The Best Secrets of Great Small Businesses

The Best Secrets of Great Small Businesses
Ray Silverstein
Sourcebooks Inc.
ISBN: 1-4022-0766-2
Non-Fiction, Business
Reviewed by Kevin Aguanno

Most small businesses have a board of directors that sits around a table “the family dinner table” for meetings at family get-togethers; that is because the boards of most small businesses are made up of family members or close family friends. The purpose of a board of directors, however, is to provide sound business advice to the management team of the company. How much sound advice is a business owner going to get from grandma or ne’er-do-well cousin Freddie? Small business leaders need advice from people who have struggled and overcome similar issues in the past.
Author Ray Silverstein is the founder of the President’s Resource Organization, a group that sets up and facilitates meetings of peer advisory groups for small businesses. These groups are made up of up to a dozen small business leaders such as owners, partners, CEOs, and presidents who get together regularly to discuss their current challenges and to share successful strategies with each other.
Silverstein has captured the common questions that arise in these meetings, grouped into ten categories, and presents them along with answers and case studies provided by the successful small business leaders who have participated over the years. Categories include:
- The owner’s role and strategies for overall management
- Sales
- Sales management
- Marketing
- Performance and organizational design
- Human resources issues
- Innovation and implementation
- Financing
- Succession planning
- Metrics and diagnostic tests
The book is impressive in the broad range of its coverage and in the practicality of its solutions, these are not management theories extracted from some business school textbook, these are tried and true techniques that are simple to apply and that will achieve immediate results. The case studies sprinkled throughout the book not only illustrate the application of these techniques, but they also breathe life into the book, showing the struggles and victories of many entrepreneurs as they overcome common challenges in creative ways.
Reasonably priced, this book is a must have for every small business owner. Read it once through, then skim through it again, highlighting those ideas that you will start applying today. Then put it on your shelf, you’ll find yourself going back to it from time to time as you encounter new problems and want to see what others have done to solve them.