When we started this project, the idea of a small business book which focuses on traditional small business was a bit of an uphill climb. It was not obvious to everyone that such a book would look different enough to be distinctive. In the end, that approach struck a responsive chord in more people than we expected, and as a result Entrepreneurial Small Business' acceptance in the minds of faculty and students is far greater than we ever had hoped.

We want to thank the hundreds of professors and thousands of students who have made Entrepreneurial Small Business the success it has become, and in particular we want to thank the dozens of faculty and students who have offered their suggestions and corrections to help strengthen this edition. We want to start with the Entrepreneurship Teaching Team at Saint Louis University – Tim Hayden, Trey Goede, Larry Weiss, Daryl Rhodes, Thomas Wong, Vince Volpe, and Dave Schnedler - who live with ESB on a daily basis and provide an ongoing stream of insights and suggestions. And we have been awed by and appreciative of the efforts of those many faculty from all over who have emailed or called with suggestions, including Bob Hill, Ken Jones, Maija Renko, Gerry Segal, Emeric Solymossy, Thomas Webb, and Roxanne Zolin, as well as the reviewers of the first edition.

If you have used the first edition, you'll find a quite a few improvements. We have found more “best practices” to strengthen ESB such as the one-page idea map from the Idea To Product competition as well as a one-page business plan patterned after the very useful approach pioneered by Jim Horan. While we have increased the number of business plans on the Web site (and moved the Emergency Bridal and Blue Water Boatworks to the Web site), the book uses one plan – a Web-based business called MyLibros.com - to help explain a variety of topics. As you will see, we have increased our coverage of feasibility plans in the text and on the website. We even included online the feasibility plan and business plan for Serenity Spa, so you can see how these relate and how the business plan develops from the feasibility study.

As you can tell, like the first edition, we have built upon the work of our own students in the written plan examples we use in the text an on the website. In particular, we owe Jordan Koene, Kevin Antes and Chris Wallace a debt of thanks for their wonderful MyLibros.com plan. Other students who contributed plans we have added the ESB website include: Tim Geldmacher & Jonathan Taulbee (LiverQuest), Tiffani Cage, Caroline Jack and Angela Lawrence (Speech Therapy Co.), Brittany Crittenden, Gary Hartmann, and Michael Zimmer (Serenity Spa LLC). We also want to thank Kathryn Otoshi and Paul Scheiter for providing us their stories for use in this edition of ESB.

As the Internet grows, it offers more ways to start the kinds of businesses we focus on in Entrepreneurial Small Business – fast and low-cost start-up that leverage technology and the best practices of others to assure success. Reflecting this, this edition includes a lot more information on web-based businesses and ways of getting things done (from free telephone service to getting prototypes made). We have expanded our coverage of legal and human resource issues to get more of the nitty-gritty done. Perhaps what we are proudest of is the success of our continuing effort to make Entrepreneurial Small Business the easiest book to use for learning how to build financials. We have further refined our introductions to accounting and finance to help make the basics clearer, and the procedure for thinking through and building financial statements easier.

The second edition adds new content from our established strategic partners, Entrepreneur magazine and Bizinfolibrary.com. But in addition we have greatly expanded our video coverage. Our new strategic partners include SBTV.com (the Web's only online channel for small business news and help), Stanford Technology Ventures Program, BusinessWeek.com and Cornell University 's eClips collection of videos from entrepreneurs. Even we have gotten into it, creating a blog of commercials which demonstrate the ideas you read about in Entrepreneurial Small Business (http://katzesb.wordpress.com).

All together, we have tried to give you more to look at and more to try, even as we made the book easier to use. Those were our goals for the second edition. What do you think? Let us know. We are already working on the third edition, and we can use your feedback.

Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Small Business experience – thanks to you, our new and improved version!

Jerome A. Katz
Saint Louis University
katzja@slu.edu

Richard P. Green II
Webster University
rgreenii@satx.rr.com