There are many ways to start a business. Some people purchase a business, refine it, and watch it grow. Others simply focus on their product and let their business come to them. Lifestyle business owners make enough to support themselves. Finally, there are serial entrepreneurs.

Serial entrepreneurs master the process of creating a business. At a recent NY tech meetup, Kevin Ryan, CEO of AlleyCorp, explained how he built his businesses. He spends several months working with a small team to build the business, then focuses on recruiting and moves quickly to the company board. It doesn’t matter what type of business he’s building. He builds to his process, and by the looks of AlleyCorp’s portfolio, it seems to be working

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki explains exactly the same sort of process. Just check out the book’s major sections:

• Causation
• Articulation
• Activation
• Proliferation
• Obligation

Figure out what you want to do, how to make meaning. Next, refine your message. Start your business. Grow your business. (As for Obligation, it’s just a great life lesson about how to play nice on your way to the top. It’s a little ‘be the change you hope to see in the world’-ish.)

In 200 or so pages, he explains his process for building a company. Rather than a book though, this reads more like a checklist. Each part of his entrepreneurial process is condensed and mapped out, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a private checklist similar to Art of the Start stashed away at Alltop headquarters.

This book is great for helping you refine your idea. At the beginning of your entrereneurial journey, the sky’s the limit. You could become anything. Before you can ever get started though, you have to explain your brilliant idea to someone else. Most often, this person’s attention span is the length of a powerpoint slide or two. Art of the Start helps you do this. It teaches you how to build constraints into your process to elicit refinement and creativity.

To show you a little bit of what I mean, I’ve pulled out a few quotes / notes from the book:

• Who has money? How do we get it?
• Describe your business model in 10 words. Pitches should explain your concept in the first minute
• Prove concept, complete design, finish prototype, raise capital, ship testable, break even.
• Clean up your problems or disclose your problems, but never hide your problems.
• The Ideal Board consists of the customer, the geek, a calming influence with experience, a Jerry Maguire with connections, and a tight-ass who pushes for totally legal and ethical practices.
• Find lawyers who are problem solvers, not ones who tell you what you can’t do.
• Create contagion: cool is beautiful, contagious, disruptive
• Product should be easy to understand ‘out of the box’, but have legs. The more you use it, the more you discover
• Create buzz then get ink.
• Make friends with the lower ranks of reporters.
• Allow users to test drive the service, then decide whether to stay or go.

Flipping through the pages of Art of the Start reinforces Kawasaki’s emphasis on process. It reads like a guide or text book full of tables, exercises, images, and well organized paragraphs. Thankfully, the book reads more like a blog than a text book and costs a lot less.

If you take anything away from The Art of the Start, appreciate the devotion to process. Kawasaki has numbered out the steps to starting and growing your business. If you want to learn a repeatable entrepreneurial process, this is a great place for an early entrepreneur to start.

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