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This generous, comprehensive entrepreneurial guide posits that the modern workplace is a shifting, impermanent, and patently disloyal institution that can lead an unprepared worker to a surprising state of unemployment or underemployment at a moment's notice. Entrepreneurism is the answer here, as a preemptive safety net for savvy workers who recognize the precarious lack of security in working for employers who might downsize, relocate, or lay off workers at any time, leaving employees out of work and, but for a new business venture, lacking the means to maintain financial stability and social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. In short, the message here is to be a skilled, trained, and capable worker and to be prepared to use those skills in one's own business if and when the time comes.
Smith's book offers articulate, well-organized, and fresh guidance on the conventional components of starting a business, including the analysis required to assess goals, select a business and name, target audience and customers, choose a structure, secure funding, and know and comply with legalities. While this information may be found in any number of business start-up guides, the valuable perspective of this book is to combine the proven expertise of a seasoned professional with up-to-the-minute modern guidance. It includes useful information on the gig economy, online crowdsourced funding platforms, running a virtual organization with geographically distributed members, the necessity of social media marketing, and the limitless geographic potential of the modern marketplace. Yet while this important information is carefully curated here for maximum usefulness, the book's heart and soul are in the author's sharing of his own life experience. His losses and successes are engaging and humanizing, and they make a case for the entrepreneurial path he recommends.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review