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Introduction

Who would not like to be his or her own boss? To be able to run your own business and be in complete control of your destiny is the fantasy for a large percentage of people, whether they be recent graduates of high school, college or grad school, or they are employees of a company that are tired of following the direction of their boss and would like to go out on their own. For so many people this is their lifelong wish, as it has to promise of freedom, income and complete control of your destiny.

The purpose of this book is to explore the options of entrepreneurship with the objective of providing readers with guidance as to whether this is an appropriate route for them, and if so, what do they need to accomplish to be successful. It seeks to cover a wide variety of topics from the initial conceptualizing of the business idea to the development of the business plan, the planning for marketing the idea and the key considerations relative to pricing, marketing and sales. The purpose is to expose the new entrepreneur to the topics they will need to address when starting a business, and to provide some sense of priority for the attention that is placed on each during the start-up phase of the business. We do not try to provide all the answers to all the topics raised in this book, but rather share experiences in dealing with the issues so at least the entrepreneur knows what questions to ask of the advisors they will use in getting started.

The content of the book is based on both my experience in business at Procter & Gamble and Church & Dwight working in the product management field, and almost 40 years working in my own company as a marketing sales and promotional consultant for large and small companies. That experience has been greatly enhanced by the work over the past three years as a business counselor for SCORE (which was previously known as the Service Corps of Retired Executives) where I have provided counsel to over 300 different clients in more than 200 different types of businesses. It is the problems and opportunities faced by my SCORE clients that spurred the interest in writing this book. My concept was that if I were able to condense my thoughts from all the SCORE meetings into a book, my clients would be able to take home the lessons learned and more effectively execute their plans to achieve success.

I hope all the readers of this book will benefit from its content, and that they will let me know how it has helped them. Further, any readers that have suggestions for improvements in any of the chapters should feel free to contact me with their thoughts. I view this book to be a continuing work in progress.