Entrepreneurs play a vital role in economic development as key contributors to technological innovation and new job growth. We discovered that many people, just like you, have the urge to create an enterprise; to help themselves and to make a difference in this world. While successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are well publicized, the harsh reality is that most new businesses are prone to failure because they don't have access to accurate information about the entrepreneurial process. This book is a "word map" for guiding you through that process, from refining your business idea and securing capital to a successful launch into the marketplace. There are many types of business ideas to pursue and you are probably better educated than many historic entrepreneurs - both Thomas Edison and Ray Kroc being high school dropouts and both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates being college dropouts. If you hunger to be your own boss and to make a contribution to society with your ideas, then Business Alchemy: Turning Ideas into Gold has the information for which you have been searching.

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BUSINESS ALCHEMY: TURNING IDEAS INTO GOLD

By William R. Cobb M. L. Johnson

AuthorHouse

Copyright � 2012 William R. Cobb and M. L. Johnson, Ed.D, Ph.D.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-8786-9

Preface..............................................................viiChapter 1 The Entrepreneur in Hiding.................................1Chapter 2 Unleash Your Creativity....................................34Chapter 3 Testing Your Business Idea.................................77Chapter 4 Business Planning for Success..............................119Chapter 5 Find the Money to Finance Your Project.....................158Chapter 6 Selecting and Retaining Your Team..........................197Chapter 7 Entering the Market........................................234Chapter 8 Growing Your Enterprise....................................271Chapter 9 Managing Financial Success.................................302Chapter 10 Operate or Sell?..........................................341Epilogue.............................................................377Glossary of Financial Terms..........................................378

Chapter One

The Entrepreneur in Hiding

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot

There is no evidence that they dreamed of becoming disruptive technology entrepreneurs. Mary Lerner and Len Bosack, a married couple employed in computer services at Stanford University, just thought it might be more convenient to send messages to each other through a computer network rather than using telephone calls and the paper copies prevalent in the early 1980s. William Yeager had previously written multiple-protocol router software, but discovered that its internal problems apparently hindered wider acceptance of his application. Bosack was able to modify Yeager's software, so that it could work, and together, they added Richard Troiano to help form the company that became known as Cisco Systems in 1984. Although they were not the first company to sell routers, Cisco was the first to successfully produce and market routers that supported multiple-network protocols. The company name was derived from shortening the nearby city name of "San Francisco," and a succession of CEOs scaled up the product line to make it into the international computer services firm it is today.

A company with only one product is usually at-risk as technology changes; this happened to Cisco when the introduction of Internet Protocol (IP) made Cisco's multi-protocol routing less important. However, by 1990, Cisco had successfully completed a successful IPO, and was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. This influx of new capital enabled it to expand its product offerings by means of the acquisition of companies like Stratacom and the Cerent Corporation. At the height of the dot-com boom of 2000, Cisco was ranked as the most valuable company in the world; with a market capitalization estimate of $500 billion. The company continues to develop new products and acquire promising start-ups; many of which are now $ billion in-house enterprises.

Entrepreneurs Lerner and Bosack are credited with: a) perceiving an opportunity to solve a significant real world problem, b) being capable of developing a product solution and c) carrying it through the "proof of concept stage." Wisely, they brought in professional management to help "scale-up" the flagship product and develop a larger product portfolio. By re-investing their profits back into research and development, and by making timely acquisitions, Cisco has continued to play a major role in the proliferation of the World Wide Web. Their story very well illustrates how perceptive and technically competent persons can become part of a successful start-up that benefits innovators, investors, management and society.

What is an entrepreneur?

The term entrepreneur is derived from a combination of the Old French words entree, meaning to enter, and preneur, meaning to take. Thus, there has been a generous transliteration of the combined words into the business world for describing one who moves a product or service from idea to commercialization. Entrepreneurship is as old as the beginnings of commerce, wherein one person (a proprietor) or a group (a cartel) assumes the risk of moving a product or service to commercialization; taking something from an idea to profitability (Pirenne (1937). At some point in civilization's development, someone successfully took a useful product or service from idea to public adoption; benefiting himself/herself and the community.

Three entrepreneur roles are typically needed for a business start-up; a) the idea person(s), b) the financial backer(s) and c) the professional manager(s). Thus, if you are a competent manager and not particularly creative or wealthy, you can still be a significant player in the start-up world. Actually, you can become a player in several contexts: a completely new business, a business re-start, or a start-up within an existing business. This is often referred to as "intropreneurism" and such new entities may be later spun-off as an independent company. Social entrepreneurism, environmental entrepreneurism, or pioneering a new concept in a public agency or government, can all be examples of entrepreneurism. Someone who is starting a community foundation from scratch needs to have similar characteristics of a commercial entrepreneur and she/he will need to follow many of the processes described herein.

Imagine that you are watching the first farmer some thousands of years ago as he made a crude device to harness an ox to pull a sharpened stick; forming the first animal-powered agricultural technology. Animal power was a "low tech" innovation – "technology" simply being a tool to help accomplish a significant task – but, it was "disruptive technology" that replaced the pain of human powered farming. That plow made farming a bit less difficult and, although product launch and market penetration are now sophisticated processes, it is highly probable that there was little resistance to this new idea. Looking back with today's business sophistication, most consultants would have advised the innovator to give up the toil of farming and start incrementally improving, producing and distributing farm implements – as well as co-marketing with a breeder of bigger oxen. The new animal-powered plowing concept probably only spread field-by-field, as other farmers saw the mechanical advantage. Similarly, the diffusion of crop domestication technology, from its point of origin in Southwestern Asia, traveled at an average rate of only .07 miles per year – not sufficient market penetration by today's standards, but the adoption rate was fairly rapidly given that most ancient people lived and died within a radius of 20 miles (Diamond (2006).

Over time, the acts of improving things and disseminating such innovations, itself, became the entrepreneurial tool for advancing civilizations. Prototypical entrepreneurism of the ancients has been advanced and refined into high technology – an economic tool capable of dramatically transforming the wellbeing of its practitioners and improving the lives of those using the resultant products and services. The advent of money and banking facilitated and fueled entrepreneurism (See Ferguson, 2008, The ascent of money: A financial history of the world).

Though people had joined together for business ventures from antiquity, the concept of a "company" only emerged in the 1600 AD era; with such...

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