Entrepreneur's Guide to Building a Successful Business

The new guidebook is available as a free download and aims to enable and promote responsible and sustainable business development and growth. Almost every business enterprise begins as a small business and over 90% of the world’s small-to-midsize enterprises (SMEs) employ a similar percentage of the world’s working population. This means that the world's economic structure is basically carried on the backs of small-to-midsize businesses. EFMD believes that this often over-looked sector deserves closer insight from a skills-building, business education perspective.

Who needs to read this publication? 
The list includes business development professionals, students, academics, business schools and anyone who falls under the label of entrepreneur, including the experienced, the inexperienced, the unemployed, the underemployed and those working inside existing businesses (“intrapreneurs” in the jargon).

Every field, every industry and every continent has entrepreneurs and business developers. Indeed, nowadays most people will experience a period of self-employment at some point in their lives before they retire. Don’t be fooled by the term small-to-mid-size enterprises. For the record, though, definitions vary, enterprises hiring one to ten people are called micro-businesses; firms that employ up to 50 people are small businesses and those that grow to employ 100-200 individuals are usually classified as mid-sized. Even though they may be small, they pack a punch. Across the globe, SMEs are a main source of new jobs. According to OECD, SMEs also tend to be more innovative in knowledge-intensive services and new technologies and they make up the bulk of the tourism trade (the world’s largest industry) by constituting up to 97% of the world's total number of leisure enterprises. So hardly surprising that the economic strength of almost every nation rests firmly on the health of its small-to-midsize business creators and operators. The first edition of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Building a Successful Business was the culmination of a four-year study by Jonathan Scott that examined the numerous success and failure factors involved in running a small business. The new updated second edition follows up on the original endeavour and added months to Scott's total research and writing efforts.

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Building a Successful Business is written and contributed to by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

At the end of the day, the book is meant to:

• help, motivate and inform
• supplement and balance other books on business and entrepreneurship
• approach the study of entrepreneurship in a practical and understandable manner
• avoid unreadable prose, unverifiable trends and overly theoretical material.

We hope we have succeeded and you enjoy the book.

Please Note
Any organisation or institute wishing to voluntarily translate our new book into another language for the purpose of enabling economic growth, please let us know. After written permission is granted, we allow translators to sell printed copies of the book and keep all proceeds; however, e-copies of all translations must be made available at no charge and a complete digital copy must be sent to EFMD so that we can freely share it with our networks.

Download your free copy.