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Free Business Plans for All: Enloop’s Founder, Cynthia McCahon Leads the Way

Learn how one entrepreneurs frustration led her to create the “Turbo-Tax of the Business Plan," and provide free business plans for all.


Writing a business plan is a painstaking process for many entrepreneurs. Have you ever embarked upon a tiresome search through lackluster business plan templates, rummaged through sample business plans online or simply Googled, “how to business plan” and spent countless hours sifting through the results?

If so, it’s likely you’ve thought to yourself, “There has to be a better way!” Cynthia McCannon, entrepreneur, author and founder of Enloop.com, a patented innovative system that writes your business plan for you, thought so too.

Enloop seeks to make the business planning process easy, painless and complete, by letting users quickly create bank- and investor-ready business plans. Their user-friendly business planning and scoring system automatically generate a business plan for any industry and immediately know its potential for success through a powerful predictive scoring algorithm.

Underwriters and investors can quickly gauge the venture’s risk profile by viewing the company’s score and performance metrics, allowing everyone to make better decisions for a fraction of the time, cost and pain.

Learn how one entrepreneurs frustration led her to create the “Turbo-Tax of the Business Plan,” and provide free business plans for all.

 

Company: Enloop
Founder: Cynthia McCahon
Location: San Francisco, CA
Industry: Business Services
Startup Year: 2011
Startup Costs: Undisclosed

How I Got Started:

As the founder of a site that offers business plan templates, I encountered many business owners who had sunk their money and time into flimsy ideas. I decided to create a system that helps you build a business plan from scratch, and potentially help those that aren’t quite ready save themselves from themselves.

I thought, ‘how can we take that emotion off the table and create a system that guides people through the decision-making process, much the same way that an underwriter would look at them or write their risk using the concepts of risk analysis?’ That’s how I started Enloop.

Best Success Story:

Unlike websites that serve up static business plan templates, Enloop’s dynamic and engaging engine helps create text based on the user’s input and prophesies the idea’s chance for success.

We made a big splash at the Finovate conference this year: our page views jumped dramatically after our presentation to entrepreneurs and the press. Since then we’ve had some major press hits with Forbes, INCTech and a feature in Entrepreneur Magazine. We were also featured on MSNBC as the “Website to Watch.”

Biggest Startup Challenge:

Enloop was created out of frustration. I had been helping small businesses with their financials for over 15 years and watched a lot of people break into their savings and 401ks only to end up empty-handed because they didn’t understand their risk.

The simple truth was that there was no system that could help people answer the essential question of “How do you know if a business idea is a good idea”? Why? Because a good business plan helps you communicate business ideas, financials and the risk associated to partners and lenders. And a great business plan helps you communicate with yourself about whether the business is worth pursuing.

#1 Tip for Entrepreneurs:

Prove a business idea is good idea. Do this by putting a concept in front of people and listening to their feedback on a product’s usefulness and pricing.

Create a simple prototype and give it away for free to friends and family. Do what we in the software business fondly refer to as a “pivot.” It’s a polite way of saying the idea is not working and needs a change of direction. Refine it if it’s necessary, otherwise, let it go.

 

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