This class is about starting a business, and one of the key elements in starting a business is getting things done. Through the years I’ve been teaching this course I’ve become more demanding about the tools involved. For the record, this is a matter of self defense. I want to save my time to focus on the content of your assignments, not the technology.

So I’ve come to insist on standardizing certain things. This means the burden is on you to get your work into standard formats. It also means that I’m not going to be sympathetic to technological problems.

1. Please deliver assignments as either Business Plan Pro BPDX file (for assignments 2, 3, 4, and 5) or Adobe Acrobat PDF documents attached to emails sent to me at my email address tberry [at] paloalto.com. If you’re not familiar with the various tools to create the right kind of files, find out from friends, check wikipedia on PDF or google  creating a PDF file.  I use PDF995 as a simple free PDF generator, so I can print from my computer to create the PDF file as if I were just printing to a printer. Business Plan Pro exports anything to a PDF format too, so if you’re working in Business Plan Pro you could create the PDF file automatically, but to be honest, I prefer the raw BPDX file instead. That’s a special case.
2. Please deliver your assignments to me by email before the start of the class for which they are due. I’ll use email times to check.
3. I’m sorry, but there’s no good reason for being late with these assignments. It’s up to you to work a few days in advance if you’re afraid the technology will cause a last-minute problem. Back up your work, take precautions like all the rest of us do to make sure you don’t get caught by some unforeseen problem. Be resourceful. This is, after all, a class on starting a business; and in the real world, work not done on time is just that. Excuses don’t matter.

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