Best business planning books

This semester I’m teaching a business plan course for the first time since I left UCI in 2002. (I did use a business plan assignment in a 2006 strategy class — more on that later.) The course is an elective for both our undergraduate entrepreneurship and management majors, although I have a few students from other colleges on campus. At the suggestion of a local VC, we are shifting the title and emphasis of the course from strictly business plans to “Planning the New Venture.”

Although I use textbooks for core courses to cover the recommended corpus of knowledge, where possible I try to use regular (i.e. trade paperback) books for electives. They tend to be more readable, cheaper, more likely to be kept after graduation and more representative of what students will read after they graduate. So in preparing for the class, I searched on the Internet and Amazon for books related to business plans.

In 2006, I asked students to write business plans without much information on how to do it, other than walking them through our standard template, which was derived from the U. Maryland BPC. Both versions were derived originally from the standard MBA entrepreneurship textbook by the dean of entrepreneurship scholars, the late Jeff Timmons.

This year, I wanted to give them more help on the two most difficult tasks — estimating revenues and estimating costs — while also covering the broader questions of starting a new business. After buying five books and getting a 6th from the library, I eventually settled on three books.

The first book I picked was the smaller (and cheaper) Timmons paperback, entitled Business Plans that Work. It‘s not complete, but for an undergraduate course it gives a good consistent way of looking at the problem, and (not surprisingly) matches well to our (i.e. Timmons) BP format.

The second book I chose was Bankable Business Plans by Edward Rogoff. I did not expect to like the book, and with its “action steps” (rather than chapters) it’s a bit of a scattershot. However, I found it a nice complement to the Timmons text. In some areas, it’s much more concrete than Timmons, including one of the most important blind spots from 3 years ago — setting up a sales process.

These two books would have been enough for our 15 week course, if I had built a reader with 4-6 other articles to supplement the gaps in coverage. Together, they are only $28 at Amazon — a steal for anyone involved in entrepreneurship.

However, I wanted to give students a little more of the big picture of starting a business, including a sense of why they want to be entrepreneurs in the first place. In the end, I decided to use Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, which turned out to be much more substantive than any previous Kawasaki book I’d read. Still, I see Kawasaki and this book as a motivational speaker — identifying some important tricks and traps — rather than providing a business plan checklist.

One problem I’ve found in teaching entrepreneurship — with all the work of Timmons, and also many competing academics — is too much of an emphasis on venture capital-funded IPO-oriented startups. Kawasaki nicely balances this out with an entire chapter on bootstrapping, which (as he notes) can also be used by VC-bound companies to bridge between 3F money and their first professional capital. This nicely fits my course goal, which is to help students to identify the most appropriate funding approach for their idea and industry context.

The VC-centric counterpart to Kawasaki’s book is Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur by Dermot Berkery, a former McKinsey consultant turned VC and MBA lecturer in Dublin. It came highly recommended on Amazon, and after reading it, I saw why. It really walks entrepreneurs through the funding process — as VCs see it — and explains what they must do (and why) to put their best foot forward.

I decided not to use it this year for two reasons. First, it’s so VC centric that it would have undercut my message about being funding agnostic, and secondly, it’s more suitable for those already in business or graduate students. I would strongly consider it if I were teaching high growth-startups in the Stanford or Berkeley engineering school, and I’ll also recommended it for our new venture finance class.

Beyond the classroom, I would also recommend both the Berkery and Kawasaki books for those already in a startup. Despite 20+ years thinking about startups (as a founder, research, teacher and consultant) I picked up valuable tidbits from both — either things I didn’t know, or different ways of thinking about familiar problems. For example, Chapter 2 of Berkery’s book emphasized the importance of identifying 3-4 alternative exit strategies, so that investors (and founders) can still succeed if the initial plan is blocked.

One book that did not fit my immediate goals was The Business Plan Is Dead by Jeffrey Wofford. I’ll write more about it some other time.