Guest Speaker: Ron Kornfeld

Ron Kornfeld's speech was amazingly helpful in clarifying a few things that I needed to know about how to develop a good business plan. He maid many great points, one of my favorite being the following:

It is better to develop something small, sell it for a modest amount, but do it well, then to aim for a million-dollar company.

I loved Ron's suggestion of reading a section of reading a section of your business plan backwards after you've completed it to catch any grammar errors--I had never heard of that, but I will definitely have to give it a try. I have had many times where I have run the spell checker only to find duplicate or improper use of words in some of my documents.

I must admit however, that I'm a little dismayed about writing business plans, and left with a few questions. I'm not a business major, and the concept of writing a business plan is quite a daunting subject for me to begin with. As knowledgeable as Ron is, I felt that he used way too much business jargon for the audience that he was speaking to. I found myself looking up a very large list of vocabulary because there were a lot of things that Ron said, that just did not seem to click in my head.

I feel that it is very important to put yourself in the position of the audience, and then ask yourself a couple questions, such as the following: What knowledge of my topic do I perceive the audience as having? How can I put things into simpler terms that they will understand? Perhaps it is just like writing a business plan--the first step is to identify your audience.

To sum this all up, I feel that if the jargon had been dulled down a little bit, Ron's speech would have been perfect. I still did gain a lot of very helpful information from his speech, however, and I'm glad that he took the time out of his busy schedule to speak to us.