An excellent book for beginners, as stated in the title, and people who do not intend to deal scientifically with the topic. Those who want to write their first business plan or want to write an even better business plan should read this book full of advice.

***I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review***

This book would be great either as a textbook for an Introduction to Business course or for aspiring entrepreneurs who are working on their first business plan. I have very little experience in business plan writing and I was interested in what was included in writing a plan and a general layout that one would be presented in.

This book starts out with general information that is important to include in any plan, examples of how you might present your plan depending on type of business you have and audience you are pitching to, and examples of plans written for nonprofits, small service-based businesses, manufacturing businesses, and project developments. The author also includes special considerations you want to address when writing a plan for each of these models.

One thing I really enjoyed, aside from the example plans that could serve templates for creating your own plan, is that each chapter had a short quiz at the end to help review important points that were made in the text.

Aesthetic-wise, the layout is very nice with each chapter laying out the main points to be addressed in a box immediately following the chapter heading and the bulleted terms under each subheading make it easy to find information I am looking for, read, and process it quickly. ( )

If, 40 years ago, at the end of my university studies, I had had the opportunity to think about my future by applying a relatively simple method like the one explained in Business Plan Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, perhaps my choices would have been profoundly different. Perhaps I would have become more aware of my attitudes and my abilities, I would have thought more about my potential customers, how to reach them and what kind of services offer them. I would have consciously chosen the city where to carry out my work and the technologies to be used. I would have understand what financial support I would have needed and what cash flow I would have to face. All of this would have been even easier if I had also had examples from which to draw inspiration.

But I did not have these tools at my disposal and the people who could have helped me reasoned in a way that would have frightened me because of my difficulty in understanding what they might have told me.

Today, however, there is a wide variety of tools available that can help even the less experienced to apply the necessary approach to start a robust and reliable business. There are so many of these tools that it can be really hard to make a choice. How to choose? Why choose, for example, a certain book instead of another?

I found in my hands Business Plan Essentials You Always Wanted To Know almost by chance but, after reading it, I can say that if I had to give advice to someone who doesn’t know nothing of this topic, then I would recommend a book:
• synthetic and not verbose,
• with simple and easily accessible language,
• with a simple structure that highlights key concepts,
• rich in examples and exercises,
• equipped with references to other up-to-date and easily accessible resources.

But it seems to me that all this is not enough. In fact, it is important that a good book on this topic makes the reader aware of his limitations and of the need to turn to someone more prepared in case it is necessary to tackle important and difficult projects.

All these features are certainly present in Business Plan Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, but ...

I am a left-brained person, I am systematic and analytical, I am comfortable with the schemes, and the bullet points of a check list do not scare me too much. However, I can understand that a creative mind, a right-brained person, could find himself disoriented in front of structures that may appear, even if simple, a little unfriendly. For these people resources that stimulate creativity and that demonstrate the compatibility between the creative approach and the systematic and analytical approach could be more useful. This is not the case of this book. ( )