doing in a business like this? I’ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners like you for more than 40 years — mostly from within our Business Power Tools software apps and templates, and through my blogs and book, Business Black Belt. My "Hero's Journey" started just out of college, I was hired as a "Field Sales Engineer" for Texas Instruments in Orange County, California. Next, I moved to the “purchasing side of the transaction” when I became the electronics buyer for the Sharper Image catalog. I was later promoted to copywriter. Along the way, I discovered a remarkable stand-alone word-processor and soon jumped back into sales in Silicon Valley. After Macs and PCs brought about the end of word-processors, I started my own business creating sales literature for tech companies. A friend of mine was in the process of selling his engineering software to Apple. However, Apple wanted to evaluate his business plan to ensure that his company would stay in business to provide future upgrades and support. At the time, I saw a business plan as an elaborate brochure that would sell his concept to people at all levels and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (I learned that from selling word-processors.) We got the deal with Apple. Over the next year, my expertise in drafting business plans attracted other entrepreneurs who had great ideas but were not being funded and needed help filling in the missing parts of their business plans. I noticed that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. I took all the content that I had developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a software template that many people could use. This software, the first of its kind, became BizPlanBuilder and my company took off! We followed up with MarketingBuilder (which picked up where BizPlanBuilder left off) and then continued with PRBuilder (which included sample press release templates and a PR tutorial). Subsequent business software tools included EmployeeManualBuilder and SafetyPlanBuilder, each full of actual policies and procedures. Altogether, my company had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees.