THE NEW BUSINESS ROAD TEST
What Entrepreneurs and Executives Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan
John Mullins
Financial Times Press
344 pages; Rs 2,621
In my final years in college, I was infatuated with the idea of being my own boss. Later, a brief experience as a locum lecturer at a Kolkata college made me feel even more strongly that I wanted to run a business of my own. Since entrepreneurship has been a dominant theme of my life, I did what I had to do: I read loads of books on (or related to) the subject.
So when another book on entrepreneurship - The New Business Road Test, by John Mullins, London Business School associate professor of management practice in marketing and entrepreneurship - arrived, I looked at it with the same disdain as would a hard-nosed venture capitalist who has to scan reams of business plans that land on his table every day. The title was long and the cover had a picture of three blurred-out toy car models. I also found the subtitle intriguing: "What entrepreneurs and executives should do before writing a business plan." So I began browsing to see what the book had to offer.
I was immediately impressed by Mr Mullins' tone and style. He speaks in a manner befitting someone who knows his audience - the intelligent, though not-so-experienced, self-starter looking for some tips as he makes his way into some new venture. There is no-nonsense advice on identifying opportunities, marketing your ideas as well as your product or service, bootstrapping, seeking venture capital and so on. It may be nothing you won't find in other books, but Mr Mullins adds a healthy dose of reality with live cases drawn from his research and related work. Moreover, his writing is insightful and easily accessible.
Now, obviously, Mr Mullins is a very successful entrepreneur himself. He was co-founder and president (between 1980 and 1993) of Alma Products, Inc, a marketer of specialty barbecue accessories. Before that (1983-89), he founded and led specialty food retail chain Pasta Via International and took it public before market and technological changes took the company down. But that's not why I like the book. I like the book because it reduces something quite complicated - in this case, starting out a new business venture - to its very basic principles without simplifying to the point of meaninglessness.
And he presents everything in bite-sized summaries rather than as a full-blown onslaught. Take, for instance, the chapter in which he talks about whether you should enter a particular industry ("Is this a good market?"). He sets the stage with a case and goes on to identify the potential threats to entry, and then unravels the whole thing with two scenarios - in this case (the pharmaceuticals and digital subscriber line industries), what investors typically want to know and the lessons one can draw from the cases/anecdotes he presents. That is more or less the pattern he follows in every chapter. A seasoned entrepreneur will be nodding his head while reading the "Lessons learnt" section in every chapter.
The layout of the book appears to address the fact that readers today have an attention span of about 10 minutes - at least that's what a lot of research seems to indicate, which is one reason all TED Talks feature the world's leading thinkers and doers sharing their work in 18 minutes or less.
Some of the later chapters, in my opinion, get a little "out there" - for instance, chapter 11, "How to learn what you don't know you don't know". However, the first five chapters are hard-hitting, conveying the simple truth that there is no substitute for careful planning and diligent follow-through. In fact, chapter 10, "What to do before you write your business plan", should be required reading for anyone starting anything, and should otherwise be read before the rest of the book. The whole process may seem like a lot of work, but no one ever said entrepreneurship was easy.
If there is one weak element in The New Business Road Test, it is a certain lack of focus. The claim this book makes - that it can tell entrepreneurs and executives what they should do before writing a business plan - seems broad-based and that's probably why some of the chapters tend to meander. For instance, Mr Mullins tosses in a chapter about developing a business opportunity (chapter 9, "Putting the seven domains to work to develop your opportunity"), which starts with some particularly helpful insights but, after a while, it begins to seem that the author is recapitulating a lot of what he has said earlier.
