Announcer: What do Carly Fiorina, Steve Wozniak, Roger Staubach, Lowry Mayes, David Saperstein, the founders of Atari, Wikipedia, Craigslist and the inventor of Pong have in common? They have all been guests on the BusinessMakers Radio Show. And now back to the BusinessMakers Show with your host, Russ Capper

Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com. It's guest time on the show and I'm very pleased to have with me Caroline Cummings, the director of Entrepreneur Advocacy at Palo Alto Software. Caroline, welcome to the BusinessMakers Show.

Caroline: Thanks for having me.

Russ: You bet. Now let's say that somebody's been off of the planet for the last decade and doesn't know what Palo Alto Software does. Share with our audience what the company does.

Caroline: Sure. Despite the name, we're actually headquartered in Eugene, Oregon. The founders are originally from Palo Alto area. They started the company in Palo Alto in the early '90s and moved it to Eugene in '92, and we are the world's leader in business planning software, so we have three main products. We've got Business Plan Pro, which is most notable. We've got Marketing Plan Pro, which is really popular now with social media, and we also have Email Center Pro, which is - allows a bunch of emails to come into one area and people to manage them.

Russ: Okay, cool. Now I'm very familiar with the business planning software. Is that clearly still the most popular product?

Caroline: Yes, it definitely is. Everybody needs to do business planning. Sometimes it's not even with the entrepreneur population. It could be within a project, anybody that needs to actually have a beginning and end, manage budget throughout a project can use Business Plan Pro.

Russ: Okay. And all three of these products, are they all for sale products? Is there - you just buy them and you load them?

Caroline: Yeah. You can go to paloalto.com and it's a really great Web site, very easy to use. You can download the software right from there. You don't have to go to the store and buy the packaging for it, and you're immediately sent a serial number to download onto your own personal PC or laptop.

Russ: Okay. And I would assume by now there's tens of thousands of installed versions of the product.

Caroline: Millions.

Russ: Millions. Wow.

Caroline: Yes, millions, and we also have an office in London, so we are truly global.

Russ: Okay. Do any of your customers, you know, give you feedback on the results they had with your product? I mean meaning, "Hey, we used your product. The plan apparently worked well. We got funded and now we're doing an IPO."

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we actually just did a survey and just got the results on Saturday and so I haven't dug into them for the most recent survey, but at a quick glance it's helping a lot of people. The biggest thing is people are able to think more strategically about their business as opposed to just, "I've got an idea. Let's just do it. The people will come." And for very, very, very few people that is true. Most people need to think thoughtfully about their market, about their financial projections, what it's gonna take for calculating cost of goods, how they're gonna hire people.

All of the specifics that need to be thought through are in Business Plan Pro, which is one of the cool things about the program. I actually personally used it for my own startup a few years ago because it walks you through the module step by step from what type of company you are - product, services, manufacturer, wholesaler - all the way through to completing your financials.

Russ: Okay, so Business Pro actually includes financial projections.

Caroline: It doesn't include the projections for your industry. You can link off and get help in that area. What it does do is it tells you what you need to plug in, what parts of - you know, for expenses and things like that. You need to work with a counselor or an adviser on figuring out what numbers would be, but it has all the formulas in there, which is really helpful because it just calculates things out for you, which is phenomenal.

Russ: Okay. Now as the director of Entrepreneur Advocacy, it just seems like Palo Alto Software would be sort of a magnet for entrepreneurs, so your whole mission is to focus on that even more proactively?

Caroline: Yeah. Well, I mean entrepreneurs are our business and what we realize is we get a lot of calls every day from entrepreneurs all over the world and a lot of them need help with what numbers do I put in, how do I know what my market is, how do I figure this out, so we have a longstanding partnership with the Small Business Development Centers across the nation, the SCORE offices, Women Business Centers across the nation, the Veterans Administrations. There's actually, I just found out, one in seven veterans are entrepreneurs compared to 1 in 14 non-veterans, so a lot of the veterans coming back now wanna get back into their businesses and build them.

So one of the things I get to do is I get to work with the centers who serve clients who are entrepreneurs, make sure they have the right tools to grow their business or take their business to the next level because oftentimes they're not just startups. These are people who've had businesses for a long time and now wanna take it to the next level, need to get loans and need to get investment capital, find a business partner and, of course, when you go to a bank, what do they say? "Where's your plan?" You can't go to a venture capitalist and say, "I need a million dollars." They're gonna say, "What's your plan?" Business Plan Pro at the end when you're completed it, it's a loan-ready business plan. It's an investor-ready business plan or a partner or growth-ready business plan.

Russ: Okay and so your entrepreneur advocacy includes a lot more of networking and connecting your customer base with the expertise that can provide the specific thing that they're looking for.

Caroline: Absolutely and we give our software away for free as well as we have a curriculum how to teach entrepreneurship. We give that completely for free to SBDC, SCORE, any government or nonprofit agency who supports entrepreneurs.

Russ: Okay, talking with Caroline Cummings, the director of Entrepreneur Advocacy with Palo Alto Software and we'll be back with more with Caroline after this. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com, and continuing on with Caroline Cummings, director of Entrepreneur Advocacy at Palo Alto Software. Now, Caroline, we talked quite a bit about Business Plan Pro, but you also mentioned Marketing Plan Pro. Tell us a little bit about that product.

Caroline: Sure. So you have your business plan, which is the ultimate, you know, here's your bible. Here's your path for where you're going and then within Business Plan Pro, of course, you have to think through how you're gonna market your product and get it to the market, so Marketing Plan Pro allows you to dig deep into every aspect of the marketing plan coming up with how are you gonna pinpoint who are your audience is, how are you gonna reach them, what's the market size and the potential, what are the materials you're gonna use. In the advent of new media now with social media, you can incorporate your social media strategy into your overall strategy, which we find a lotta people say, "Oh, I've got my marketing team over here and then I've got my social media team over here." Well, that's set up for a disaster. Social media is not a separate strategy. It needs to be a part of your overall marketing plan and in Marketing Plan Pro it provides opportunities for you to talk about your social media tactics.

Russ: I'm interested and curious. In Marketing Plan Pro, do older versions of it not include social media and the newer versions do?

Caroline: Well, it doesn't have specific social media components in it. The point that I'm making is that you have to include your social media strategy in your overall marketing plan, so when you're going through Marketing Plan Pro and you're talking about your deliverables or your tactics that are associated with your strategies, you can say, "I'm going to set up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page or a YouTube channel," and then use Marketing Plan Pro to measure it, how you're gonna measure the success of those tools. So just like you would plug in a Web site or a brochure into your marketing plan, you would plug in these social media tools, so it hasn't changed that much. It's just that the philosophy has changed where it's not a separate thing, social media. It's part of your marketing plan, so it should be in Marketing Plan Pro.

Russ: Well, it also seems like I mean social media is just so happening right now for sure, that even the things that you do in Entrepreneur Advocacy probably center a whole lot around social media.

Caroline: Absolutely, because every company - doesn't matter what you're doing today - you need to have a social media component to your marketing plan.

Russ: Right. The way you sort of structured it chronologically you have to have your marketing plan first. Do you guys see people that abuse and misuse social media right upfront by keeping it separate from the marketing plan?

Caroline: Absolutely. Absolutely, because I also help on the side. I do advising with small businesses, the SBDC in Eugene, and a lot of people think that it's just this cool fad and only kids do it and actually on Facebook, for example, the largest growing demographic is women 50 to 65, so everybody is now really latching onto it and trying to figure out where they fit and research shows that 65 percent of consumers in America feel stronger connection to your brand when you engage with them in social media. It creates a trust environment, you know. Exactly.

Russ: Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, now you mentioned already that you were an entrepreneur. I assume you were part of a startup prior to Palo Alto.

Caroline: Yeah. I often joke and say I'm an entrepreneur in recovery right now because I had a startup three years ago. It was called osoeco.com.

Russ: Osoeco. Okay.

Caroline: And I was the CEO and cofounder and it was a Web 2.0 social shopping platform, so it allowed us to shop together even if we didn't know each other around health and wellness, so whether it was you're remodeling your kitchen and you're looking for sustainable kitchen countertops or you're planning a vacation and you wanna have eco-travel or for personal health, you don't know how to treat something that you have going on that you don't wanna use traditional pharmaceuticals and you wanna use something more healthy, that you could shop with other people online, so we had the company for two years and we raised a half a million dollars from Angel Investors in Oregon.

Russ: Congratulations.

Caroline: Thank you. It was very difficult. It had actually never been done before in Eugene for an Internet startup, and we often thought about moving to the Bay Area. A lot of venture capitalists tried to recruit us and maybe if we did move we might still be around. Who knows? But we had to dissolve the company because we still needed another $2 million, and we knew this because we had used Business Plan Pro, and we knew exactly where our touch points were when we needed to have another infusion of cash, but the economic crisis hit and my tech team got recruited away, so we had to dissolve the company.

Russ: Wow. We do present a real-world perspective on entrepreneurship here at the BusinessMakers Show. I think there's people outside of the world of small business and entrepreneurship that don't really understand how difficult and challenging it can possibly be, but it's kind of interesting. We've had others who have gotten in it and had to dissolve a company, but they stay in it like it's still their life and in their bloodstream. Does that apply to you?

Caroline: Oh, absolutely. Once you're an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur and, honestly, I like to tell a lotta people this because I speak to a lot of undergrad and MBA students now in entrepreneurship programs, that success is a terrible teacher. It's the failures where you learn. Those are the key learnings, so I am an advocate for telling people to go out on those skinny branches of life. If you don't go out there, you're not going to push yourself and you have to go in uncomfortable places in order to learn and that's what entrepreneurship is all about. It's about being uncomfortable for a while, being a risk-taker, but at the same time, it's exciting. It gives you the chills, you know. You have to do it. It's not a choice. You have to do it if you have it in your blood, and I'm so glad to have it in my blood.

Russ: Well, that is such a cool description, you know. So you became part of Palo Alto because you were a Business Plan Pro customer.

Caroline: Exactly.

Russ: That's cool.

Caroline: And when my company dissolves, as I mentioned, Palo Alto Software is in Eugene, and I am very close with the founders and have done a lot of entrepreneur advocacy with them before I even joined the company and the CEO came to me and said, "We want you to come onboard and help us advocate for entrepreneurship because you are an entrepreneur. You understand it and we work really well in the government space and the nonprofit space and we wanna make sure that every entrepreneur knows about our software so that they can succeed."

Russ: That is so cool. Caroline, I really appreciate you giving us some of your time.

Caroline: I appreciate you inviting me. Thank you.

Russ: And that wraps up our interview with Caroline Cummings, director of Entrepreneur Advocacy at Palo Alto Software. Stay tuned in for the school teacher turned entrepreneur, that's Julia Rhodes the founder and CEO of KleenSlate Concepts. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.