Business Plans Kit For Dummies For Dummies Business & Personal Finance

Editorial Review
When you’re establishing, expanding, or re-energizing a business, the best place to start is writing your business plan. Not only does writing out your idea force you to think more clearly about what you want to do, it will also give the people you work with a defined road map as well.

Business Plan Kit For Dummies, Second Edition is the perfect guide to lead you through the ins and outs of constructing a great business plan. This one-stop resource offers a painless, fun-and-easy way to create a winning plan that will help you lead your business to success. This updated guide has all the tools you’ll need to:

Generate a great business idea
Understand what your business will be up against
Map out your strategic direction
Craft a stellar marketing plan
Tailor your plan to fit your business’s needs
Put your plan and hard work into action
Start an one-person business, small business, or nonprofit
Create a plan for an already established business
Cash in on the Internet with planning an e-business

Featured in this hands-on guide is valuable advice for evaluating a new business idea, funding your business plan, and ways to determine if your plan may need to be reworked. You also get a bonus CD that includes income and overhead worksheets, operation surveys, customer profiles, business plan components, and more. Don’t delay your business’s prosperity. Business Plan Kit For Dummies, Second Edition will allow you to create a blueprint for success!

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
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Customer Reviews

Business Plans Kit for Dummies

2007-12-02
I had never bought one of these "Dummies" series books, I was a little embarrassed to, but I was wrong. Never had I read something in such "plain" english. I needed to prepare a Business Plan, and I needed to do it without spending a lifetime learning about it. This book helped me more then I thought possible. I only wish everything could be explained like this. I highly recommend it if a Business Plan is in your future for writing and you have no prior experience writing one.

Should be called Thinking of Starting a Business 101!!

2007-11-04
Yeah, this is really the book for dummies because that is exactly how it is written. Don't buy this book unless you are someone whose mind is not yet made up about whether or not you want to start your own business. What this book makes you do is decide whether you have the mindset to be a business owner and then it takes you through a "high-school-like" ritual of developing your plan and in the end still does not get you there. It is literally the first step for someone who has not researched business ownership at all. The cd is absolutely no help! Don't get it if you're trying to develop a business plan unless you're doing it for your high school business teacher!

Crash Business Corse

2007-10-17
This book was very precise. Just follow the steps and you will have your business plan when your done. I found it very helpful as I had no idea what a business plan should look like. I highly recommend it.

Good Format

2007-06-12
Simple and easy to follow. Great to have CD for forms etc.

Looking for an intro to business before starting a plan?

2007-05-01
Business Basics Bestseller 1: The Easy, Interesting, Open-book Look at the Game of Business Numbers! 2nd Edition

I've read some "Dummy" books and like them (it's how I learned to do PowerPoint). However, if you aren't quite ready to start a business plan and want to learn more about the financial side of business first, you will want to look at "Business Basics Bestseller 1" as a starting point. If you find the "Dummy" books to your liking, you'll enjoy zipping through this 150 page sketch filled title. This is not a suggestion that you substitute it for this book (it isn't), just that you check it out as well. The BBB #1 book was written by a guy who is not an accountant -- imagine what that can do for cutting through the jargon accountants love.

BBB #1 will introduce you to the basics of business including the terms behind the numbers and where all the financial statements and key formulas come from. That's a big help before you plow into setting up a business and talking to an accountant. Search for "Business Basics Bestseller 1" and add it to your consideration. It can be one of your best investments.

Excellent and Simple

2006-02-28
When you’re establishing, expanding, or re-energizing a business, the best place to start is writing your business plan. Not only does writing out your idea force you to think more clearly about what you want to do, it will also give the people you work with a defined road map as well.

Generate a great business idea
Understand what your business will be up against
Map out your strategic direction
Craft a stellar marketing plan
Tailor your plan to fit your business’s needs
Put your plan and hard work into action
Start an one-person business, small business, or nonprofit
Create a plan for an already established business
Cash in on the Internet with planning an e-business

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Practical, convenient, comprehensive 2005-11-29
This book and cd combination is likely to be a good buy for quite a range of people. The great advantage that I see is that it is encyclopedic in scope. And by scope I am referring not to the great range of business and management knowledge that is available but to the processes that someone attempting to prepare a business plan is likely to face.

For example the book begins with Part I: Doing Your Planning Homework. This section assumes that you may not yet have a firm business idea. Yet the material on creating or identifying a business idea may very well be quite useful even to those people who have their basic idea in place.

In Part I Chapter two deals quite well with understanding the why of the business plan. This point, why you must be a business plan believer, is often taken for granted or dealt with by a few platitudes by some authors but here the topic gets full treatment. This could be particularly important to people who are attempting a business and a business plan for the first time.

Is the book encyclopedic? Well if you really want to understand market segmentation in depth you will have to go to a text or a couple of seminars. Nevertheless, the concept is here along with many others, but tailored to the beginner and to the new, small enterprise.

Perhaps comprehensive, rather than encyclopedic, would be a better word. However, if it is a topic likely to affect your startup or small business it is here at least in elementary terms. In fact, with an MBA and nearly 40 years experience, I would say that the technical treatment, for the given audience, is really quite good.

The forms or questionnaires, I believe, selectively could be useful to business people at almost any level. The forms take you through an exhaustive chain of concepts and detailed questions. Sometimes it seems that the questions are repetitive. Some of them may be redundant for your business but don't jump too quickly. Take your time and mull over the questions. If you do take the time, you may come up with an eye opening new thought here and there.

The CD allows you to print the forms, including your input, if you choose. The CD also introduces some trial versions of software that might be worth your consideration.

Since I do business plans as a part-time business, I expect that I will be referring to these convenient forms again and again in the future as my projects shift from one type of business situation to another.

Take a good look at this choice if you are serious about a business and a business plan.

OK Book...VALUABLE CD!! REALLY VALUABLE! 2003-08-23
The book itself is a very basic rundown of starting a business running and keeping it going. The info presented is quite basic, and not very detailed. BUT, the enclosed CD is FULL, FULL, FULL of forms, government documents, sample by-laws, etc., etc., etc. Having all these forms at your disposal is invaluable. It's a terrific book and CD.

An Essential Planning Guide 2001-08-14
Like a lot of people, I am a BIG fan of the first Business Plans for Dummies book. It got me started thinking about going out on my own a few years ago. Well, this new Kit book is a great addition. It's particularly useful as a real hands-on guide to putting together a business plan and then making it work. Every chapter has checklists and other forms that take you through the process step by step, as well as "case study" type examples that really bring the information alive. It's full of updated examples of businesses that have succeeded (and how they did it.) And it also contains terrific analyses of business plans that didn't quite make it (and why.) As a small business owner myself, I was surprised to learn as much as I did from the chapter devoted to small businesses. UNLIKE a lot of other business planning books, this one tackles the subject with real authority along with a great sense of humor. I think this is an essential book for anyone who is putting together a business plan for the first time. I even used the trial business planning software that comes on the CD-ROM to choose the program that would work best for our company. And that's made completing the business planning process even smoother.