The Art of The Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide For Anyone Starting Anything

By Guy Kawasaki

The Art of The Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide For Anyone Starting Anything by Guy Kawasaki gives new entrepreneurs an overview of topics they might need to understand.

Some of the topics surveyed in The Art of The Start include:

• The Art of Positioning
• The Art of Pitching
• Writing A Business Plan
• Bootstrapping
• Recruiting
• Raising Capital
• Partnering
• Branding

All entrepreneurs will find some of Kawasaki's advice useful. For example, he suggests making a bottom-up forecast, rather than a top-down forecast. Top-down forecasts usually predict a market size and arbitrarily assume the business will be able to capture some percentage of the market. That's not grounded in reality.

Kawasaki writes: "Bootstrappers don't build top-down models. For them, top down = belly up! Instead, they build bottom-up models, starting with real-world variables such as

• Each salesperson can make ten phone calls a day that get through to a prospect
• There are 240 working days per year
• Five percent of the sales calls will convert within six months
• Each successful sale will bring in $240 worth of business
• We can bring on board five salespeople
• Ten calls/day x 240 days/year x 5% success rate x $240/sale x 5 salespeople = $144,000 in sales for the first year."

With positioning, Kawasaki says the entrepreneur should be positive and customer-centric. Kawasaki writes: "Entrepreneurship isn't war, so you don't describe your enterprise in warlike terms… Positioning is about what you do for your customers—not about what you want to become. Announcing that your organization is 'the leading company' is egocentric, not customer-centric. It's also impractical: How can you prove you're the leader? How can you prevent another organization from declaring that it is the leader—just like you have?"

Kawasaki, a renown public speaker, also gives some solid advice about giving presentations and pitching. He suggests you videotape yourself and says, "If you can watch it without being embarrassed, you're ready to go."

Overall, The Art of The Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide For Anyone Starting Anything is a good overview of topics you'll find useful in starting your own entrepreneurial venture.