This is the complete, up-to-date guide to creating a successful new venture. Using real-life examples, it helps you assemble every piece of the puzzle: you, your team, your opportunity, your business concept and revenue model, your resources, and your successful launch, execution, and growth. The authors illuminate entrepreneurial mindsets, motivation, attitudes, and leadership, and cover the entire process of starting a company, from idea through your first four years of operations. You’ll learn how to recognize, define, test, and exploit opportunities; transform ideas into revenue models that earn sustainable value; demonstrate viability to funders; establish a strong ethical and legal foundation for your concept; and build a thriving team to execute on it.
24 Steps to Success! Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. For more please visit http://disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.
Are you ready to take the next step in your author journey? Art for the sake of art is important. Writing for the love of it, or to create something beautiful on the page, is absolutely worthwhile and critical to expand the sum of human expression. But I’m not here to talk about creativity or the craft of writing in this book. My aim is to take the result of your creativity into the realm of actually paying the bills. To take you from being an author to running a business as an author. I was a business consultant for 13 years before I gave up my job in September 2011 to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. I worked for large corporates and small businesses, implementing financial systems across Europe and Asia Pacific. I’ve also started a number of my own businesses ”" a scuba dive charter boat in New Zealand, a customized travel website, a property investment portfolio in Australia as well as my freelance consultancy. I’ve failed a lot and learned many lessons in my entrepreneurial life and I share them all in this book. In the last six years of being an author, through tempestuous changes in the publishing world, I've learned the business side of being a writer and I now earn a good living as an author-entrepreneur. I’m an author because it's my passion and my joy but also because it's a viable business in this age of global and digital opportunity. In the book, you will learn: Part 1: From Author To Entrepreneur The arc of the author’s journey, definition of an author-entrepreneur, deciding on your definition of success. Plus/ should you start a company? Part 2: Products and Services How you can turn one manuscript into multiple streams of income by exploiting all the different rights, various business models for authors and how to evaluate them, information on contracts, copyright and piracy. Plus/ putting together a production plan. Part 3: Employees, Suppliers and Contractors The team you need to run your business. Your role as author and what you’re committing to, as well as co-writing. Editors, agents and publishers, translators, book designers and formatters, audiobook narrators, book-keeping and accounting, virtual assistants. Plus/ how to manage your team. Part 4: Customers In-depth questions to help you understand who your customers are and what they want, as well as customer service options for authors. Part 5: Sales and Distribution How to sell through distributors and your options, plus all the information you need to sell direct. ISBNs and publishing imprints ”" do you need them? Plus/ your options for pricing. Part 6: Marketing Key overarching marketing concepts. Book-based marketing including cover, back copy and sales pages on the distributors. Author-based marketing around building your platform, and customer-based marketing around your niche audience and targeted media. Part 7: Financials Revenues of the author business and how to increase that revenue. Costs of the author business and funding your startup. Banking, PayPal, accounting, reporting, tax and estate planning. Part 8: Strategy and Planning Developing your strategy and business plan. Managing your time and developing professional habits. The long-term view and the process for becoming a full-time author. Plus/ looking after yourself. Part 9: Next Steps Questions from the book to help you work out everything to do with your business, plus encouragement for your next steps. Appendices, Workbook and Bonus Downloads including a workbook and business plan template. If you want to go from being an author to running a business as an author, download a sample or buy now.
Business Creativity is the first volume of a series of textbooks called Fundamentals of Sustainable Entrepreneurship, which has won multiple awards in Africa and Europe. It is a comprehensive guidebook for aspiring entrepreneurs who desperately want to acquire the critical business tools to generate a brilliant idea and turn it into an innovative start-up company.In a refreshingly enjoyable and well-illustrated how-to guide for first-time entrepreneurs... Michael C. Fanning serves up 17 bite-sized Lectures ... helping start-up founders to: -Accelerate their entrepreneurial mind-sets by providing them with proven and tested scientific methods that foster creativity in business.-Identify and change the self-sabotaging beliefs and behaviours that stop them from creating and maintaining sustainable enterprises.-Learn to apply various hands-on techniques to collect constructive feedback from industry experts to formulate a successful product launch.By the end of Business Creativity, first-time entrepreneurs will be educated, empowered and equipped to apply creative thinking while attempting to develop innovative products, processes and services which help carry out the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).[ Each entrepreneur purchasing this textbook through Amazon will automatically be granted access to the online course 'Business Creativity' via PhilTech Business Academy's website: https: //www.PhilTech.Academy provided that they email their proof of purchase of the textbook to this email address: [email protected] ]In order to finalize this textbook, Michael C. Fanning has traveled extensively and met with Government officials in Stuttgart, where he took part in the Autumn School for Sustainable Entrepreneurship at Social Impact Lab Stuttgart (Germany). He also worked in France for two months to refine the entrepreneurship curriculum, which makes up the full series of 8 textbooks and called Fundamentals of Sustainable Entrepreneurship. He trained and collected feedback from entrepreneurs in Gabon, Cameroon, Burundi and Nigeria.He was invited by the President of Egypt H.E Abdul Fattah El-sisi to take part in the Arab and African Youth Platform in Aswan (Egypt) where he met with the president on live Egyptian television. Further, through this presidential event, he was introduced to Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela's grandson; Zondwa Mandela who gave him a training on Social Entrepreneurship while he was in Egypt. Lastly, this book was refined even further when Michael C. Fanning had the immense privilege to take part in the 2nd edition of the Pan African Youth Forum held at the African Union's Headquarters located in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). The African Union was a great opportunity to be exposed to the 2063 Agenda, as well as the 1 Million campaign by 2021 initiated by the President of the African Union Commission; H.E Moussa Faki.
Tapping into more than 33 years of small business expertise, the staff at Entrepreneur Media takes today’s entrepreneurs beyond opening their doors and through the first three years of ownership. This revised edition features amended chapters on choosing a business, adding partners, getting funded, and managing the business structure and employees, and also includes help understanding the latest tax and healthcare reform information and legalities.
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
The one primer you need to develop your entrepreneurial skills. Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals--from writing a business plan to getting your first loan. You also need to know the latest thinking on how to create an irresistible pitch deck, mitigate risk through experimentation, and develop unique opportunities through business model innovation. The HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook addresses these challenges and more with practical advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review's archive. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your startup's life--and increase your business's odds for success. In the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook you'll find: Step-by-step guidance through the entrepreneurial process Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on entrepreneurship from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman Time-honed best practices Stories of real companies, from Airbnb to eBay You'll learn: Which skills and characteristics make for the best entrepreneurs How to gauge potential opportunities The basics of business models and competitive strategy How to test your assumptions--before you build a whole business How to select the right legal structure for your company How to navigate funding options, from venture capital and angel investors to accelerators and crowdfunding How to develop sales and marketing programs for your venture What entrepreneurial leaders must do to build culture and set direction as the business keeps growing HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.
(Black & White version) Fundamentals of Business was created for Virginia Tech's MGT 1104 Foundations of Business through a collaboration between the Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries. This book is freely available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961 It is licensed with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
