It’s Sunday night. Your business analysis assignment is due Friday. You’ve googled “how to do business analysis” three times. And you’re thinking: where do I even start?

Where Do I Start? is the book your lecturer forgot to write — a clear, step-by-step system that tells you exactly which analytical framework to use, when to use it, and why.

Most business courses hand you 47 different tools — Porter’s Five Forces, PESTLE, SWOT, BCG Matrix, Stakeholder Theory — without ever explaining how they fit together.

The result is students throwing random frameworks at assignments with no clear logic connecting them. This book fixes that.

At its core is the Contradiction Compass Methodology — a four-stage GPS for business analysis that works for any assignment, any business, any brief:

• ORGANISE — Spot the opportunity. Build Intellectual Capital
• GROWTH — Set direction. Build Human Capital
• PAIDBACK — Execute. Build Structural Capital
• PROTECT — Manage risk and relationships. Build Network Capital

Each stage tells you exactly which tools to deploy and why. No more random framework throwing.

Then comes the case study that makes it all click.

Rather than analysing a generic fictional company, this book applies every framework to one of history’s most ambitious projects: the construction of the Egyptian Pyramids.

Pharaoh Khufu as startup founder. The Great Pyramid as product launch. Ancient Egypt as market.

Why the pyramids? Because building a 146-metre structure using 2.3 million blocks — managing a workforce of 20,000 people, complex supply chains, stakeholder politics, and technological innovation without a single computer — is every business challenge ever faced, just with more sand and fewer PowerPoints.

If you can analyse this, you can analyse anything.

By the end of this book you will:

• Know exactly where to start any business analysis assignment
• Understand how the major analytical frameworks connect to each other
• Be able to apply PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces, Value Chain, BCG Matrix, Stakeholder Theory and SWOT as part of a coherent system — not as isolated tools
• Understand what Entrepreneur Capital is and how to assess it in any organisation
• Have seen a complete, worked analysis from first principles to conclusion

Written for business undergraduates, A-level students, MBA candidates, and anyone who has ever stared at a blank page and wondered where to begin.

Includes FREE AI PROMPT for Paul Clargaux’s CCM.

Part of The Entrepreneurs Series by Paul Clargaux.