Break Points: A Business Fable

Break Points — hidden pitfalls and pratfalls — can tarnish the sheen of the most promising enterprises, dulling the enthusiasm of their creators. 
Authors Larry Kesslin and Chris Winter reveal where these Break Points lurk and demonstrate how to sidestep them to keep an entrepreneur’s dream alive.

Master salesman Tom Wilcox and IT wizard Jose Alvarez planned a firm built on their exceptional skills, a firm with a future guaranteed to be golden. Except that it wasn’t. Some days they felt they were forging head-first towards success. The next, they were beating their heads against a wall.

They survived by stumbling across the hidden Break Points, then taking corrective measures–sometimes in the nick of time–to overcome them. In Break Points, Tom uses the parallel stories of the partners’ travails and the lessons they learned to teach a graduate business class of would-be entrepreneurs.

The book is broken out into the following sections: