Thursday, November 20, 2014

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. 

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