This book is designed to be of practical assistance, rather than as a posy bit of management speak from a couple of university dons who’ve never left the campus in their lives.
We believe this book is full of useful questions, examples, tips, and hints, but even generically it cannot by, any definition, be comprehensive. If you have differing thoughts, try them. If you learn of other approaches elsewhere, try them too. Business is not logical because if the world was logical your business would already exist as someone else’s. Likewise, business is not linear, that is, a business doesn’t necessarily go the route intended or indeed in any predetermined direction.
Within this book, we have tried to create a stream. Small beginnings, bigger things later. But you have to determine if the stream is a rushing torrent or a meandering watercourse. Along the way, please pay scant regard to the section headings—a nugget in your stream might lurk behind a heading that would otherwise distract you. Likewise, however useful an index might be, it could easily be the authors have filing what you actually want behind a different word.
We also want to make it clear that we authors are not sexist—so where there is reference to him in the text, please equally interpret it as her. Whilst statistically most entrepreneurs are men, we want to encourage women into expanding their businesses too and don’t want to put them off with our own brevity. Remember: “When God invented man, she was only joking.”
Be warned, we do talk a lot about making widgets. But most of what we try to put across applies equally if you are a service business designing, coding, repairing, or trading widgets as much as it does to the manufacture of them. We use widgets to provide consistency in the writing, but can apply to any industry or service. Wherever possible, we use real industry and service examples including food, education, home services, retail, telecoms, agriculture, and so on.
If you are not used to widgets as a concept, think of them as a universal case. Like the use of Acme—meaning best—in cartoons, widgets can be something a farmer grows, a manufacturer makes, assembler assembles, a restaurant serves, a driver delivers, and a beautician pretties. It can be something programmed, written, recorded, produced, or broadcast. It works for a toll highway operator and a dress shop owner. Even allowing for the fact that we might not have listed your business or service so far, please believe, before we move on, that widgets apply to you.
Finally, for here, though we will come back to it, is the notion that you probably need, and think you are owed, a decent vacation. What can you do today to help that happen? If your business needs you so much that you can’t take a vacation, you need this book even more than we expected!
Please enjoy, take action, and—oh, yes—a big thanks for buying the book.