Cute Little Store

Cute Little Store
Adeena Mignogna
OutskirtsPress
ISBN: 1-59800-436-0
Non-Fiction, Business
Reviewed by Frederick Noronha

To understand Ashburn, VA-based author Adeena Mignogna’s bookread her preface on “why I wrote this book” The writer, in 2002, quit her engineering career, launched her entrepreneurial dreams, and opened her own retail store.
Not just any store, but a contemporary paint-your-own-pottery studio. She comments: “It’s those first couple of years that can make or break a small business. Before you decide to open up your own retail shop, read this book!”
A dire warning. Mignogna explains that she found plenty of books by successful business folk. But while opening her store, she wanted “to read about businesses *like* mine.” And her first chapter starts with this reminder, ”Entrepreneurship is working 80 hours a week, so you don’t have to work 40 for anyone else.”
In 13 chapters, Mignogna talks you through the idea, understanding it, and the execution. From the time you start dreaming of giving up your job, to understanding what you want to do. Leasing, landlords and opening late is the title of another chapter. It’s a lesson in research, following your instincts, and negotiating.
Safety, staff, following your feelings, “loving” your customers, coping with competition, managing marketing, enhancing earnings, surviving the start... these are some other themes.
Mignogna begins her last chapter asking: “So you’ve read this entire book of good and bad, and you still want your own Cute Little Store or other small business. You’ve decided that you can handle the bad in order to get the good. Kudos! You’re on your way.”
It was her chapter called They Gotta Know You’re There that struck this reviewer as being most useful. Google for cutelittlestore and you’ll find Mignogna right on top.
If you weren’t impressed enough, it tells you Mignogna’s an aerospace engineer by practice, physicist and astronomer by education, entrepreneur by force of will, occasional freelance writer and with the introduction of Cute Little Store now a published author.
Getting started in this field, as they would say, is not really rocket science. But then, as our teacher would tell us repeatedly in school, common-sense isn’t very common these days. Interesting ideas in an interesting book. Simply put across too.