The slim, highly readable book How to Make Big Money in Your Own Small Business: Unexpected Rules Every Small Business Owner Needs to Know is fat with usable – if at times unorthodox – advice for the new entrepreneur. It covers so much in such concise chapters – most sections are two or three pages – it comes off at times as a mini MBA; despite this, the best-selling writer, Jeffrey Fox, ends the book by reminding readers that no one needs an MBA to start a business.
Some of the advice is artless, such as “bring in more money than goes out.” And: “Cash is a company's oxygen.” But he follows these directives with details and distinctions that add value to the simple truths.
Fox opens the book with various thoughts on how the business owner should spend his or her time and how to deal with a range of situations with employees – for example, he offers up a 60-30-10 rule, a sort of “human asset allocation system” that calls for investing most of your time, or 60 percent, with your “superstars and high-potential people.” He also lambastes the idea of a home office, calling it inefficient and requiring “rock-solid discipline.” He urges readers to get an outside office as soon as one can be afforded. “A once-elegant old dilapidated building in the bad part of downtown is fine.” Later in the book he covers more complex issues, such as avoiding litigation, eliminating certain employees, and when or when not to add new technologies.
Throughout the short text he weaves tangible examples, such the overspending on a customer by a PR firm that later reaped rewards from that decision, with the kind of knowledge that often comes from a classroom or a textbook: how to price value, how to calculate your break-even point, how to calculate the size of your market and estimate your “total market revenue potential.” He doesn't do as well covering how to get start-up funding, choosing instead to offer a list of potential sources.
Fox is unrelenting in his push for delegation, outsourcing, hiring consultants, outside experts, interns and temporary workers; and for making marketing and manufacturing workers be in constant contact with each other
Some of Fox's advice that takes on conventional, accepted or conservative views of the first days of a small business he argues well enough to make them worthy of debate. For example, Fox advocates hiring family members “until the gene pool runs out.” He also champions hiring a personal driver – this regardless of business size – because “driving is a time thief.” He notes that “the travel expense for a driver is usually the lowest travel expense option.”
Fox writes: “Having a driver is not a luxury for the small business owner. Having a driver is not frivolous. Having a driver gives you more time to work, more time to get and keep customers.”
He also is against allocating time to board membership – with few exceptions, such as if board membership would be profitable for your business. “Because you are conscientious,” he writes, “you will steal time from your business, frittering it away as a board member. Conserve your time. Give money instead.”
Some of Fox's words in the end are simple cheers for the new entrepreneur, such as reminding the newly minted small business owner that it is better rack up strikeouts than avoid the plate.
Because it is such a fast, easy read, it is well worth the hour it takes to cover Fox's basic business book; even if you are a seasoned entrepreneur, it can never hurt to be reminded that “customers don't buy medicine, they buy cures.” And: “Price it right. Bill it tonight. Put success in sight.” -- Jeanie Straub