Both responses kill business dreams.
People who are afraid to “go all out” in business because of fear fail to reach their potential. People who “go all out” in business without the right foundation risk losing everything they are fighting for.
Improve Your Odds is about balancing the path to business success.
What is Improve Your Odds About?
Improve Your Odds is a sugar-coated “anyone can build a business in seven days or less” kind of book. It presents statistics that can be downright disheartening if you aren't serious about the work of a business. The author does this because he wants readers to truly grasp what business is … and is not.
Entrepreneurship is not simply launching a blog or website and selling things or services. It's more than that. At the same time, it's not rocket science. It's “people plus ideas” science. It's figuring out the right combination of four pillars (you, your idea, your employees, and your team) to reach the goals you've set for yourself. This is what author Alan Young is getting after.
Balance also comes into play after you've launched your business. Many entrepreneurs get caught up in the novelty of their idea. They assume consciously (or subconsciously) that their idea will change their world, bringing in lots of money in the process. This view is unbalanced and ignores the reality of business as the book brilliantly points out. Most businesses that are launching will not be “game-changers”, but they don't have to be in order to thrive. They have to be excellent at feeding into the four pillars that started the whole process (owner, customers, etc.) By paying attention to their foundation, business owners can once again achieve the necessary balance of ingredients to thrive in the market they have chosen to pursue.
Yong is a founder of DNotes, a digital currency management agency and co-editor of DCE Brief, a business news website. He has a twenty-plus year history in computing and business technology. He is also the creator of the world's first personal tablet computer.
What Was Best About Improve Your Odds?
The best part of Improve Your Odds is the straightforwardness that comes across from the very first page. From the beginning, readers should be able to pick up on the author's focus on using his past business experience to give concise and direct advice on how to achieve an early balance in your business launch and continuing that balance throughout.
What Could Have Been Done Differently
While Improve Your Odds provides a lot of straightforward advice, it focuses mainly on principles and not particular situations that a reader might encounter. For example, the book will tell you that you need to be as good as or better than your competitors. The book won't delve into how to benchmark (or even how to find) that competition, but it will provide some basic principles and strategies for being competitive.
Why Read Improve Your Odds?
Improve Your Odds is the kind of book you want to read when you are in the planning phase of your book or want to rethink the assumptions behind your current business strategy. The book dispenses with all of the fancy, overly positive business talk (“You can build a startup in two days because you're awesome”) and provides the straightforward advice from an entrepreneur who has been through it. It isn't pessimistic, but it is realistic about the nature of business, which should be welcome reading for anyone who wants to take that first step into business. The book won't cover set up details at any great length (like how to incorporate), but it will identify key principles and assumptions to have before you take that all-important step to launch a business.
This article, "Want a Thriving Business? Improve Your Odds With These Four Pillars" was first published on Small Business Trends
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