Customer Reviews

Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am relatively new to the world of entrepreneurship having started my own small business about a year ago. I was thrilled to come across this book and consider it my entrepreneurship bible. It is a concise, thoughtful and practical guide for anyone starting a new business venture. He covers everything from building your team, to choosing a lawyer, to making your pitch to investors. I do not have a strong financial background, so the chapters that were most helpful to me were the chapters covering Cash Flow and Investment. Gold focuses on the big picture when writing about these topics, which is exactly what I found most helpful. I'm new enough to the game that I didn't want to get bogged down in the details. The Entrepreneur's Notebook has helped me avoid common mistakes and use Gold's years of experience to arm myself as I continue to grow my new business.

This is a delightful little book that contains a wealth of useful and helpful information and ideas on starting a small business and ensuring that it is viable and succesful. The book is well written and easy to follow and interesting to read.

This is a must read for entrepreneurs, particularly budding ones as the information the book provides is very practical and can help you avoid making costly errors. The book covers a wide range of topics including the start-up process, marketing the business on a small budget, cash-flow forecasting, among other things.

The book is an excellent companion for the entrepreneur that is well worth having.

Gold goes far beyond the typical "here's the difference between a C Corporation and an LLC" to explain not only the nuts-and-bolts of finding business partners, forming a company, marketing your products/services, and writing a business plan, but also--and perhaps even more importantly--how to *think about* being an entrepreneur and how to make the critical decisions that can make or break any new venture in its early stages. And he does this not only from the point of view of someone who has studied and taught business (although he does fit the bill on both of these fronts), but as someone who has successfully started and run several businesses.

For example, he not only points out the need to put together a team, but explains how to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses and how to identify complementary team members who are most likely to work together as a cohesive unit. He not only explains the importance of finding the right corporate lawyer for your company, he also provides concrete--and nonintuitive--advice for how to avoid picking the *wrong* one. He doesn't merely repeat the mantras of "find your niche" and "focus on your core competency," he explains how to translate your "big idea" into a finely-honed business plan based on analysis of both your company's strengths and weaknesses and the market in which it will operate.

I highly recommend this book to anyone thinking about starting a business who wants to avoid common pitfalls and start off on the right foot with the "entrepreneur's mindset" and plenty of concrete strategies for success.

This book does a terrific job of presenting some of the most important issues entrepreneurs face when embarking on new ventures, touching on topics such as the business plan, funding, team building, and cash flows. Using simple, yet stunningly accurate models of the entrepreneurial process, Steven Gold distills complex subjects into simple, practical, take-away messages. The classification of entrepreneurial personalities (professionals, pragmatists, and inventors) is something I think we can all relate to. I find the metaphor which compares building a new company to making "stone soup" equally compelling. There are countless books out there for budding entrepreneurs, but this one is no fluff. It gets right down to the nuts and bolts so you can concentrate on your business.

Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture is an excellent book for entrepreneurs of all sorts. It covers such topics as brainstorming, resource gathering, business plans, legal entities, financing, exit strategies and presentations, and it does so in such a way that is concise and remarkably engaging.

Dr. Gold's life as a `serial entrepreneur' is fascinating and inspiring, and his first class education combined with his wealth of entrepreneurial success, give his advice and insights the highest level of credibility. Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture is an invaluable resource to any person who is either currently involved or thinking about getting involved in any type of new venture. I feel a huge amount better-off for having read this book.

Great book for getting ready to open a new business. Would refer to anyone thinking about opening a business.

This book tells a budding entrepreneur what to do and how to do it. Advocating for simplicity and clarity in thinking and business planning, the author practices what he preaches in his compact writing style. Stories and personal experiences drive home key points and make them memorable. I teach at the college level, and put this book on the reading list for my undergraduate entrepreneurship class.

The Entrepreneur's Notebook by Gold offer an enthusing reading for anyone interested in knowing the fundementals of starting a new business venture with the least amount of mistakes. This is why I liked this book:
1. Uses real life examples from the author's own experience to explain entrepreneurship and the mistakes not to make when starting a new business.
2. Uses very simple analogies (I love the chapter on cash flow).
3. Very easy to follow and explains the different entrepreneurial personalities in great detail.

I did not like this book for the following reasons:
1. This book is not universal and most of the chapters apply to entrepreneurship in the US only. Although the first chapters are applicable to any entrepreneur, the ending chapters are rigid and US specific.

Final Verdict: Still a valuable buy but more applicable to US entrepreneurs rather than Entrepreneurship in general.

This book was very helpful to me. I started one business quite a few years ago and was looking for something to help me brush up on the basics. Entrepreneur's Notebook exceeded my expectations. It's an unintimidating book about so many of the pivotal concepts, some of which I learned the hard way with my former business so can attest to. I especially liked the chapters about generating and analyzing ideas, and also the chapter on management. A couple of the chapters were really original. Most of all I liked the fact that this book is very accessible. It's very readable and doesn't take too long to get through. Overall, I learned some things that I don't think I would have found in other similar books.

This tiny book is packed with valuable information and advice on all critical aspects of starting up a venture, from the nuts and bolts of finances and legal issues to the all important and often overlooked human element. It is easy to read and engaging, with a good mix of fact, explanation, and tales of hard won experience. This one gets a "strong buy" rating due to value, and good P/I (page/information) ratio.