If you are an entrepreneur, owner or a director of an SME you should buy and read this book – NOW! Business Link should be encouraging entrepreneurs and small business owners to read it, come to that Business Link’s advisors should read it.

Even the hopefuls preparing to pitch on Dragon’s Den should read it. If they follow the advice on preparing a business plan they’ll have a far better chance of getting investment or at very least they understand why their business is not an investment opportunity.

Why? Well The Successful Entrepreneur’s Guidebook is a practical guide to all aspects of business. It covers everything from assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a business to strategy, finance, management and organisational structure. It’s not to the depth that you’d get from attending a course at a management school, it’s more like an executive summary of an MBA, for entrepreneurs.

The book is based on research carried out by the Cranfield School of Management where the three authors are or have been lecturers. If you don’t know Cranfield is currently ranked 8th in the Financial Times rankings for European Business Schools with only two UK based business schools ranking above it and one equal to it.

The three authors are; Colin Barrow, the former head of The Enterprise Group at Cranfield, Robert Brown who directed the Graduate Enterprise Programme at Cranfield and leads the course on Entrepreneurship (which is part of their MBA programme), Liz Clarke who is a visiting lecturer at Cranfield, teaching on the Business Growth and Development Programme.

Given the authors it’s not surprising that the book reads like a set of university lecture notes – but good, interesting and well presented ones with a good helping of case studies thrown in to illustrate the key points.

Each chapter concludes with an assignment. The authors state that completing all the assignments will take around 200 hours work, but I have no doubt that you will understand your business a lot better afterwards and be in an excellent position to develop the business in the direction you wish to take it.

If you’re serious about running a successful business then this book should be on your bookshelf.

You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

Free updates:
If you enjoyed this post and would like to be kept updated on future posts, then please click here to get updates by Email. Alternately you can follow the updates the Business Opportunities And Ideas Facebook page or follow me on Twitter.