I spend a lot of time working with a very wide range of people - students, people in business incubator units and established small traders - helping them embrace the thinking and planning that's involved in starting and maintaining their own businesses. Many of them love the idea of independent self-employment but also admit to a strong dislike of traditional business planning. So how do I resolve that paradox? Well, in truth I think it's all down to where you start the exploration. If you start with tax, accounting, SWOT testing and competitor analysis the danger is the creativity and excitement gets buried in rules and notions of conformity. Any interest in planning goes out the window and important work simply never gets properly completed.

On my last visit to Hereford College of the Arts - a favourite of mine because it has retained a lot of the character of the old style independent art college and crucially because it places importance on providing key support around post-college survival and sustainable practice - we took a very different approach to the business planning process. The challenge was to get the students to do all the thinking required to create a business plan in 5 days without losing them along the way. How precisely? To approach business planning with enthusiasm and a sense of excitement, students need to be encouraged to explore the following key questions.

• What sort of lifestyle do they want their business activity to lead towards?
• What sort of business do they need to build that will support that lifestyle?
• What underlying values and sense of purpose will drive this along?
• How and where do they want to live? What does the geography of their business need to look like in order to make it exciting enough to pour in the requisite energy and commitment?
• What is the scale of their ambition - local, regional, national, global?
• What sort of people do they want to build their key business relationships with?
• How can they start behaving like a business well before graduation point?

These questions, presented as as series of 'thought experiments' open up a much broader vision of what a satisfying and sustainable business might be built around. Exploring these scenarios makes the business planning process relevant and exciting. The need to think ahead, plan and research suddenly becomes vital and personal rather than academic and assessment oriented. By the end of day 5 at Hereford, most of the students had a workable draft business plan and were excited about what the future holds.

That thinking underpins the structure of this toolkit. It leads with lifestyle ambitions and fills in the critical business information along the way. I hope you enjoy the process.