How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan

This book is a very helpful and very useful tool for anyone who is thinking about writing a business plan. It has some history behind the plans of some great companies and it takes examples from those plans to show you how you could use them in writing your plan.

Our banker said the plan we wrote with this book was "the best plan he had ever read" and approved our loan before we filled out the application, without a credit check! This simple, easy to understand guide will be especially helpful to first-timers and people with short attention spans (like myself). This book got us $120,000 in startup capital and, 4-1/2 years later, a company worth $3,000,000. Buy this book!

No joke. I have to say, I'm no idiot. But writing a business plan was the most difficult thing I had ever had to write in my life. And I'm a professional journalist/writer. However, this book really helped me structure my proposal, leave out the non-core information, research my market and --very important-- understand what I could leave out of the b-plan. While the book de-constructs the business plans of other extremely successful companies, it doesn't bog you down with too much information. It presents useful, crystallized examples from those plans. The Best Practices, so to speak. Anyway, the best news: I just got funded for my web business (and in this down market, too!). It's called www.mediabistro.com and the comment I heard over and over from the VCs I spoke to was: "GREAT business plan." I have Mr. Gumpert to thank for that. --Laurel Touby

This book was recommended to me by an executive with 30 years of experience and 8-digit net worth as the "bible" for starting a business. I have used this book twice during the past 6 years to assemble successful business plans. The lessons in the book are not industry specific or date specific, but rather the wisdom that applies to any business. Some of the insights in the book were later worth a lot of money to my companies. My compliments to the author for not just putting together templates or example plans, but rather teaching the entreprenuer how to think.

This book was extremely informative and it was a great help in running my business and also helped me in planning several new ventures.