These instructions are about doing the business plan yourself without the aid of Business Plan Pro. If you have Business Plan Pro available to you and you choose to use it, then you won’t need this. You will need to have some sort of spreadsheet, or a calculator.

You can’t get around basic spreadsheet usage. If you don’t know how to start, set up a new spreadsheet (also called workbook, or worksheet), to select rows or columns and name them, and type in formulas, then you need to find out. This link may help. Also this one. And this may be an indication that you do want to get access to Business Plan Pro, because if you have that, you won’t need spreadsheet prior knowledge.

1. Start with a blank spreadsheet. How you do that depends on which spreadsheet you’re using. 
2. Set it up as shown in the illustration here, although don’t worry about the formats, like white text on a black background or the colors of the cells.
3. Set up five years in a row along the top, naming them either with the actual name of the year (”2010″ or whatever) or as numbered years “Year 1   Year 2″ etc. 
4. Set up the title row like it’s shown here, the row with the label “Potential Customers” in cell A3, “Growth” in cell B3, and CAGR in cell H3. CAGR, by the way, stands for “compound annual growth rate.

(Click the picture for a larger view)

5. Set up one row each for each market segment. The example here shows three segments. You set up as many as you need.
6. Use column B in each of the segment rows to set up a cell to contain each segment’s estimated annual growth rate as a percentage. That’s a number.
7. Use column C in each of the segment rows to set up the initial estimated potential market number for that segment. It’s a number. You type that number in.
8. Set up the following formula in cell H4: “=IF(C4<>0,(G4/C4)^(1/4)-1,0″ … don’t worry if you see an error message, it will solve itself; it’s missing numbers.
9. In cell D4, set up this formula: “=ROUND(C4*(1+$B4),0″
10. Copy cell D4 and paste it into Cells E4:G4.
11. Repeat steps 7-11 for each market segment row, but of course adjusting the row numbers in the formulas, so that, for example, in row 5 the formula in step 9 refers to C5 and G5, and the formula in step 10 refers to C5 and $B5. In row 6, C6, G6, and $B6. And so on. 
12. Set up the final summary row. Put “Total” in that row’s column A. For it’s column H, type in (or copy from another row and paste) the same formula you see in number 8, above. In this example, in which the totals are in row 7, it would be: “=IF(C7<>0,(G7/C7)^(1/4)-1,0″. In column B, type in the formula: “=H7″.
13. When you have your table as shown here completed, refer to your spreadsheet documentation (details vary) to create a market pie chart to illustrate the cells in the first year column. In this example, it would be the following:
14. For the text parts of this assignment, you can refer back to the assignment page and follow the suggested outline. Use your word processor and spreadsheet facilities to copy the table and the chart into the document, and then to print it out onto an Adobe Acrobat PDF document.

About a year after the book was published, and after a lot of previous engagements speaking on it, Guy chose this video as the one to post on the web. It’s a very good live and in person presentation of most of the same content as in the book.