A Giant Step Toward a Sure-Footed Start-Up

A Contest for Women Promotes a Vital Task: Writing a Business Plan

Jennifer Thorp Hemann, who is opening a Rockville franchise of Dream Dinners, has entered the StartRight! Women's Business Plan Competition. (Photos By James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)

In the early stages of starting her own business, Jennifer Thorp Hemann had a lot of ideas about how to make it successful. The problem was that she frequently lost the ideas, a predicament caused by a tendency to jot her great thoughts onto scraps of paper.

"I had all these totally random pieces of paper," she said. "I had spreadsheets and Word documents. The ideas were just scattered everywhere."

For her scattered problem there was a focused solution: Buck up, bear down and write a business plan, a suggestion made in an entrepreneur's class she took. A headache, to be sure. A three- or four-month headache, actually. But a necessary headache. A headache that could culminate in dollar signs.

"I finally realized how complicated everything was, and in order to keep all of these moving parts organized, I needed to have a plan that I could actually follow," she said. "It has made me pull together all of my ideas and made me really realize what I needed to do to get this business going."

Now Hemann likes her business plan so much -- she is opening a Rockville franchise of Dream Dinners, where customers can cook 12 dinners in two hours, then take them home to freeze -- that she is entering the third annual StartRight! Women's Business Plan Competition. The contest is organized by Rockville Economic Development Inc. to encourage the careful and successful opening of businesses by women.

The competition has grown from a handful of entries the first year to what organizers predict will be "gobs and gobs" of entries this year -- a reflection, they said, of the entrepreneurial interests of women in the county.

Montgomery County is home to more woman-owned businesses with paid employees than any other county in Maryland, with nearly 4,000 firms employing more than 34,000 people, according to 2002 Census figures. Twenty-one percent of the state's woman-owned businesses are located here. Though the number of firms owned by women in the county is roughly the same as in 1997, economic development officials predict significant gains will be seen in the next count.

"There's no reason why women shouldn't own businesses and create businesses and have a much larger share of the wealth in this county," said Sally Sternbach, executive director of Rockville Economic Development.

The ideas in the contest include a plan for helping families navigate care for elderly loved ones and a home health monitoring business that would alert patients from afar when, say, their blood pressure goes up. The organizers are expecting professional service ideas, Internet ideas, biotech ideas. Lots of ideas.

And the first, most important step for all of the ideas, the very foundation of a successful business, is a successful business plan.

The business plan is a way of testing an idea to make sure that it will make money not just over the long haul, but also enough to pay the bills in the short term, before profitability. It's a way of identifying customers, sizing up competitors' strategies and making plans to deal with inevitable surprises. And just try raising money without one. Your family will give you money without a business plan, the saying goes, but no bank will.

The only problem with writing a business plan, Sternbach said, "is that they don't just fall out of your sleeve." Translation: They are difficult to write. Sternbach said the process should take four to six months, which is why her organization has been offering business plan classes monthly for the past year to help women gear up for the competition.