This guide provides techniques for working within the rules of starting a business - and making those rules work for you. As an entrepreneur, you love the high-wire balancing act of launching a business and then helping it come to life and flourish. Less exciting, however, are the nitty-gritty finance and business details necessary to keep that business from sinking. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Finance and Business provides you with simple and effective guidelines for minding the books.Written by Steven Rogers, a proven entrepreneur and Top 10 BusinessWeek entrepreneurship educator, this proactive and technique-filled guidebook focuses on the down-and-dirty fundamentals of starting and operating a business. It provides fascinating and firsthand coverage of important details including: Business Plans - What they are, what they can do, how to prepare one; Financial Statements - How to develop them, how to analyze them; and, Money - Where and how to find it, techniques for maintaining positive cash flow Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. But if you are - or plan on becoming - an entrepreneur, there are certain inescapable rules of finance and business that you must learn in order to succeed. Discover what those rules are and how to use them as a tool for long-term growth and success in The Entrepreneur's Guide to Finance and Business.'The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business and Finance is a simple and practical approach to understanding entrepreneurial finance. As an entrepreneur, you need to know financial formulas and how to use them to spot problems or seize opportunities. This book aims to help you get there...' - From the Preface. The amount of work involved in visualizing, launching, and growing a business is staggering. Yet, all of that work can be undone if simple yet fundamental financial and business techniques are underappreciated or, worse yet, ignored.The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business and Finance shows you how to lay the foundation for a strong, successful business. From crafting a meaningful business plan to taking the necessary steps to raise your business to the next level, it discusses: the dual objectives of a business plan and how to ensure that both are fulfilled; differences between debt and equity financing and how and why to use each; real-world methods for structuring a deal to benefit both the financier and the entrepreneur; valuation techniques for understanding what your business is truly worth; essential resources for finding the detailed information you need; and, working for yourself remains a demanding and difficult career path.The Entrepreneur's Guide to Finance and Business strives to make it easier by outlining the fundamental matters you must control from the beginning - or risk having them control you. Drawing on solid research, up-to-the-minute case studies, and his own experiences as the founder of numerous businesses, successful entrepreneur and Northwestern University professor Steven Rogers reveals what must be done, how to do it, and what to do when things go wrong. Just because you are making your own way as an entrepreneur doesn't mean you have to go it alone. Let The Entrepreneur's Guide to Finance and Business show you everything you need to know to maintain control of the numbers end of your new enterprise - and prevent inevitable financial barriers from blocking your entrepreneurial dream before it has a chance to flourish.