Good job, Marc!
Like McKnight's book the criteria are just a starting point, because Debelak tells you how to find compensating factors against any weakness in your business model.
Although McKnight goes into more depth (44 criteria), I will probably use Debelak's (18 criteria) as a first blush approach as they are easy to apply and remember, they apply for all types of businesses, and they leave out the messy details of how the company will be staffed -- which can be evaluated after these.
The author calls his model "GEL". "G" is for Great Customers, "E" is for Easy Sales, "L" is for Long Life.
Great Customers - Debelak breaks this up into 2 sub areas: Customer Characteristics and Customer Value to the Company. Customer Characteristics has 3 factors: the number of possible customers (High is better); ease of finding the customers (Easy is better); Spending Patterns of the Customer (Prolific is better). Likewise, customer Value to the Company is broken into 3 factors.
Easy Sales is broken into 2 parts, and in total they total 6 factors). Long Life (profitability and investments) is likewise broken into 2 parts having a total of 6 factors.
You rate each factor into: Excellent, Average, Poor. Then you want to have a certain number of Excellents... and no more than a certain ratio of Poor's for every so many Excellents.
He provides a nice form for you to use to fill all this in. He also provides many examples of how to rate different business types.
What I found most interesting was his discussion of why we should use his (or McKnight's) business model. He says that you should go through these criteria before you do your business plan. You need to re-calibrate your business each year -- because the degree of change is so great.
When you jump into a business plan, you often forget to look at the forest for the trees. Debelak points out that many dot.com's become dot.bombs because they focused on their plan (and selling it to VC's) and not on whether their business made basic sense.
Debelak's criteria make you stay focused on whether your business makes sense.
Once you go through Debelak's business model then he describes how you should then proceed doing your business plan. I like this approach very much. It allows you to re-configure your "business offer" (so to speak) before locking it in with a business plan. If your ease of finding new customers is Poor, then you can brainstorm ways to change that. After that, then you can proceed on your business plan with a modified version of your business, or a compensatory set of tasks to shore up that weakness.
The book is 260 pages. There are copious examples of different businesses being put through the business model and/or business plans. Sometimes this was a little repetitious. But, you'll find great nuggets of wisdom and further commentary on his model process in these examples.
Overall, this book SHOULD BE REQUIRED for anyone doing a business startup. I like it as well as McKnight's, and I recommend both.
Debelak often writes for Entrepreneur Magazine. His other books are excellent -- particularly on bringing new products to the market, and marketing.
John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX