Bankable Business Plans: A successful entrepreneur's guide to starting and growing any business

Lifelong New Yorker and NYU entrepreneurship professor Edward Rogoff has recently written his third iteration of his book Bankable Business Plans, a step by step guide to setting up a business plan, with a foreword written by none other than Amazon founder and onetime world’s richest man Jeff Bezos.

How he and Bezos met, Rogoff laughs, is “one of those New York stories.”

Rogoff and his wife owned a three-apartment building in Manhattan back in 1993 in Manhattan. They lived in one apartment and rented out the other two.

“This young guy shows up and says, ‘I graduated from Princeton, I work at an investment bank, and I’d like to rent an apartment, ‘” Rogoff tells Poets&Quants.

The young guy was Bezos, and he ended up renting from Rogoff for three years.

“He’s a lovely guy, and what he accomplished was incredible,” says Rogoff, who says that Bezos initially moved in with a girlfriend at the time, who later became his wife Mackenzie. “They bought a dog, and my kids took care of the dog when they were away, so we became and stayed friendly.”

When Rogoff reached out to Bezos, his former tenant happily wrote the foreword. “He couldn’t have made it easier,” he says.

The book is now on its third edition. While some authors choose to update their foreword for new editions, Rogoff chose to keep the original written by Bezos. It’s a snapshot in time, he says, from one of the world’s all-time most successful businessmen.

“For any students who are in the phase of ‘I’m thinking of starting a business, I’m beginning to write a plan, ’ this book couldn’t be more relatable for them,” says Rogoff, “That’s the stage Bezos was in when he wrote this foreword.”

Rogoff grew up learning the ins and outs of his father’s deli. He attended Columbia University with dreams of going into politics. He changed his mind and decided to go to business school instead.

“Business was a much better fit for me,” he says.

Studying under none other than Nobel Prize-winning economist William Vickrey, who coined the term “congestion pricing,” Rogoff focused his Ph.D. dissertation on the economics of the New York City taxi cab industry. Vickery, he says, “was the most supportive faculty mentor I could possibly expect to have.”

The next step was moving to the front of the classroom. He won a position teaching the first-ever entrepreneurship course at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, which he says was then one of the largest B-schools in the U.S.

Rogoff says that at the time, he thought the information in the textbooks he and other teachers were teaching from had limited information.

“All I was doing in class was criticizing the books,” he laughs. That was the motivation behind writing his own book, with the first edition published in 2002.

–Meghan Merrin, Poets & Quants, August 21, 2024

Edward G. Rogoff is a professor of entrepreneurship and former dean of the LIU Brooklyn School of Business. He was formerly the Lawrence N. Field Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Dr. Rogoff has served as the academic director of the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College. He teaches and conducts research in entrepreneurship, particularly relative to minority and later-life issues. Dr. Rogoff was named the 2010 Outstanding Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year by the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Bankable Business Plans, Bankable Business Plans for Non-Profits, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Conversation and The Second Chance Revolution: Working for Yourself after 50. He has published in such journals as The Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, The Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship, Family Business Review, and Journal of Small Business Management. He initiated and supervised the largest study of minority entrepreneurs in the United States, the National Minority Business Owners Survey. Professor Rogoff has written articles for the New York Times, Forbes, and Newsday, as well as having been a guest on CNN. Prior to joining the faculty at Baruch College, he was an entrepreneur in the radio broadcasting industry where he headed two companies that operated 23 radio stations throughout the United States. He was the president of the Hemophilia Association of New York for more than twenty years, and continues to serve on its board and the boards of the Hemophilia Services Consortium and LiveOnNY, the New York organ donor network.

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