Tim Berry is a successful entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International. He built Palo Alto Software from zero to 40 employees, multimillion dollar sales with no debt, and 70% market share without outside investment.

Tim is a business plan expert. Pamela Slim, author of the best-selling Escape From Cubicle Nation, calls me the Obi-wan Kenobe of business planning and quotes him extensively as the business plan expert for that book.  Guy Kawasaki made Tim his business plan expert in “How to Write a Business Plan.” Tim has written about business planning for more than 10 years for Entrepreneur.com, and also for the U.S. Small Business Administration at SBA.gov. In addition he has written several books on planning. The latest, Lean Business Planning, was published in 2015 by Motivational Press.

Tim reads and reviews about 50 business plans per year as an investor member of the Willamette Angel Conference (WAC), a local angel investment group. He is a frequent judge of business plan competitions, including the Rice University Million-Dollar Business Plan Competition and the University of Texas’ Venture Labs Competition, formerly Moot Corp, the Superbowl of business plan competitions.

Tim is also a teacher having taught course on starting a business at the University of Oregon for 11 years. He teaches a SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) workshop on business planning every quarter; and is now a guest teacher with two Small Business Development Centers.

Tim has a Stanford MBA degree, an MA in Journalism with honors from the University of Oregon, and a BA in Literature magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife of 50 years live in Oregon and are the proud parents of five now grown children.