Entrepreneurship is the hottest growth area in America today. There are 30 million entrepreneurs now and 60 million more say they would like to be. DO you have what it takes - do you know what it takes to compete and succeed with a business, be it small or large?

Rob Ryan will help you find out if you got what it takes. Ryan founded Ascend Communications in 1989, which in nine years grew to over 2 billion in sales. Rob runs the Entrepreneur America boot camp from his ranch in Montana, where startup wanna-bes come to develop their entrepreneurial skills. Two of Rob's boot camp companies, Silicon Spice and Looksmart, had market caps over 1 billion... If you can't get to Montana, Rob shares his lessons in "Smartups", a Cornell Press book. Ryan shares his boot camp techniques for developing a successful team, product, pitch and eventually business.

Ryan's mentorship focuses on methods he developed over the years for building a sustainable business that makes money. He emphasizes the importance of testing your ideas on customers, building the product, making sure the product have a high value to the customer and finally sell, sell and sell more.

Ryan uses anecdotes, humor and plain spoken advice and shows you how to:

-- Build a Sunflower for your business, analyze your driving forces, determine your core competencies and analyze/test your market/application petals.

-- Be a red polka-dotted zebra. Make sure your customers can pick you out in a crowd.

-- Find out if the dogs will eat the dog food. Are you giving your customers what they want?

-- Learn the 10x rule. Your product must be 1/10 the cost of your competitors, or ten times the performance.

"Business ideas are like belly buttons", says Ryan, "everybody has one." Ryan's mentorship or Ryan's Smartups book will show you how to turn your idea into a real product, take it to customers and sell, take to investors and sell and in general get your startup started.