Business Planning and Market Strategy

Entrepreneurial Market Strategy and Business Planning covers all the essential topics found in most planning texts, guidelines, and templates. However, it also provides insights not found in other planning texts -- insights students and executives need to develop sound and convincing market strategies and business plans that enable businesses to succeed in a world that is becoming increasingly competitive. This brief book keeps the fun in planning but not by dumbing down the planning process and planning issues. Instead, it concisely lays out critical issues and affords insights into their resolution. It tells intelligent readers not only what they should look at and do, but also what they should look for and why. Rather than reducing the planning process to a mechanistic, step-by-step "how to" instructions, this text provides practical guidelines for applying strategic management and marketing concepts to business planning. This text aims to help readers identify critical issues and think about them deliberately so they can make informed, sound, defensible strategic decisions. Further, it depicts marketing and business plans as proposals that must be backed by compelling logic and coherent arguments, something that can be accomplished by making strategic decisions throughout the process.