Stroll through the business aisles of your favourite bookshop (physical or electronic) and you'll be overwhelmed with any number of titles promising to show you the way to chuck it all in and make your own way in business.

Unfortunately the more successful the entrepreneur, the more likely it is that the offered money mojo is some frustrated business journalist getting a big name above his own work.

Fortunately 'Bottled for Business' is a perfectly-pitched middle ground.

Cobra Beer founder and the Cambridge-educated Indian lawyer Karan Bilimoria weaves his own pearls of wisdom into this account of his own struggles to get the brand up and running.

The chapter on 'Financing Cobra' has been called essential reading by some of the book's fans, including John Mullins of the London Business School, for its description of how to finance a growing business without giving away the lion's share of the equity to VCs bearing gifts.

Bilimoria's lessons are deceptively simple.

The most important of them is: get off your ass and turn that idea you talk about in the pub into reality, and have the bottle (sorry) to stick with it.