I admit I’m a bit behind in my reading amidst end of year planning and all this holiday hoopla, so I’m just getting around to reading Sunday’s Wall Street Journal post asking “Should Start-Up Founders Forget About Business Plans?”

The post quotes HubSpot founder and CEO Brian Halligan saying that creating a business plan is a “fool’s errand,” noting that he has raised some $30million in investment capital without a formal business plan.  He added, “No venture capitalist actually asked us for a business plan.”

There’s long been a debate about the value of a documented business plan in fundraising.  VCs might ask for one, but really (and usually said with a wink and a snicker), we all know they never actually read them. In other words, as Halligan put it, business plans are “a waste of time.”

As business professors everywhere grab their pearls at the thought, let me jump in here and say that Halligan is right – and completely wrong.

A fully-documented, prose-polished, perfect-bound business plan adds little real value to a startup company. But that’s really not the point.

A documented business plan doesn’t simply appear, created from golden cloth as if by some Rumplestilskin-like magic.  Indeed, to say that a business plan is a fool’s errand is missing entirely the nature of the errand itself.  The thinking, measuring, investigating, validating, and actual planning that enables one to write a business plan is what matters.

Halligan goes on to say that startups need only three documents with which to raise money: a PowerPoint presentation, a one-page executive summary, and a “fictitious” pro forma income statement.  All of which, he stresses, are “simple.”

Let’s assume for a moment that Halligan is right.  The subtext of his comments presented at the Puerto Rico Venture Forum, is that the venture guys are kind of superficial and so you, dear entrepreneur, can be, too. Throw together some slides, whip up a couple of paragraphs, invent some numbers. Bob’s your uncle.

I dare you to build a business on that soft foundation. While business plans find their way to the dust bin of history, business planning is critical to the formation and growth of any company.  I’m not talking about lock-yourself-in-a-room-subsist-on-pizza-and-Red-Bull-ignore-incoming-calls-figure-out-every-nuance planning. I’m talking about common sense testing of assumptions, laying out a strategy, idenfitying tactics, and understanding milestones. It shouldn’t take weeks, but it ought to take days.

Without this level of planning, you can’t articulate your business in the infamous 10-slide deck or quick and dirty executive summary.  More importantly, you can’t articulate your business to your team, your potential hires, contractors, and others who will actually help you execute on the business.

It takes time – thoughtful, focused time – to plan a business, but so much less time than tacking from one spaghetti-against-the-wall experiment to the next.

Do I read massive business plans?  No.  Do I expect the companies who seek my help to have planned? Yes!

So while Mr. Halligan may be right that no one reads a business plan, you’ll be dead in the water if you interpret his remarks to mean you needn’t plan at all.