Smartups Rob Ryan in His

Smartups Rob Ryan in his book Smartups makes use of his experience teaching beginning entrepreneurs how to develop a plan, raise money, and put their plan into effective action. He finds, however, that most are not prepared and have not done the research necessary to create a viable plan. Most also have no idea how to raise the money they need to achieve their goal.

Ryan has also learned from those he teaches and describes the seven different types of entrepreneur he has found in his classes, though all are the same in that they have not done the work needed to build a business model and achieve the rest of what is needed to get their business working. He finds one category he calls Guts and Brains that is the exception, for this team is the one that can achieve what it wants.

His aim is to show the reader how to form such a team and how to get the best from it. To this end, he examines different models of entrepreneurship and how the entrepreneur must follow each step in the process of developing a business model, acquiring the money needed for it, and putting the whole into operation. He also discusses companies that are successful and why they are able to be a success.

His intent is clearly to help those with a good idea nad an entrepreneurial bent to know what they need to do and what they need to understand in order to accomplish what they want, and he is correct to focus on a lack of preparation and a lack of planning as the key failure.

He also considers how the entrepreneur can be better prepared to attract the money he or she will need, and this can mean dealing with venture capitalists who will want to see certain information, certain skills, and a degree of commitment and understanding that many entrepreneurs fail to take into account when approaching investors.

The advice Ryan gives is usually specific, though he also tends to tie it to the different types of entrepreneurs he describes, which might be less valuable to those who do not see themselves in that particular role. The second chapter is entitled "Do the Dogs Like the Dog Food?" And follows the general pattern the author uses throughout. In this chapter, he introduces the subject with an example, citing a start-up team that showed him a presentation, one of the many he hears each year.

He finds, as he often doers, that their project was a good one but that their marketing plan was not. Their project was a technological one that would provide a good service, and the team understood the technology but not the marketing. He made a series of suggestions that would have given this team a way of making money from their database right away, but they did not understand and were confused. They did not follow the advice given.

Nine months later, the son of one of the founders took over and called again, eager to follow the advice Ryan had given. He showed them what to do and gave them a potential market for their product. The team now did the marketing research that would help them, landed $2 million in contracts, and "created choices for itself" (Ryan 36). Ryan says this story illustrates a common mistake made in the start-up process, that being that a company may develop an interesting product but do so for the wrong market.

Ryan also develops a test with a rather cute name, which in itself might antagonize some of his readers. He calls this "Rob's Quality Dog Food Test," setting up a questionnaire with questions that the team should rate from 1 to 10, worst to best, and this test can provide a way of analyzing the different elements in a marketing plan as to how effective and how cogent each may be.

The ability to answer these questions is also a test of the work the team has done in discovering the customer base and its characteristics and in deciding how to sell their product or service to that base.

Ryan operates a group called Entrepreneur America that does just that, running ideas through the system to see if the product will sell and so answering the question asked by venture capitalists, "Will the dogs like the dog food?" To demonstrate the effectiveness of this system, Ryan applies the dog food test to a couple of examples to see if it works. He cites first a California team with a Web-based tool to build three-dimensional worlds that use avatars.

The company intended to sell subscriptions to people on the Internet and have them pay yearly for the service, allowing them to play in a fantasy chat room that would appeal to game players. This was deemed a narrow idea for a business, but it had not been developed fully. Ryan says that this sort of business model, aiming a $20 a month product at the consumer, and that a model could be developed that brought in more income.

A different example demonstrated a more effective business model, and the two taken together show how important having a better idea of the market and how to reach it is in setting up a business that will work and that will be ongoing. In putting a vision into reality, the entrepreneur must naturally develop a vision for the future and then develops a way to make that future come to pass.

The vision of the entrepreneur is then the beginning point for hundreds of decisions to be made along the way, and that vision will be used to infuse others with the same enthusiasm so they will do their best to see that it comes true as well. Market planning begins with an analysis of the business and its environment as they exist today. Approaches are developed to reduce the complexity of the problem without losing important details.

It is necessary then to identify important discrepancies between the current state of the business and the desired state if corporate objectives are met. The next stage is formulating strategies, and the last is recording results. The small company will have these same steps, but the complexity may be less because the forces to be applied are fewer or because the options available to the company are fewer. This can also make the actual process of accomplishing the desired ends more difficult.

In any case, the smaller corporation may find that the strategic management concepts that work for the larger corporation are ineffective for the small. Market planning cannot offer an assured course because the environment can change at any time. Market planning can only project from what is known about the present and what is known about the processes of change that can be perceived at the time, but change must be accounted for in the calculations. Different companies handle these issues in different ways.

A company with an entrepreneurial approach will nurture innovation and develop products through entrepreneurial methods within the company, then marketing these products to whatever target market can be identified for it while trying to expand that market through creative approaches. The non-entrepreneurial company is more likely to stick to what it believes it knows and to encourage satisfying the market it has rather than seeking new markets or even new products.

Other writers on the subject agree with much of what Ryan says but often do so in a more formal manner. Peter F. Drucker has long been an astute observer of the American business environment and extrapolates from the environment of today to predict what will happen in the environment of tomorrow and how businesses can meet the challenge. In his article "The Discipline of Innovation" (1985), Drucker addresses the issue of innovation and whether it is given proper attention by today's managers.

Drucker writes: Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution, or a new venture started by a lone individual in the family kitchen. It is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth.

(Drucker 67) Drucker believes there is confusion today about the definition of entrepreneurship, but for him the heart of the activity is innovation, or "the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise's economic or social potential" (Drucker 67). Innovation comes about in response to unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, and industry and market changes. Opportunities also exist in demographic changes, changes in perception, and new knowledge. Every company experiences unexpected successes and failures every day, which Drucker feels managers tend to dismiss and even to resent.

In this way, managers suppress any possible recognition of new opportunities: The first acknowledgment of a possible opportunity usually applies to an area in which a company does better than budgeted. These genuinely entrepreneurial businesses have two 'first pages' -- a problem page and an opportunity page -- and managers spend equal time on both. (Drucker 68) service business needs to develop a good relationship with customer, and thisc an mean developing a relationship with local clientele while also creating an image that might serve to attract customers more broadly.

Delaney notes some of the ways.