How to Read The Entrepreneurs: a Novel RTF
The Entrepreneurs is a business book disguised as a novel with humor, romance, danger, and the entrepreneurial imperatives of a startup woven into the entrepreneur's mantra: Build it! Run it! Sell it! The entrepreneurs are two characters of incongruent backgrounds embracing one goal—wealth. Set on Florida's Gulf Coast, in the disparate worlds of sailing aboard luxury yachts and women's high fashion, Matt Scott and Donatella Donatucci personify the dreams of all neophyte entrepreneurs.Matt is a hero at forty whose dreams of glory are crushed when he's forced to resign from the Army. Lacking any business experience or contacts, he finds himself unemployed and unemployable. Driven to succeed, Matt retreats to She Said, his sailboat, to develop his Plan B—an entrepreneurial venture—when a chance encounter connects him with DeeDee, a 20-something fashion designer with plans to become the next Coco Chanel. DeeDee is fashion smart, street smart, business smart and, unknown to Matt, the only daughter of a Mafia don. When DeeDee inserts herself into Plan B—describing the need for a sunset-cruise service where single, young professionals of the opposite gender can meet and mingle in a champagne fueled environment aboard luxury sailboats—Matt embraces the entrepreneurial opportunity. As Matt and DeeDee extend their operations to seaside cities around the globe, they encounter the usual entrepreneurial challenges, and the unusual challenges of philandering husbands and vengeful wives that threaten their new company, Demanding Damsel LLC, and its reputation. These challenges they overcome by creating audacious, imaginative solutions, while attempting unsuccessfully to control their own ids.Unbeknownst to Matt is that Claudette Lafevre, the libidinous French TV reporter who was responsible for his being cashiered from the Army, and has thwarted his efforts to find a job, now turns her efforts toward ruining his fledgling company. Claudette is a vengeful bitch who is sleeping with the director of DPSD [the French intelligence agency charged with combating the Mafia] in return for his collaboration in destroying Matt—whom he believes is a front for the Sicilian Mafia smuggling counterfeit euros into France.Of more immediate concern to Matt is FBI Special Agent Michael Mausbacher. Based on logical assumptions derived from his high-tech eavesdropping—inspired by Matt and DeeDee taking on an investing angel who sold his string of Midwest funeral homes to the Detroit mob, and a German banker of dubious background who invests to obtain a green card—Mausbacher and the FBI hierarchy believe DeeDee has duped Matt to create Demanding Damsel as a front for the Mafia's smuggling operations. Tension mounts as the FBI uses its best efforts to stop the flow of millions of counterfeit dollars into the U.S. from the Caribbean, where Demanding Damsel has extensive operations. When DeeDee wants to sell her share of Demanding Damsel and use the money to create her own fashion house in New York, Matt dangles an investment opportunity that draws the attention of DPSD, the FBI, and the zips [Sicilian Mafia] who make an offer Matt wants to refuse. The Entrepreneurs creates a new genre by incorporating the "How To" of business into a fast paced novel—showing, not telling! Showing the development of a "Gotta Have" service into a money machine. The Entrepreneurs takes you inside the creation of a successful startup tutoring readers in the imperatives of entrepreneurial ventures through the eyes of a business neophyte and a street-wise vixen.The Entrepreneurs will reinvigorate the moribund business book genre as did Christopher Reich's Numbered Account in bygone years. [As much action, tension, business development, and romance as can be packed into 105,000 words!]
