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.
EXCERPT
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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