Starting Your Own Business

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There are many new books available. All I can do is recommend some that have helped me along the way.

1. 36 Small Business Mistakes (and how to avoid them) This book is only 187 pages but is packed with power information that could save you quite a lot of grief if you don’t have experience

2. How To Make Your Advertising Make Money. Almost any business that you go into you will need a basic understanding of how to advertise your product or service. This book by John Caples is a real gem!

3. The Money Tree, By James Marshall Galbraith. This is a good quick read and can bring you up to speed in many areas.

4.Jump Start Your Business Brain, By Doug Hall. If you are serious this is a must read!

5. Straight Talk About Small Business, By Kenneth J. Albert. Good book and loaded with plenty of practical information.

6. Wealth Building Secrets, By William Beaver. I wouldn’t put this at the top of my business reading list but it’s okay. You will learn something from reading it if you are just starting out.

7. Wealth 101, By John Rogers and Peter Williams. this is 530 pages and filled with great quotes and plenty of motivational examples. I loved it and still review it on occasion.

The Following two books are on management of people and obviously will only help you when you have employees. (Not “if” but WHEN!

1. 1001 Ways To Reward Employees By Bob Nelson.

2. See Spot Run, By Kevin J. Murphy

3. The Master Manager, By R.G.H. Siu This is a must read in the area of management.

Good luck isdatnutty and if you ever have any questions feel free to post them and I’d be more than happy to help. I have been doing this a long time.

Edit: Just thought of another interesting business book. It is somewhat dated but it is a great story. It’s called "Take A Chance To Be First" By Warren Avis the founder of Avis Rent-a-car. Of course no matter how many books that you read nothing will take the place of gaining experience as you move forward.

Best Of Luck!

ZEB

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Learn accounting. Keep costs under control. Focus on sales.

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What he wrote… more or less…

The one thing I would add is that a brilliant idea executed badly or not at all is inferior to a mediocre idea that is executed in at least a not all bad manner.

Execution is all.

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Read ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ and ‘Cashflow Quadrant’ by Robert Kyosaki.

The main message of those two books is understanding how the wealthy get wealthy. And how they stay that way for generations. Huge mindset shift if you were raised middle class with the go to school-> get a job-> work till you die plan.

To steal straight from the books the most important lesson is: Think of a business as a system for creating value for customers and generating wealth. There are 4 groups ways to earn from that system.

Employees work for the system. They trade their time for money.

Small Business owners ARE the system.

Big business owners (500 employees +) built the system and now they could leave for a year and it will keep generating value without them.

Investors use capital (theirs and OPM) to own the system.

The hardest thing to be is the small business owner. They get the worst tax treatment, the least personal freedom, the least piece of mind etc… To be successful you need to have the opposite mindset of an employee. An employee seeks to make themself indispensable to the business. The owner must build a team and systems to the point the owner is irrelevant. You can still work crazy insane hours to make things better. But if the business NEEDS you there to function, then congratulations… you’ve built a job, not a business.

Two other books I’d recommend: ‘Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing’ and 'Millionaire Next Door.

One last lesson that took me 4.5 years, thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn: Just because you can successfully make a profit at the moment doesn’t mean this is a sound business. You must develop a rock solid competitive advantage in your market or somebody else will. How does your business create value for the market in a way that other businesses can’t replicate or do even better? If it took you more than 5 seconds to think of that answer then you need to re-evaluate. The margin for error at small startups is often literally zero, you have to be better at everything than your established competitors or they will eat you.

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I’d talk to a CPA :wink:

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