Stylitics won the Wharton 2011 Business Plan Competition, beating out seven other finalists for the grand prize of $30,000 in cash and $15,000 in legal and accounting services.   The competition, which is open to any student of the University of Pennsylvania, began in the fall of 2010, with 210 contestants.

Stylitics motivates customers (with gifts like reward cards) to log what they wear on a daily basis, thereby capturing up-to-the-minute insights that it hopes will make it the “Nielsen for clothing.”   The company has developed a “new generation” of tools that can track and analyze actual offline clothing and purchase behavior.

Stylitics was judged to have the “most viable business plan.”    Obviously  a business plan is needed to win a business plan competition, and is also typically required to raise capital from outside investors, but how about a company that is able to self-fund, is a business plan still important?

Using Stylitics as an example, they believe there are 50,000+ clients for their services in the United States, and that at an average revenue of $5,000 per client, they have the potential to be a $95 million revenue company by 2015.   In the process of creating a business plan for Stylitics, one of the key questions that would need to be answered is: “what marketing strategy and tactics, and at what cost, is needed to build awareness and trial of our site among these 50,000 potential clients, in order to put us on a growth curve that gets us to the $95 million revenue level by 2015?”   Estimating this early years’ marketing budget is key to estimating the needed initial capitalization.

Although a self-funded company would not need a formal 25 page business plan write-up, it would still need to know how much it has to self-fund.   Therefore, the problem solving, decision making and disciplined planning that goes into answering questions like this all can be essential elements of successful start-up businesses, even if the end result is not a 25 page comprehensive business plan.