Business Planning For New Ventures

Starting a new business takes a lot of energy and organization. The failure rate is alarmingly high and the task can look herculean at the outset. This new textbook provides a simple guide to help plan a successful new business, taking entrepreneurs and students through the steps required to avoid pitfalls and get a business going. Unlike most entrepreneurship textbooks, the author avoids dwelling on theories in favour of providing effective and practical guidance on how to start and manage a profitable business, with a focus on new ventures operating in high-growth, innovative sectors. Written by an expert with experience in academia and business consulting, this concise textbook will be valuable reading for students of entrepreneurship, new ventures and small business. The practical focus of the book means that it will be useful both for students in the classroom and for entrepreneurs wanting to start a new business.

Judging by all the hoopla surrounding business plans, you'd think the only things standing between would-be entrepreneurs and spectacular success are glossy five-color charts, bundles of meticulous-looking spreadsheets, and decades of month-by-month financial projections. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, often the more elaborately crafted a business plan, the more likely the venture is to flop. Why? Most plans waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to information that really matters to investors. The result? Investors discount them. In How to Write a Great Business Plan, William A. Sahlman shows how to avoid this all-too-common mistake by ensuring that your plan assesses the factors critical to every new venture: The people—the individuals launching and leading the venture and outside parties providing key services or important resources The opportunity—what the business will sell and to whom, and whether the venture can grow and how fast The context—the regulatory environment, interest rates, demographic trends, and other forces shaping the venture's fate Risk and reward—what can go wrong and right, and how the entrepreneurial team will respond Timely in this age of innovation, How to Write a Great Business Plan helps you give your new venture the best possible chances for success.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: New ventures are an important driving source of wealth in societies. Small and especially young ventures have a fundamental impact on the whole economy. Activities of new ventures provide various positive effects, such as the creation of employment, contribution to technol-ogical advance, innovation and the overall competitiveness of a society’s economy (e.g. Brinckmann 2008, pp. 1). It is a big challenge for founders to assure that their new ventures survive and prosper. Many aspects have to be considered and high uncertainty is faced. One question which entrepreneurial research frequently tries to answer is whether planning in new ventures is positively related with performance. Plenty of research has been done on this question with rather incomplete and inconsistent results. Rather than trying to answer the question whether planning is beneficial in a strict yes or no manner, this thesis focuses on a contingent view on the stated problem. Several external factors, so called moderators that might have an impact on the success of planning, shall be examined in more detail. The first part of the thesis provides conclusions for planning in new ventures in context of the corporate life cycle concept. Specific planning requirements and topics will be discussed in the context of early stages of the corporate life cycle. First of all, the question whether and under what condition planning in new ventures pays off will be dealt with. Related to the first two age states following Adizes (1998) the relevance of written business plans and market entry strategies will be discussed. The contingent view on the problem will be completed in the second part of the thesis by looking at new ventures in different founding environments. The challenges of two types of new ventures with very specific environments will be discussed in this part. New internet ventures are acting in a completely different environment in terms of communication and therefore, have specific requirements for planning and e.g. marketing instruments. Also new ventures entering high technology markets are challenged by specific characters of their environment, especially because of the even higher uncertainty in comparison to other new ventures. Finally implications for further research and concrete advice for practitioners will be given.

This book provides the essentials to write a successful business plan. The represented methods and best practices have been approved over many years in practice with many management consulting engagements. The book is beautifully structured, it has a pragmatic emphasis and an autodidactic approach. The reader gets acquainted with the skills and competencies as well as tools, required for the planning and development of the business plan project.

Starting a new business takes a lot of energy and organization. The failure rate is alarmingly high and the task can look herculean at the outset. This new textbook provides a simple guide to help plan a successful new business, taking entrepreneurs and students through the steps required to avoid pitfalls and get a business going. Unlike most entrepreneurship textbooks, the author avoids dwelling on theories in favour of providing effective and practical guidance on how to start and manage a profitable business, with a focus on new ventures operating in high-growth, innovative sectors. Written by an expert with experience in academia and business consulting, this concise textbook will be valuable reading for students of entrepreneurship, new ventures and small business. The practical focus of the book means that it will be useful both for students in the classroom and for entrepreneurs wanting to start a new business.

Business startup advice from the former president of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation and cofounder of Global Entrepreneurship Week and StartUp America, this “thoughtful study of ‘how businesses really start, grow, and prosper’...dispels quite a few business myths along the way” (Publishers Weekly). Carl Schramm, the man described by The Economist as “The Evangelist of Entrepreneurship,” has written a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to help you get your big idea off the ground. Schramm believes that entrepreneurship has been misrepresented by the media, business books, university programs, and MBA courses. For example, despite the emphasis on the business plan in most business schools, some of the most successful companies in history—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and hundreds of others—achieved success before they ever had a business plan. Burn the Business Plan punctures the myth of the cool, tech-savvy twenty-something entrepreneur with nothing to lose and venture capital to burn. In fact most people who start businesses are juggling careers and mortgages just like you. The average entrepreneur is actually thirty-nine years old, and the success rate of entrepreneurs over forty is five times higher than that of those under age thirty. Entrepreneurs who come out of the corporate world often have discovered a need for a product or service and have valuable contacts to help them get started. Filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs who drew on real-life experience rather than academic coursework, Burn the Business Plan is the guide to starting and running a business that will actually work for the rest of us.

Venturing is a pragmatic methods-based book that first helps students conceive, design, and test product and service innovations, develop business models for them, and then create their business plans and investor pitches. The book also delves into different types of investors, stages of investment, and deal structures. It is a perfect book for business planning courses, where the instructor wishes to emphasize innovation and the creation of truly interesting, customer-grounded businesses.

Successful Business Planning for Entrepreneurs differs in approach from traditional college texts that are highly theoretical. This text contains activities and features in which student participation in discussions and group activities is encouraged. The sequencing of chapters and units are designed to closely adhere to the Small Business Administration suggested business plan outline.