📚 Finished reading Starting & Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies by Colin Barrow. At least the sections of it that seemed relevant to what I wanted to know.
After years of exclusively working for larger organisations, I recently had reason to learn something about how to set up a new business. Having little experience in the area, and with no obvious lead contender in books to learn this stuff from, I felt like a book “for dummies” might be appropriate for me.
It claims to be six books in one. That’s perhaps a stretch - but does give a clue as to how the volume is laid out. These are the titles of the six “books”:
- Laying the groundwork
- Sorting out your finances
- Finding and managing staff
- Keeping on top of your books
- Marketing and advertising your wares
- Growing and improving your business
There is a little repetition between some of the sections, but not a ton.
Having not a lot to compare it to I don’t feel qualified to give a strong verdict on it. My sense it that whilst it doesn’t go in-depth enough in many topics to be all you would need to know in order to optimally succeed, it did provide at least a couple of helpful features:
- It helps those of us who are inexperienced at least know which topics we should be thinking about. For instance, I’m not sure I’d have realised that I should look into the insurance implications of working from home, or that there are so many different organisations out there that may be open to supporting or nurturing small businesses. It also helped me to know what the basic suite of financial reports that folk evaluating a business would be interested in are - even if there’s likely not enough detail enclosed to, for instance, confidently complete a tax return. But it at least reminds you that you will need to complete one!
- It also has plenty of links to further information - mostly websites, and a few phone numbers. Lists of potentially useful organisations, links to free tools and templates, to government resources, to further information from industry bodies and so on. So it’s a also nice collection of “here are some websites you might want to visit before going too far down any unchangeable path”.
