The Smart Entrepreneur (Part I: Idea creation and evaluation)

and taking actions that may help you find luck, such as an open mind, lots of networking and hard work).

When you meet your lucky moment, we hope this book helps you to be better prepared to seize it.

There’s also a lot to be said for luck in entrepreneurship (being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people and so on), as well as for initiative (adopting attitudes

When you come to write a business plan, there are certainly templates that you can adopt and guides you can consult. Every business is different, however, and you should aim to create a document that does justice to your business rationale.

crucial point of a new business proposal, in whatever form, is your ability to justify your assumptions and intentions, based on the facts you know about your business environment and market, and to answer challenging questions that potential stakeholders (investors, partners and customers) are likely to ask. If you cannot answer such questions convincingly, it may be a sign that your business case needs more work.

This book, however, describes some of the successes and pitfalls of previous entrepreneurs, and may help you to make sense of your own past experiences and results in order to take maximum advantage of any future opportunities.

No book is a substitute for direct experience, and there’s nothing wrong with trying and doing, and subsequently learning from the experience of success or failure.

The resources you will need to implement the business:

- You understand the type of skills and team members required for your venture, and what sort of people you will need to find to complement your own knowledge and skills (including personal or ‘soft’ skills) or to fill any gaps

when your venture aims to target a niche market segment to start with or to create a new market altogether.

- Industry and market reports published by research firms can offer a starting-point and some ‘helicopter-view’ information for further investigation, but they are no substitute for getting the inside story from some real people, especially

- Ideally, you should be able to back up some of the assumptions outlined above based on preferred witness research and some basic, low-budget prototyping and market testing exercises