Business Basics for Customer Satisfaction.

• Author: HOLTZMAN, HENRY
• Position: Entrepreneur Alaska - Review

Don't be put off by the title. This book isn't a thinly veiled ad for the author's business. After selling his 10-year-old company, Ascend, to Lucent Technologies for $22 billion in 1999, Rob Ryan should be secure enough not to hustle budding entrepreneurs for a few hundred thousand more.

By the time you're 20 pages into Entrepreneur America, you realize that the author has something important to say and that he says it in a very interesting, informative and often downright funny way. Here are just two examples:

Citing too heavy a reliance on marketing reports for startup companies, the author notes, "Here's what's wrong with marketing reports: Either the industry is immature, in which case nobody knows what the hell they're talking about, or the industry is mature, which means that there are entrenched leaders."

And, when discussing several key flaws among a would-be entrepreneur's managers, Ryan states, "This team isn't ready until they demonstrate that their focus is on running around talking to customers instead of investors."

Ryan calls unprepared entrepreneurs "one-stripe zebra wanna-be's." The days when the phrase dot-com was enough to excite investors are over. Now it takes an old-fashioned, highly focused approach that clearly demonstrates to investors that the wanna-be's have a handle on their customers, their market, their business process, their management team and their competition.

Ryan's "boot camp" for entrepreneurs deals with business fundamentals that are inevitably overlooked by inexperienced men and women carried away by the power of their own ideas. The camp brings their thinking back to reality. According to the authors, the most fundamental of all concepts is expressed by the Silicon Valley slang phrase, "Do the dogs like the dog food?" In other words, do customers really like and need what you are offering? If they do, and...