Nonfiction / Business
There’s a lot of over-promises and incorrect advice being given online on starting a successful enterprise. This wrong advice could cost someone their life savings and importantly ruin their life ambition and dream. Therefore, in partnership with the Erasmus University Rotterdam, we decided to pull together a practical how-to guide explaining the process successful start-ups go through: The Start-up Puzzle. It explains the different steps by using real-life examples and has an academic section explaining the theory behind these steps, all augmented by interviews with experts in the field of start- and scale-ups. What makes this guide unique? Real-life examples and expert interviews augmented with a birds-eye overview of the academic theory create a practical guide that is both understandable, practical, and implementable.
Introduction
GIVEN MY BACKGROUND as a law graduate, let me start with a
disclaimer:
This guide doesn’t pretend to cover every element of new
business creation and entrepreneurship. It is also not meant
to be an
academic publication or research summary. It aims to give a
practical
birds-eye overview of the common factors & deliverables
that
successful start-ups seem to have focused on. The pieces of
the puzzle
or the academic framework are not meant to become a
tick-thebox
exercise but instead offer a holistic view to aid
understanding
of the key drivers of building successful enterprises. We
have chosen
and named the different pieces of the puzzle as we felt fit
based on
our own experiences in the start-up and scale-up world as
founders,
board members, advisors, angel investors, or acquirers of
start-ups
and scale-ups. We thus accept that our puzzle pieces will
stem from
our subjective biases, yet hope the simplification we have
tried to capture
will aid the understanding of the whole process of starting
a new
venture. We will leave it to academia to properly define the
appropriate
definitions, models, and frameworks of the start-up phases.
We
hope this guide will help entrepreneurs make choices about
where
they want the magic and/or superpowers of their start-up to
be. On
top of our own experiences, we held interviews with serial
entrepreneurs,
academics, private equity, investment banking, and other
subject
matter experts, with jointly more than 300 years of
experience
with start-ups & scale-ups. We hope their unique
perspective will not
only aid the understanding but also serve as an inspiration
from those
who live and breathe start-ups day in, and day out.
We have chosen this condensed practitioner’s format as we
ourselves
also would not have the time or patience to read multiple
fourhundred-
page business books to get a big-picture overview of what
constitutes a successful start-up journey. Furthermore, we
hope the
practical examples will inform and inspire how to overcome
certain
challenges and navigate opportunities entrepreneurs will
likely be
confronted with during their start-up journey. We believe
this practitioner
guide can also offer food for thought for more established
businesses,
as most of the reflections and observations hold for
businesses
in general, not just start-ups.
About The Author
RvP is known as the go-to person to simplify & break down complex business challenges into understandable questions you can deal with. He has a remarkable 30+ year track record as both a senior leader in a Fortune 50 company in operational regional and local jobs, global marketing and strategy roles, innovation and external ventures jobs - world of abundance of resources, shortage of entrepreneurship. On the other hand, he was closely involved as an entrepreneur and advisor to many start & scale-ups in FMCG, Luxury, and MedTech, a world that is often dominated by scarcity, and thus the only way to survive is by taking risk, and coming up with creative out of the box solutions that have never been done before. Currently, he is active as a senior consultant, advisor to start & scale-ups, an avid (public) speaker, a University lecturer, and a high-altitude tour skier, Robert strives to make a difference in the lives of those who aspire to be involved in creating new ventures, in starting enterprises as well as big Corporates that want to be inspired by the creativity that a culture of scarcity breeds.
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