Startup Guides > 3 Reasons Why You May Not Need To Write A Business Plan After All

As an aspiring entrepreneur, you can lay out a proposed path to success in a business plan, but the road will be full of surprises. More important than attempting to forecast is knowing how to adapt and be flexible.

For exactly that reason, many top investors and incubators are shifting their views on written business plans. They would rather see founders building their concepts than spending time writing down ideas. Here's why this dynamic is taking hold, and why business plans may be on the way out:

1) Business plans are snapshots in time.

Written plans are static, but startup businesses are dynamic. A good drill for startups can be to save the plans that were created at various stages and review how they have changed; and, most important, how reality differed from what was on paper. Sophisticated investors will pay more attention to where a business has been than to its projections for the future.

2) The meat of the plan is made up...