Entrepreneurial Small Business

"This book got its start with a simple question from my mother, "What is the difference between what you teach and what your father did for a living?" We were sitting shiva (which is the ancient Jewish tradition of mourning), in this case after the death of my father, a Polish immigrant to the United States who had been a small business owner for almost 50 years at the time of his death in 2003. When sitting shiva the immediate family mostly sits and reflects and prays for a week, so my mother, sister, and I had plenty of time to talk. And talking as we did, the question came up. I gathered my thoughts for a minute. First off, I realized that throughout his life my father had picked up on my comments about the very rare high-growth, high-tech businesses that came through my class. Somehow he thought that was who I had as my run-of-the-mill student. That was funny to me, because in teaching entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years, fewer than a dozen of the several hundred business plans I worked on involved high-growth, high tech firms. But thinking about what my father heard, I realized that I talk about two sets of rules, one for when I have a potentially high-growth business and another for the more conventional businesses that most of my students start and that my own father had mastered three times in his life. The answer to my mother came out this way"--