This pathbreaking book looks at a business plan from an investor’s perspective.  What does your backer need to know?  What concerns do you need to address? What opportunities do you need to highlight and justify?

Launched in November 2011 in the U.K., The Financial Times Essential Guide to Writing a Business Plan: How to Win Backing to Start Up or Grow Your Business will help get you the backing you need for your business to succeed!

Think of yourself as a business. Use the tools of strategic due diligence to assess if you would back you in your current job. If so, use business strategy tools to make yourself more backable.

Or use tools of strategic mergers and acquisitions to shift to your ideal job or business – one which you are passionate about and where you’ll be backable.

Backing You, MBA! How Thinking of Yourself as a Business Can Advance or Transform Your Career innovatively uses the very tools learnt at business school on yourself.  It will guide you in achieving career success post-MBA.

The book uses case studies directly relevant to MBAs – for example, Jennifer, the former financial due diligence specialist thinking of switching to strategy consulting or private equity, and Gary, the manager seeking to return to his former company armed with a career enhancing MBA and a strategy for acquiring and applying new skills.

It is out NOW! You’ll find it at leading bookstores and online here! If you’re a business student looking to advance or transform your career, this is the book for you!

For each job or business, think initially of just these two criteria:

• Your relevant capabilities—How you would rate against the capabilities required for the job or business?
• Your experience—How you would rate against the experience needed to do the job or run the business?

 The first criterion relates to how well you think you would do the job, or run the business, if you got into it. How relevant are your skills, your innate talents, to the skills needed to perform the job successfully? How suitable are your qualifications?

 The second criterion is important in those jobs or businesses where experience is a serious barrier to entry. There may be a whole range of jobs you know you could do well, but your lack of relevant experience would make you hard to back. Not necessarily because you couldn’t do the job. More because prospective employers, or indeed your customers, would be looking for someone more experienced than you to be offering and delivering such a service.

 Some words of warning on the experience rating:

• When screening a long list, you may think you have no experience at all of doing a particular job. Don’t be dismayed. Think about what elements of your experience to date may at least be indirectly or tangentially relevant to that job.
• Remember that you’re looking primarily for relative comparisons, not absolute levels. You’re looking for jobs where some aspects of your past experience may be more relevant than for others.
• If you’re young, say under 30 (lucky you!), the experience criterion may be less relevant than for those of us who are not so young, especially for the over-fifties. Youngsters applying for jobs are typically assessed less rigorously on experience than on capability. And on potential capability.

Again, one or two jobs on your long list will now be screened out. If you really have few of the required capabilities and little experience for the job you covet, it’s better to axe it now rather than later. But in others your rough placing may emerge reasonably okay as it passes through the screen.

In the next post on career tools, we’ll take a first cut at how backable you are in each of those long-listed jobs…

Gut feel is all that’s needed at this stage. You need to rank your long list by what you feel. You already have a vague notion of market demand and competition for these jobs, because you know something about them. These are jobs to which you aspire, where you believe the hwyl lies. Let your gut provide a preliminary view. 

You need to rank each of the long-listed jobs or businesses by four criteria:

• Number of people engaged in this job or business—Are there many people working in this field, compared to the numbers engaged in other fields?
• Growth in jobs or businesses—Is this a field where there will be growing demand for people over the next few years? Or is demand more likely to stay flat, or decline?
• Competition for jobs or among businesses—How ferocious is the competition to get these jobs? To what extent does the supply of people wanting to do these jobs exceed vacancies available? If this is a business, how intense is the competition between businesses? Is it intensifying?
• Job market risk—How risky is this job or business, compared to others?

 Take care to get the rankings of job market attractiveness the right way round (!):

• The more jobs available, the more attractive the market.
• The faster the growth, the more attractive the market.
• The more competitive, the less attractive the market.
• The more risky, the less attractive the market.

 How attractive are your long-listed jobs overall? One or two on your long list may already be screened out. If market conditions are unfavorable, you’re unlikely to be backable. You’ll be pushing uphill. But others on the list should come through okay.

In the next post on career tools, we’ll take a look at the second part of the process: how well placed you would be to get in and then succeed at this job or business.  Again gut feel is all that’s needed for now…

Now you need to derive a short list of two or three jobs. These will not only be jobs with passion but also jobs in which you could succeed. 

You need to take a first cut at assessing how attractive the markets are for each of these jobs and how well placed you would be to get in and succeed in them. You’ll effectively be doing a quick and dirty assessment of how backable you’d be in each job.

The screening process has to be as objective as you can make it. The aim is not to provide you with a clearer ranking of which job you’d most like to do. It’s to find out in which job you could be backable. Out of all those jobs in your long list, where would a backer consider you worth a punt? 

This aim has implications for the criteria we’ll use in ranking the jobs. Typically, when people are thinking of a career change, they’ll list criteria such as pay, working conditions, values, culture, location, type of colleague, status, and so forth. They’ll use these criteria to rank possible careers by relative attractiveness. 

This is all highly valid. But it’s not for here. It’s for later on, after we’ve screened the long list for backability. 

There is little point in spending loads of time doing further research on a career where it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be backable. To a real-life investor.

There are two parts to the screening process: how attractive are the markets for these jobs, and how well placed you would be to get in and succeed in them.

We’ll take a look at the first of these in the next post…

That list should hopefully have reached two, three or more dozen. Now it needs to be set out in a more manageable way.

Rearrange the full list (easier if you’ve typed it out on your word processor) by grouping the jobs by the number of ticks received. At the very top, group together all those jobs that gained five or more ticks. Then those with four, three, and so on. Last, and least, should be those with crosses.

Now you weed out those with the fewest ticks. Obviously, you’ll start with all the crosses. Then you’ll move up to the single ticks. Carry on this process until you have only a dozen or so jobs left. Hopefully these final dozen will each have received at least three ticks. 

No more than a dozen jobs are needed at this stage. You can always return to the list if you have to. A dozen is a reasonably sized list to be taking into the next chapter on screening. This is your long list of jobs with passion. 

To reiterate: At this stage, it doesn’t matter whether you could do these jobs well, or if you even qualify to do them. The important thing is to derive a manageable long list of jobs that inspire you, ranked purely by the extent to which they will fill you with passion.

They could well be an odd assortment of jobs or businesses. You may have given five ticks to becoming a pro tennis player, a lawyer, a hotelier, a health guru, a landscape gardener, whatever. The more diverse the range of five-ticked jobs, the broader your range of interests and passions, which is no bad thing.

It doesn’t matter whether there is no chance whatsoever of you becoming, say, a lawyer. What matters is that you believe you’d love to do that job, that being a lawyer would consume your days with passion. As would others with five ticks, each of which are in good company.

The trick now is to screen this long list of jobs into a short list of two or three where market conditions will be favorable and you will be well placed to land the jobs–and succeed once in.

In short, you need to convert the long list into a short list of jobs where you’ll be backable.

We’ll start that process in the next post on career tools…

So far you have only looked at your family, friends, and colleagues – and at their friends, family, and colleagues. How about your fellow interest sharers? Do you belong to any clubs, societies, voluntary groups, political groups? Are you a golfer? A member of Toastmasters? A chorister? Do you help out at your kid’s school? At the club? At church?

Whichever group you are involved with, think on this: what else do you have in common with your fellow group members, other than the one common interest through which you know each other? Might you have work interests in common? What is their line of business? Are any of them in a job that would inspire you?

What about their family, friends, and colleagues?

Take out your sheet of paper and add to it some jobs of your fellow interest-sharers and their contacts.

So far you’ve looked to people you know for inspiration. Now take a look at people you don’t know but you know of. Think of people you’ve read about in books who have inspired you. Poeple you’ve looked at or read about in newspapers, in the supplements, in magazines. What about people you’ve seen on TV? In documentaries, in reality shows, in sports, on the news. People who’ve inspired you in some way.

Think too of fictitious people. People in novels, in movies, in the theater, in dramas, or soaps on TV. People whose imaginary lives have come alive for you through fiction or drama. Try broadening your reading to gain further inspiration.

How’s your list coming along? If it hasn’t reached 30 or 40 by now, you may need to try some further sources – please take a look at my book, Backing U!, for more detailed info.

Next we need to review your list – this is the fun part, and it’s for the next post…!

They have a point! This will be so in some cases. In which case, please, please revert to the standard approach used in most career guides. You could try Richard Bolles’ perennial best-selling What Color is Your Parachute and fill in his flower diagram. Geography: North America. Interests: beekeeping and honey. People environment: people who help others. Values: mutual support. Working conditions: outdoors. Salary: at least average earnings. Transferable skills: accounting and (favorite) beekeeping.

Then, after a prolonged and painstaking job search, Eureka!, you find it: a vacancy for a new commune member of the Honey Cooperative in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan—a job of your dreams and one you previously didn’t know existed!

These cases I suspect may be uncommon. In the majority of cases, the approach recommended here works too because you already know of, or you can get to know of, the kind of work you would like to do. That’s not to decry the standard, bottom-up approach, of course. It’s proven. It works.

How to find the ideal job for you? How to discover where the passion lies? If you don’t already know, and many of you do, here are some tips.

Think of jobs you admire of those you know. Think of your family. Your friends. Your old school friends. Your colleagues. Your former colleagues. Your kids’ friends’ parents.

Are any of them in a job or running a business that would inspire you? Have they been in the past? Are they thinking of switching to one?

Take one further degree of separation: What about the family, friends, and colleagues of your family, friends, and colleagues? Do they have jobs that would inspire you?

Take a piece of paper and make three columns. In the left-hand column, write down all the names you’ve just thought of. In the middle column, write down the kind of work these people do, or did. Then in the right-hand column, indicate to what extent the work would inspire you. Try ticks. Or a cross for a job that does nothing for you. One tick for an okay job. Two ticks for a good job. Three ticks for a great job.

Then give four, five, or however many ticks you can fit across the column for the jobs that would truly inspire you—the jobs where the real passion lies.

That’s a start. You already have a list of 20, 30, 40 jobs, each of which you have rated according to the degree of passion you would feel if you were to do that work.

We’ll now build up that list by drawing from other sources – but that’s for the next post…!

It’ll fill you with drive. To do something about it. To pick up the phone, knock on a door.

Above all, you’ll know you’ve found the passion when you speak about the job! When people talk about something they’re passionate about, the voice changes. The pace quickens. The pitch rises. The volume gets turned up a notch or two.

As an extreme example, take a teenage girl in two situations. Imagine her mother or father asking her how school went that day. The answer comes back monosyllabically, monotonously, ponderously. Then the telephone goes and her best buddy’s on the line. The voice undergoes a metamorphosis. Suddenly it’s animated, rapid, rich in variety of tone, pitch, and volume. Punctuated throughout with laughter. Whatever the two teenagers are talking about, it’s surely something that fires them. And it’s reflected in the voice.

It’s the same in public speaking. I’ve belonged to a public speaking and communications club, part of Toastmasters International, for many years. At every meeting four or five people stand up and deliver a prepared speech for five to seven minutes on a topic of their choosing. All speakers are advised to choose a topic that they are interested in, preferably one they are passionate about. As a result, and this is extraordinary given the range of backgrounds and talents of all these amateur speakers, it’s very seldom that we hear a dud speech. Whatever the topic, the speaker’s enthusiasm for the topic will be conveyed to the audience through above all her voice. No matter how inexperienced the speaker, no matter whether she has learned any of the tricks of vocal variety, the speech will be a winner if the topic brings out the passion in her.

If you want to know whether the passion lies for you in a particular job, try talking about it to a friend. Talk about its daily routines, the kind of people who work there, their ambitions, their achievements. Talk about the pros and cons. Talk about it in relation to other jobs where the hwyl may also lie. Talk about it in relation to ordinary jobs. Talk about it in relation to your current job. Ask your friend to observe how you talk about these jobs. When you speak of this particular job, does your voice become faster, more animated, more impassioned?

Or join Toastmasters! Speak about the job to a small audience. Ask your evaluator beforehand if he’ll note any difference in your vocal variety on this speech, compared with previous speeches. Will the speech convince him too that the job is fascinating?

The passion will be reflected in the voice. If you speak about a job where the passion lies, your voice will confirm it.

But how to find such a job…?

This blog is going to help you find a job or business that consumes you with passion and where you’ll be backable. Take Katherine’s word for it:

“Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.”—Katherine Hepburn

First a word on the approach we’ll be taking. There are loads of books, e-books, and blogs about changing career. Many of them are excellent and if you want a steer, just ask me!

But they nearly all use the same approach. It’s a bottom-up approach, starting from identifying who you are – your skills, interests, values etc – and then finding a job to match.

I have nothing against this approach. It’s structured, and sound. And it works. But changing career is a big, big step. And you deserve to be introduced to more than one basic approach. You need an alternative – one which may work better for you.

This blog’s approach starts from the other end. It’s a top-down approach. You’ll find a job that you love and then work out whether it’s right for you. As distinct from the other way round.

In business-speak, it’s a demand-driven, not a supply-pushed approach.

In most cases it should get you to same end-point. But I hope you’ll find this approach simpler and more inspirational. You’ll find out why later…

In this top-down, demand-driven, passion-driven approach, you’ll start with where you’d like to end up. What job would you love to have? In which job would you be happy? It could, according to Abraham, be yours!

“You can have anything you want, if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish, if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.”—Abraham Lincoln

Which job can you think of where work would no longer be “work”? You would be so fired up that it wouldn’t seem like work at all. You would rush to work in the morning and you wouldn’t want to leave in the evening.

Who would you most like to be? Whose job, or business, do you most covet? If you were in his or her job, would you consider that you had the dream job?

In which job would you be consumed with passion? You would feel such emotion, such fervor, such spirit about the job that you would be uplifted to extremes of success.

This is the top-down approach. It’s demand driven, in that it seeks to pinpoint those jobs that attract you to them, that draw you toward them. Rather than supply pushed, where you steer yourself toward a job that suits your skills, interests, and values.

And it’s driven by passion. The job will entice you with its promise of passion.