is there a market out there and building off of that and seeing what it looks like and then figuring out what are my peers doing? So if I’m opening a coffee store, I can say, Hey, I want to make $5 Million in my first year in my coffee store. But when you go to the bank and the bank looks at that and goes, this is an accurate for for the marketplace.

What we can do at the Nebraska Business Development Center is we can do benchmarking. So if you come in and say, my coffee store is going to do 5 million the first year, we’re going to look at it and go, okay, what do we do? Omaha metro area coffee stores do for for revenue and we can pull up that data. We can also look at the expenses to the whole idea is to prepare you. So when you get in front of the bank, they’re going to benchmark your numbers anyway. So we want to get ahead of that. We want to have you prepared. So when you’re going in with numbers, you’re building your business plan. Those numbers are accurate for the marketplace. So that’s really what it’s all about.

Matt Tompkins: It’s looking at your ugly baby and just admitting, okay, maybe my baby is a little ugly, but he’s still got a whole life. He can grow up to be a very handsome George Clooney type. Maybe, or maybe just settle for a matt Tompkins type and just, you know, just be a local George Clooney esque. I don’t know why I’m comparing myself to George Clooney. Nobody’s going to buy that. I guess what I’m getting at is you have to admit the reality that you’re seeing because the bank is going to see it, too. The investors are going to see it, too. And it’s easy to just look away from that baby with your finances, especially.

I don’t want to reconcile my books. We just did a whole episode about why businesses fail in the first year, and a lot of it is just ignoring the basic things the, as Jeremy Aspin put it, to quote him, the boring shit, you know, it’s just the things that you don’t really want to do. But they’re not fun. They’re maybe not as cool or sexy to do, but they are the most important. And this is one of them, right?

Tony Schultz: It really is. And you don’t have to be an expert in writing business plans. You don’t have to have ever written a business plan before. The fact is, you can come to a Nebraska business development center, other community partners out there and get the steps to go through it.

And what I always say is when you’re writing a business plan, start with the easiest thing first. What do you know? You probably know the operations of the business. You probably have an idea who your customer is. We can do some market research on that, but starting with the easy stuff kind of gets the momentum going. So you don’t want to just sit down and start writing because you’re going to hit that roadblock and be like, This is boring. I don’t like it. Throw it in the garbage and try to go do fun stuff.

Matt Tompkins: So I think like just start a Google doc. That’s what I usually do with I mean, podcasts that we produce for clients here. It follows the same model as a business because you should treat your podcast as a business and that’s how it will be set up for success. Yep. If you don’t, it’s going to be really challenging to find that success. So we do the same exercises. Ideal listener, Ideal customer Who is your customer persona? Be very specific with that age sex. People want to say, you know, a person who’s 20 to 60 years old and man or woman, two, maybe four kids and like, would you describe yourself that way? Like, I’m mad. I’m, you know, maybe 20 to 50 years old and maybe 2 to 4 kids. I don’t really know. I don’t keep track of them.

But those basic things there, they’re really crucial components and. It’s not like it’s a super complicated thing. You actually know a lot more than you probably give yourself credit for. So as you’re saying, put that Google doc together and just start putting it together. Here’s who I think this ideal customer is. Here’s what I want to get out of the business. Here’s what here’s what my role is. Here are the other roles. I’m going to need the other people and team members, the seats that I’m going to have to fill, the processes, the procedures. How are you going to actually get your customer from here to this transformed place of the grand destination or the grand vision you have for them and what they’re going to accomplish?

That’s all things I think you have already in most people’s minds. It’s already there. It’s just getting it down in on paper, but on a Google doc or some form and then come to you at the Nebraska Business Development Center and then you’re the experts in putting it all together. Right? Bring all the ingredients to you and you make grandma’s apple pie so that I don’t screw it up.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And we provide one on one free consulting. So it’s sitting down on a zoom call or even one on one or offices and going and saying, What’s your business idea? You tell me the business idea. We go through the business plan structure, talk about the different sections the bank wants to see, talk about the different areas. And then as you build it, we’re going to provide feedback. We’re going to help you polish it up. So at the end of the day, we want you bankable. We want you to be able to go in with a business plan and financial projections, hand them to a banker, be able to answer all those questions. A lot of people say, Hey, will you write the business plan for me? No, because it’s not my.

Matt Tompkins: Business and you don’t know.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And how are you going to answer the lender’s questions or the investors questions if you didn’t build a business plan, if you paid someone else to do it. So that’s that’s a tricky part.

Matt Tompkins: You’re like ghostwriters with books. I think there’s a different term now. They change the term like when they just write the book anonymously and the famous person gets all the credit. I mean, it kind of it’s unfortunate for you because you deserve a lot of the credit. I don’t think you have to stay anonymous necessarily, but it’s similar in that they are the expert at what they do.

And you’re the expert with the idea and the experience and everything you bring to the table for this business idea. And I know that we probably have a lot of people who have already, just in the last 10 minutes or so listening, have Googled business plan template and or have maybe even already even downloaded it. Like I’m sure a lot of resources is Canva. Other places have these types of templates.

Why go with you guys over that? Because I think that’s the tendency is, well, I have to go down there, I have to schedule a zoom or whatever it might be. It’s going to take time. And yeah, they say it’s free, but is it really free? And people are skeptical. Sure. So they’re going to try and do it themselves with a free PDF that they downloaded. How is that going to backfire?

Tony Schultz: Yes. So if they get it online, I mean, that’s okay to start off. But the form that we have and we have connections with the lenders. So that’s the big thing is we know the lenders, we know what they want. So when they come in, we can show them, hey, this is the information the lender wants to see. If you pull something off of Google, whatever, whatever, whatever it could be, anything. Yeah. And we have literally seen financial projection templates that people have put together, their projections. We’ve gone through the formulas don’t match. Nothing adds up. The cash flows aren’t right. I mean, everything is absolutely.

Matt Tompkins: That was a question that you saw, was it?

Tony Schultz: I’m not going to name names or anything, but but good. It definitely was. We’re not naming me. Yeah, but yeah, that’s something that we see all the time is they try to pull it off the Internet, they put it together in the forms, not even right. So. So why waste time doing that? Just reach out to us. We’ll get you the forms, We’ll help you through the process. And it just makes life a lot easier.

Matt Tompkins: And, you know, and I. I did this similar thing just the other day with it was a proposal for a new account, and it was putting all my thoughts together in the Google doc and then organizing it based off of kind of the templates that I’ve used and put together and kind of tried and true.

And then the last step is then yes, you can go to Canva or Photoshop or download a template that fits your style, your creative vision, and plug this information in there and dress it up. So it does look you want to look professional, you want to look polished and legitimate. And I would say like, you know how they say showing up is kind of half, half the half the job, Right. Is just showing up and being present, you know, showing up and looking professional with your business plan, having a business plan, period, is that half the the battle right there alone?

Tony Schultz: It is really half the battle, because if you do that, we’ve had so many clients that have gone to the lender and the lender says, no, I’m not going to do the loan. Well, they didn’t even have a business plan, didn’t present any projections. And the fact is, if you’re prepared we talked about Boy Scouts before, you know, being prepared like a Boy Scout. When you go in, you’ve got all the tools in front of you. So when you present it to the banker, you have a much better chance at a yes in a business plan. Doesn’t have to be a 30 page document. It doesn’t have. Have to be a.

Matt Tompkins: Little.

Tony Schultz: Difficult. I mean, you can have if it’s a basic business, you might have 7 to 10 pages and it’s all information you already know. You just got to get it down on the paper, the front pages of the logo. The second page is just your table of contents. So and so there’s two pages out the door. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Matt Tompkins: And then you could have a conclusion page and then a headshot.

Tony Schultz: So yeah, exactly.

Matt Tompkins: Now we’re down to eight pages.

Tony Schultz: That’s that’s man, you can dial it down. So, you know, we get some clients that they add some fluff in there. The bank doesn’t care about the flood. They don’t want to know the basics of what are the business. And a lot of bankers, there’s an executive session section.

There’s literally a summary of kind of key points out of the other sections. They’ll look at the executive section of the business plan and they’ll look at your financial projections. If they don’t like that, it’s going in the trash can. So those areas, the rest of it is all kind of just kind of the icing on the cake sort of thing, that if they have a specific area that they want to look at, they’ll jump to it. But building out those areas is so important. But if you have that ahead of time, you’re ahead of the game. You’ve got a better chance.

Matt Tompkins: And there is a certain degree of the adage of who you know, it’s all on who you know and the networking and relationships. That is a big part of it because, you know, there are a lot of business plans that I would guess are pretty close or it could go either way. It doesn’t look like it’s a bad investment, but it doesn’t look like it’s a guaranteed investment for that return either. And then that’s when that trust factor comes in. So if you are working with an organization like the Nebraska Business Development Center, which long name amazing results.

Tony Schultz: Nbc, you just go in.

Matt Tompkins: Bdc for sure. Bdc, I know. I always think I’m going to get the acronym like screwed up in my head. I don’t know. I put too much pressure on myself.

Tony Schultz: There a lot of letters.

Matt Tompkins: On my way in B C No, no, but the credibility that you lend to any business, anybody walking off the street who’s never done this before has no relationships or connections with these banks. It is a pretty low chance that if it is close, they’re going to say, Yeah, let’s go with this complete unknown wild card here, let’s go with Matt. Or would they be much more likely to say, Wait, Matt’s with the BDC and Och, well they’re legit. They wouldn’t be here in essence vouching for them with his business plan if they didn’t believe in this person. And so there has to be some value to that as well.

Tony Schultz: So yeah, it goes back to the point. There’s a section of the business plan where we talk about listing your your community partners or the people you’re working with, and it could be your banker, your accountant, your insurance agent, your lawyer. We call it the bail team. So if you put it in order, they’ll be going to bail you out of trouble.

Matt Tompkins: Oh, I have a different bail team.

Tony Schultz: Okay, well, yeah, that might be different, but. But anyway, the idea is they list in BDC on there, so the the lender knows they’re working with, with BDC. Now we can’t guarantee that’s going to be a successful business. We’re never going to call the banker and advocate for that client because it’s the client’s business, but we’re going to make sure that client’s as prepared as they can be when they go in front of the bank. The other piece that is you make a really good point. If you and I are walking down the street and I meet you for the first time, you say, Hey, Tony, lend me 20 bucks. Probably not going to lend you the money.

Matt Tompkins: But if I hang out the hard way.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, yeah. But if I’ve hung out with you and I know you and you say, Hey, I need a 20 spot, can you lend it to me? I’m probably going to lend it to you. Don’t make the first conversation with your lender where you’re asking for money. You have that conversation ahead of time. Let them know, Hey, I’m going to be coming to you for for a loan. This is my business idea. This is what I’m putting together. These are the people I’m working out in the ecosystem. Have that be the first conversation? Don’t be the first one where you’re asking for money, so it just doesn’t work.

Matt Tompkins: We’re going to be doing some some episodes about each of these different laws rules practicum to follow for marketing, which is marketing is relationships. It’s just the human experience, really. Yeah. The example you gave there is some really good things and I wanted to hit on that in regards specifically to the business plan here to keep it simple clarity, brevity, simplicity.

Those are what you want to lean on the hardest and don’t lean harder on creativity. If you try and lean too hard on the creativity and you don’t cover this, the simplicity, brevity and and just getting to the point short, concise. If you’re too cool for the room, it’s not going to work. It just isn’t. Now you can be creative and be cool in the room that you create within that structure. But you know, marketing and business, it is a science as far as what works. It is not an art, it is a science. Now there’s art in that science, Absolutely. And creativity is really cool to see how people incorporate it, make it their own. But most people miss that that step. So with your business plan, the tendency I write way too long emails my wife tells me all the time.

Matt Tompkins: She’s like, She even bought me a book. It’s just called Brevity. I had to write shorter emails. Yeah, my kind of book. But. But yeah, you want to be just short, concise. You don’t want the. What is it? The deal are too long. Didn’t read from your investors so be simple to the point and then you also you mentioned the the first impression you know how you present yourself. You can never change your first impression once it is entered. A person’s mind does not change.

Doesn’t matter how much money you spend or how hard you try, you will always be known as that first impression. And so keep that in mind. It’s important, you know, don’t like obsess over it where it freaks you out and you’re like having panic attacks like, Oh my God, But you have to have to give it some the respect that it deserves because you’re doing a presentation, you have the data, you have everything you worked on. But there are a lot of other components in here you need to really factor in and consider.

Tony Schultz: That’s right. And and you’re exactly right. I mean, the fluff, the little extras, things like that, not important. Get to the facts. Why is this business going to be successful? How are you going to be able to pay the bank back? How are you going to be able to pay the investors back?

Matt Tompkins: Wait, wait, wait. You have to pay them back. I thought it was like a gift.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. No.

Matt Tompkins: No. Well, that explains why they’re calling me.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The banks aren’t into the grant, so, you know, that’s. But.

Matt Tompkins: But again, shameless plug. That’s another area. There are a lot of other areas for grants, for funding for government contracts we’re going to get into at the Nebraska Business Development Center. And I want everybody to know this isn’t like a paid advertisement or anything.

We just kind of stumbled upon this hidden gem in the state of Nebraska, Nebraska’s best kept business secret. Yep. And it is. I’m a small business owner and I’m a few years into my my second run. My first run didn’t go so well because I did everything wrong. And to know that all these things are available and that they’re, for the most part, free and confidential, and there’s a place that business owners can go to and not feel judged, be able to ask the questions they may be embarrassed to ask out loud at their networking group, which we’ll get into that later, too, because hopefully we can shatter some of those the shame and guilt that we put on ourselves.

But man, that’s that’s what it’s all about. So we are really passionate about what you’re doing as well because it’s truly beneficial to the state, to small business owners. And we’ve talked so far in this episode about what you do when you are starting out with an idea and you haven’t started your business yet. I wanted to wrap up with a completely hypothetical scenario.

All right. Definitely not a real person. Let’s just say this person is Caucasian, male, 41 years old, looks more like he’s 31 years old, let’s be honest. Married in Omaha, Nebraska. Let’s say he has a as a production company or something in the media, maybe a podcast or something. And let’s say he’s, you know, a couple of years, one month, a few weeks into his second run at the business ownership experience, and he didn’t put together a business plan. What does this person need to do as far as a business plan? Is it the same process? Is it different? And then why do they need to do it at this point?

Tony Schultz: So that’s a really good question. Usually on questions, I don’t get as much detail as that. It’s interesting how much detail there was, So I really it was the more hypothetical. Yeah, I don’t know, for hypothetical was excellent detail.

Matt Tompkins: I’m the specific person. Yeah. As I mentioned, you want to be detailed and specific, right. We’ll call this guy. We’ll call him. I don’t know. Not Tom. How about Tom P kittens? There we go.

Tony Schultz: Tom Pickens That’s.

Matt Tompkins: A good definitely not.

Tony Schultz: Tompkins Yeah. Tom Pickens Okay. Okay. All right. So I would say if your artery in the business, things are going well, things are going great. A lot of people are focused on operational things, which is great. The part the business plan comes into at that point is what’s my next step? What’s my future look like? So do I want to buy a land in a building to put my business in, or do I want to go out and add locations? Do I want to expand things like that? And that’s where the bank’s going to want to see that business plan.

The investors want to see it. If you’re operating along okay right now, things are fine. You’re happy. There’s no reason to go through an exercise you don’t have to go through. But if you’re looking to the future, like, what’s my next step? What’s what’s the next horizon? What’s the next thing I want to do? Start thinking about that strategic planning piece of that business plan. And that’s where where it comes into play, because, again, the banks are going to want to see it. The investors are going to want to see it.

The other piece is if you’ve written a business plan, don’t throw it up on the shelf and let it sit there and collect dust. Look at it annually, check it out. What’s working? What’s not working? How do we evaluate who our customer is? What do we do differently?

Matt Tompkins: Make it part of your your strategic planning sessions for the quarter or the year, which is important to do that. I mean, we’re doing that right now, going through the whole process again of like fine tuning. All right, who is our ideal? Customer persona. And we’re it’s always the process of evolving and changing. So, yeah, you do. It never ends. It’s not like it’s just, all right, we’re good for eternity, you know? Yeah. But the risk is real if you, you know, there’s that Silicon Valley expression of, you know, grow or die.

I don’t know if we need to be that extreme or vote or die. Let’s just have nobody die. Let’s just say that, you know, your business can really start to plateau and flounder pretty quickly if you aren’t bringing in new business. And so if you want to bring in new business, you’re going to need new resources, new ideas, new personnel, perhaps new physical space, a lot of different digital assets you’ll need. So how are you going to accomplish that? You may not need to take out a loan, but a business plan not only tells the banks what you need, it tells you what you need. And that is a, I think, a step that most people don’t even think about. Or if they do, they skip it because they think, well, that’s not that important right?

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And the piece of that is look at your competitors. They’re not sitting there doing the same thing. They’re not sitting there stable and not thinking about it. So to stay competitive, you have to be changing. You have to be adjusting. You have to be adapting. Look at the time we had COVID, how many businesses it adapted during that had to adapt, had no choice. But I guarantee you, a lot of people that didn’t have kind of an emergency operations plan or emergency plan in place thought, what if this happens? What are we going to do? So being thinking about that all the time is really important.

Matt Tompkins: So and we were a company literally born out of the situation as a result of the pandemic that changed how we interact with video and podcasting and all these different marketing tools. So your I mean, it changes fast, It changes quick. And if you’re not prepared, it can just you can drown in it really fast.

And the stress level that I went through this this past summer over a three week period proved to me just how quickly things can turn. Just I mean, just letting off of the the gas for a couple of weeks and you can see immediate impacts that can scare the living shit out of you, just terrify you and put you in situations where that’s where a lot of businesses fail. That’s why 75% of businesses do not make it past the 15 year mark. You know, half of all Nebraska businesses fail and gets like 52% in the first five years. I mean, that is there’s are some staggering truths right there. This is how you avoid being on the wrong side of that percentage and starts with this and exploring all the other resources at the Nebraska Business Development Center, the Nbtc.

Matt Tompkins: That’s right. I need like a hat. Like a there you go. One of the, you know, the NB DC although it might get confused with like CSI Miami or something, so but we’ll see We can we, we’ll work something up for you. Tony Schultz you are the state director for the CDC and we have a whole bunch of different resources you provided there in the show notes. You don’t have to go anywhere. Just scroll down and click on them. Everything from a template for a business plan to some of the other suggestions and resources you have on your website. And there’s so many other resources to not just the business plan.

This is just one small component important. I will I will give you that, Tony, but it’s just one small thing. There is so many other resources. Every business in the state should know about this and take advantage of this. And I hope this episode has just blown your mind and change your life forever.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, and I think the part I’d add is it’s not just business plans, like you said, it’s financial projections, it’s market analysis. If you’re going in and look in a new location, you want market analysis on that, reach out to us. We do free market analysis. You want to see, are my customers living in that area? What are the household incomes look like? What are my competitors look like in that area? Those are great things, great resources that we have. We have a new tool and I shouldn’t say new because it’s actually it’s it’s birthday. I think this coming week is called Source Link Nebraska. Okay. So you get on source link Nebraska, you can type in your zip code, you can type in what area of assistance you need. It’s no cost, low cost resources that are out there throughout the entire state of Nebraska. So check it out. You need help with social media.

You type in social media, type in your zip code. It will print off and show you won’t print off old school, but it’ll show you on the screen what the resource partners look like. Yeah, you can download it. Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, I’m familiar with that a little bit. And we do have listeners and Hastings and Red Cloud and Lincoln and Carney and all over the state of Nebraska, even all the way out in Seattle. I think there’s some like former Nebraskans just reminiscing out in Seattle in the rain. So thank you for listening. And once again, Tony, thank you so much for coming on. We’ll put your contact information in the show notes as well so people can get ahold of you directly. Thanks for what you’re doing and congratulations. The promotion to. Now you’re running the state, man. You know what’s next? Planet?

Tony Schultz: Planet Earth. Yeah, maybe.

Matt Tompkins: Maybe I better put together a plan.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, exactly. Better have a plan for that, right?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. Hot podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help your business grow.