About a year ago, I joined the TYE Program, a teen entrepreneurship competition in Vancouver. Teams were to create business plans and present them in a venture challenge—the winner competing again in the global competition in Washington DC.

What I learnt in this experience, however, was not that business plans are necessary. Simply surveying a landscape and writing a report does not help start up a company. Because business plans have to be specific, they may be rather make-believe. No matter how extensive your research is, there are too many things you have to assume. I felt this when my team—consisting of my four siblings and myself—created a business plan. We won both the local and global competitions for our written and presented business plan, but that didn’t matter in the real world. Things didn’t go the way we wrote our plan. Of course they didn’t. For example, we didn’t know if suppliers would work with us. Things don’t go as planned almost all of the time, so it doesn’t help when you measure your success based on how close you are to your business plan. In this sense, I believe that business plans aren’t a useful tool for startups.