Business-plan

This book is for a start up small business. Easy, walk through, step by step planning. Good conservative insights of what an investor or bank would be looking for. Favors the service industry.

It is designed to provide an annual plan ... not a five year plan. There is little in the book for advice in an ongoing buisness.

The verbage, however, is useful for any business plan.

This is an excellent book that will walk you through the process of writing your business plan. It covers all of the major sections of creating a business plan including Executive Summary, Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Strategy, Sales and Marketing, and so on. For each area, it asks clear questions, offers guidance to answering them, and offers different examples and formats that could be appropriate for different types of businesses. This is also one of the only business planning books that offers help with the financials!

Also, the book is well laid out and organized. It can be easily skimmed or read cover-to-cover with the major points highlighted well with excellent graphics. The sample business plans are very simple but concise and well written. Though they are not "real" examples, they can help provide guidance and get the juices flowing. Do not expect the book to make you a master of business planning, but as a tool to get started it is excellent. Furthermore, it can help you get thinking strategically and to get you asking yourself the right questions.

The only real negative about the book is that it does not tell you what types of formats or plans are appropriate for different types of businesses, and different types of financing.

I am a very proficient writer who found the task of writing a business plan for my consulting practice overwhelming. I knew what I needed to say, yet getting that perfect concise wording proved more than a notion. After reviewing several business plan "how-to" books, I found that only Bob Adams has made writing a first-rate business plan painless and pleasurable.

Whether a start-up or existing business, Bob has done the "scratch work" for each section of your plan and provided a wide variety of pre-written text options for you to tailor to your specific situation. In addition, he walks you through every step of creating those much scrutinized financial documents, item by item, giving formulas when necessary so that nothing is omitted or misunderstood.

It has been 18 monnths since I used Bob's book to construct my initial business plan. The results was a "living" document that has served me better than I ever anticipated.

This is the best book I can even imagine if you're looking for guidance for re-positioning, expanding or diversifying your small business. After working with one high-priced but useless consultant then a free one at the SBA's Small Business Development Center (neither of which had a clue about what I needed to know), this book showed me exactly what I needed to consider, provided useful, not hokey, exercises to narrow my options, then walked me through planning and implementing the strategy, step by step. It covers pros and cons of four options:
1. Sticking with what you're already doing and your current customer base
2. Developing new products or services for your existing customers or clents
3. Finding new customers for your existing products or services
4. Developing new products or services for new customers or clients

It's clearly and concisely written, too. In sum: Excellent and invaluable.