Reading :: Entrepreneur's Toolkit

Entrepreneur's Toolkit: Tools and Techniques to Launch and Grow Your New Business
By Harvard Business Essentials

I picked up this book as a tool for better understanding entrepreneurship. It does a serviceable job of this, although it's less heuristic-driven and therefore less accessible than other books on entrepreneurship I've read. The book aims to be comprehensive, so it covers topics such as:

• Self-diagnosis: Are you cut out to be an entrepreneur?
• Finding and evaluating the opportunity
• Organizing the enterprise (Should it be a sole proprietorship, partnership, C Corporation, S Corporation, etc?)
• Building a business model and strategy
• Writing a business plan
• Financing the business
• Angels and venture capitalists
• Going public
• Enterprise growth
• Keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive
• Harvest time (i.e., cashing out)

This scope is appropriate for providing a broad overview of entrepreneurship. However, some of the details get lost. For instance, readers get to learn a lot about how to organize the enterprise, but they learn comparatively little about the process of designing, ideating, and iterating the value proposition. Similarly, the chapter on writing a business plan discusses some of the main sections, but doesn't provide a model to follow or analyze.

If you're looking for a broad overview of entrepreneurship, this may be the book for you. But you'll want to supplement it heavily with other sources.