Guru Guide to Entrepreneurship: A Concise Guide to The Best Ideas from the World's Top Entrepreneurs - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOSEPH H. BOYETT (joe@jboyett.com) is cofounder of Boyett & Associates (www.jboyett.com), a consulting and research firm specializing in helping companies implement state-of-the-art management and organizational practices. He has been a consultant to a number of Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, British Petroleum, Merck, EDS, and BellSouth. Dr. Boyett is the author of ten books, including Workplace 2000, Beyond Workplace 2000, and The Guru Guide(TM) (Wiley).
 
JIMMIE T. BOYETT (jimmie@jboyett.com) is cofounder of Boyett & Associates (www.jboyett.com). She is the coauthor of six books, including Beyond Workplace 2000 and The Guru Guide(TM) (Wiley). Boyett is a recognized expert on business process reengineering and the application of leading-edge information systems technology. Her clients have included Hartmarx, Brunswick Corporation, Burlington Industries, Methodist Hospitals, J. P. Stevens, and SouthWestern Bell.

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What qualities does it take to be a successful entrepreneur?
 
Are some business ideas better than others, and how can I pick the one that's right for me?
 
How do I obtain financing to start a business? How do I write a successful business plan?
 
What is the secret to finding and keeping customers?
 
How do I find, hire, motivate, and retain great employees?
 
For answers to these and other critical questions on the minds of every entrepreneur and aspiring business owner today, there is no better source than those who have been there and done it. Few entrepreneurs have achieved the level of business success realized by the gurus covered here. Now you can find out what they have to say about the most practical aspects of starting and succeeding in the business of your dreams. The Guru Guide(TM) to Entrepreneurship is an indispensable source of inspiration and ideas for anyone who runs, or dreams of running, a business of their own. Some of the Gurus you'll meet:
* Paul Allen, cofounder, Microsoft Corporation
* J. Walter Anderson, cofounder, White Castle
* Mary Kay Ash, founder, Mary Kay Cosmetics
* Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon.com
* Richard Branson, founder, the Virgin Group
* Charles Brewer, founder, Mindspring.com
* Warren Buffett, owner, Berkshire Hathaway
* Ben Cohen, cofounder, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream
* Michael Dell, founder, Dell Computers
* Debbi Fields, founder, Mrs. Fields Cookies, Inc.
* Bill Gates, cofounder, Microsoft Corporation
* Earl Graves, founder, Black Enterprise
* Steve Jobs, cofounder, Apple Computer, Inc.
* Herb Kelleher, founder, Southwest Airlines
* Phil Knight, cofounder, Nike Corporation
* Ray Kroc, founder, McDonald's Corporation
* Edwin Land, founder, Polaroid Corporation
* Charles Lazarus, founder, Toys "R" Us
* Bill Lear, founder, Lear Jet Corporation
* Tom Monaghan, founder, Domino's Pizza
* Akio Morita, cofounder, Sony Corporation
* Fred Smith, founder, Federal Express
* Thomas Stemberg, cofounder, Staples, Inc.
* Dave Thomas, founder, Wendy's International, Inc.
* Jay Van Andel, cofounder, Amway Corporation
* Sam Walton, founder, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Aus dem Klappentext

There are scores of books on the market offering "surefire" formulas for entrepreneurial success. But when it comes to turning your dreams of success into reality, who do you think is more qualified to offer an opinion-the esteemed Professor X, or Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Wayne Huizenga, and Walt Disney? And who better than Ray Kroc, Debbi Fields, and Lillian Vernon can provide solid advice and guidance on overcoming psychological obstacles to success, pitching ideas to skeptical backers, and keeping your cool in the face of adversity? The answer is clear: When you want to know what it's like from the inside out to make it in a business of your own, ask those who have done it to the max. Ask the gurus. A valuable source of inspiration and entrepreneurial know-how, The Guru Guide(TM) to Entrepreneurship provides you with an unparalleled opportunity to learn the keys to starting and succeeding in your own business-directly from the real experts. Based on top Fortune 500 consultants Joseph and Jimmie Boyett's exhaustive research, it distills the wisdom of seventy of the world's most successful entrepreneurs into straightforward, easy-to-digest lessons about everything from picking the right business and developing business plans to managing money and exploiting technology and the Internet.Here's your chance to hear what entrepreneurial lions Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, and Sony's Masaru Ibuka have to say about the "right stuff" and how to tell if you have it. From no less than Mary Kay Ash, Michael Dell, and Jeff Bezos you'll learn the secrets to coming up with, developing, and fine-tuning the "perfect" idea for a business. You'll find out how to estimate start-up costs, raise initial capital, and work with banker and venture capitalists from Home Depot's Arthur Blank, Domino's Pizza's Tom Monaghan, and Ross Perot, among others. You'll also learn what it takes to get and keep customers for life from Nike's Phil Knight, Ben & Jerry's Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Hewlett-Packard's David Packard, and more than forty other successful entrepreneurs. And, from the likes of Steve Jobs, Soichiro Honda, and Colonel Harland Sanders, you'll learn valuable lessons on finding, hiring, and rewarding great employees and motivating them to exceed customer expectations-every time.Featuring practical, motivational advice and guidance from some of the all-time greatest entrepreneurs, The Guru Guide(TM) to Entrepreneurship is a working asset no entrepreneur or aspiring business owner should be without.

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Chapter 3: Money Matters

Money matters. It is as simple as that. The money you have or can get from someone else makes all the difference in your ability to start a business and keep it going. All entrepreneurs learn that lesson, and almost all entrepreneurs hate it. Of all the activities entrepreneurs hate the most, raising and managing money are at the top of the I-can't-stand-to-do-it list. The fun for entrepreneurs is thinking up ideas, taking prudent risks, winning and losing, wooing customers, inspiring employees, creating, and innovating. Accounting, financial analysis, running the numbers, wooing bankers, and romancing venture capitalists are rarely tasks entrepreneurs enjoy. If you are like most entrepreneurs, you will find this chapterwell-necessary. So, let's begin with the most necessary of necessary things. Just how much is it going to cost to get your "perfect idea" off the ground and keep it running until it can take care of itself?

Estimating Startup Costs

So far in this book we have relied exclusively on entrepreneurs as our gurus because we wanted to present the ideas of people who had been there and done it. This chapter is a little different. We will be turning to the advice of two well-known business writers as we discuss methods for estimating your start-up costs. As we already noted, real entrepreneurs don't find the ins and outs of money matters that enjoyable, so they rarely go into great detail about how they crunched their numbers. In addition, our entrepreneurs' approaches to such matters as estimating start-up costs are often decidedly unsophisticated compared with those recommended by the experts in small-business development. Because we want to be true to our entrepreneur gurus, while not giving you bad advice, we include both approaches in this chapter.

First, we share with you an example of the typical entrepreneur's method for calculating start-up costs, based on the experiences of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's. As you will see, it is rich with imprecision. Next, we share the recommendations of Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine, coauthors of The Field Guide to Starting a Business. Their approach is much more precise. The difference between these two approaches is somewhat analogous to the differences between the approach most of us use to jump-start a car and the method recommended by battery manufacturers. Faced with getting the car going on a cold and snowy day, most of us pay little attention to the order in which we attach the cables. The manufacturer's guide, on the other hand, gives precise instruction amid dire warnings of the possible consequences should you not follow their steps. We all know that both methods have worked in the past. We also know that the manufacturer's way is a lot less dangerous. That said, here is the way start-up costs are usually calculated, followed by the way some notable experts recommend.

The Ben & Jerry Approach to Estimating Start-Up Costs

When Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield decided to open a homemade-icecream parlor in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978, they had exactly $8,000 between them to invest in the business-$4,000 from Jerry, $2,000 from Ben, and $2,000 from Ben's father. They knew that $8,000 wouldn't be enough but had no idea how much they would really need. Here is how they calculated their start-up cost, as explained in their 1997 book, Double Dip.

We sent away for some of the inexpensive little six-page brochures the Small Business Administration publishes. The brochures gave us formulas to figure out how much money we needed to start out with, and what our break-even point would be. Everything we needed, and in those days they [the brochures] cost only twenty-five cents each.

We used those brochures to fill in the blanks on the pizza parlor business plan we were using as a template. Unfortunately, we read one of the brochures wrong, which caused us to make a basic error in our planning. We thought you were supposed to double your cost of ingredients to come up with your retail price. In fact, for an ice cream parlor, you're supposed to triple it.

Also, the business plan called for us to estimate how many ice cream cones we were going to sell in an hour, a week, or a month. That stumped us. How were we supposed to know how many people were going to patronize a homemade-ice-cream parlor in a town that had never had one? There was no rational basis for coming up with an estimate of sales-but writing a business plan, applying for a bank loan, required us to do that ....

Later we realized that our initial calculations were based on sales projections that were unprojectable, on the wrong formula for figuring selling price, and on a huge underestimation of the number of ice cream cones we would end up selling in a typical day. Not surprisingly, our financial model showed the business couldn't be successful ....

In those moments it helps to be a person like Ben, who realizes facts and figures don't tell the whole story-and may be downright misleading ....

But there's always that choice to make. You can just as easily say,"I don't believe the numbers," as,"I don't believe my own qualitative judgments based on my observations of the marketplace."

After all, it wasn't instinct alone that told us to go ahead despite the projections. We couldn't afford to hire anyone to do market research, so we'd done our own-visiting homemade-ice-cream parlors up and down the East Coast. We counted the revolutions per minute of the ice cream freezers at Steve's. We learned how other shops made ice cream.We saw ice cream parlors that were successful in towns similar to Burlington. We familiarized ourselves with the competition they faced, their pricing, the kind of products they were serving. We had reason to believe we could be successful too. So we changed the numbers to project first-year sales of $90,000 and a pretax net profit of $7,746...