Entrepreneurship

This web site offers short articles with tips on writing good business plans, growing your business, purchasing a business, and other useful topics. There are over 500 free sample business plans for many types of businesses.

This book contains instructions and forms to put together a business plan with financial projections, marketing strategies, and overall business goals. You'll learn how to: figure out if your business idea will make money, determine and forecast cash flow, create profit and loss forecasts, prepare marketing and personnel plans, find potential sources of financing, and present your plan to lenders and other backers.

Examples include: Know what matters in a great business plan; Adopt lean startup practices such as business model experimentation; Be prepared for the race for scale in Silicon Valley Better.

This book is for engineers and scientists who create new products. The key features of this reference enable readers to sharpen their new idea, turn an idea into a commercial product, conduct patent searches and complete a provisional patent application, and collect data and prepare a business plan. Supporting materials are provided on the book's website (www.engineer-entrepreneur-book.com/).

Great Sites!

Offers info for starting a small business, including sample business plans, and many articles with advice on small business topics.
Mostly free, though it advertises products that are not free.

This state of Michigan site offers full text of the booklet Guide to Starting and Operating a Small Business, as well as links to sources of free one-on-one business counseling. Also find info on licenses and permits, business taxes, buying or financing a business, hiring employees, Worker's Compensation, and selling to the government.
Guide to Starting a Small Business is in PDF and may take a few seconds to download.

Provides free content from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Stanford University, including videos, podcasts, and articles.

This is a great site for entrepreneurs and would-be business owners. It serves as a community space, and has articles, podcasts, online seminars and other information on small businesses.

Includes links to basic federal tax information for small business owners and those looking to start a business. Includes information on identifying your businesses' structure, employer identification numbers, record keeping, business taxes, and a helpful checklist for all necessary tax-related small business filings.

Bryce Pilz, a Law Professor at the University of Michigan delivers this series of 3-5 minute videos designed to guide entrepreneurs through the important concepts of intellectual property during their startup. He covers 60 topics, including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan.

Sample Business Plans

A list of free business plan templates and sample business plans, collected by the Canadian government.

A number of sample business plans are available free online. Each of the 10 volumes has a variety of sample plans--you may have to scan the table of contents of several volumes to find a sample plan relevant to your undertaking.

A collection of hundreds of sample business plans, and information on entrepreneurship in the form of video clips (of successful entrepreneurs as well as business pitches), journal articles, conference proceedings, business cases, and more.

Every business needs a business plan but how do you put one together? Jay, a clothes designer, and Robin, in the forestry business, explain how they wrote their business plans. Objectives: the business plan has to state what the business has been set up to do. Marketing: the plan describes the product, who it's aimed at, how they'll buy it and at what price. Production: the production plan outlines how they'll make their product. Resources: will the business need start-up cash to get going and what assets will it have? Finance: how much cash will the business really need to keep going while setting up?