If you are like most entrepreneurs, you were taught that you must have a business plan. Every expert seems to agree that a business plan is necessary and is the golden ticket to entrepreneurial success. But is it really? Personally, I think it does more damage to a company than it actually helps them to grow and stay on pace.

Let me show you why.

No planning needed

There are many successful entrepreneurs who took an idea, put themselves out there, and saw their business flourish. Burt’s Bees and Mark Zuckerberg had no initial plan, to name a couple. Think about it—when Facebook got started, Zuckerberg was a college student who had no plan or idea where Facebook would go. Today, he has a company that is valued at around $50 billion!

If you have a good product, service or idea, don’t worry about a business plan. You have what you need, which is the salable idea. All you need to do is put the wheels in motion to start capitalizing on that idea. Putting together a business plan will not only make your head spin, but it will probably lead you to believe that reaching your business vision is a mountain that may be too steep to climb.

So why are business plans not such a hot idea for business success? For several reasons, including:

• They look too much beyond you. In your business, you are the star of the show, but business plans want you to look beyond you and determine who else is going to be involved. If you are busy looking at others, you are not concentrating enough on your own importance and contribution, and ultimately your success will come down to you.

• They require you to determine how much money you will bring in. Sounds nice in theory, but in reality this is not so cut and dry. We can’t determine what will happen when people really start coming through your door. It would be nice if we could! There are too many factors that can have an impact on what these numbers will really end up being.

• Business plans are about boxing you in, rather than letting you shape and mold your business as you see fit. They will require you to clearly define your business down to the smallest morsel, leaving very little room for creativity and ingenuity once you open those doors.

Beyond plans

If you are wondering what business plans are actually good for, I know of one thing: financial loans. And that’s only because they will require that you have one in order to get the funds. But beyond that, they don’t serve much purpose. Instead, they will make you focus on achieving what is on paper, rather than what you believe can and needs to be done.

What you should have, rather than a business plan, is a vision. All you need is a vision of what your business is going to entail and where you want it to go. Picture it, write that vision down, and refer back to it when you need to. And don’t worry if it changes over time. Just keep it as a point of reference for those days when you feel overwhelmed and can’t remember why you started all this in the first place.

It’s really all about the vision, rather than a professional business plan that others may not fully understand anyway. Like author Jonathan Swift once said, “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”