Working For Yourself is an introduction to the issues facing anyone planning or starting their own business. It deals with issues such as:
- business planning,
- raising finance,
- choosing premises,
- taking on employees,
- keeping accounts,
- tax and legal implications,
- costing and pricing,
- marketing your business,
- IT and it’s impact on your business,
- planning for growth
amongst others. Those that haven’t run their own business before will find it provides a very useful overview of the issues they need to consider with a number of pointers to other sources of more in depth information.
I was particularly impressed by the first chapter “How Well Prepared Are You?”, most would be entrepreneurs need to spend more time addressing these issues before they start out, as time spent planning with vastly increase the businesses chances of success.
Reuvid has a background in investment banking, financial consultancy and marketing strategy - perhaps that explains the somewhat out of place chapter on Management Buy Outs (MBOs) - I would expect anyone considering an MBO to be familiar with the contents of this book, and to have a good team of professional advisors on hand.
Over the book is very readable, broken up into short chapters covering each topic with a summary/checklist at the end of each chapter.
For a book that has just been published (September 2007) I would have expected the chapter on using IT to run your office to at least have made a passing reference to Voice Over IP (VoIP) and not to refer to 56K as the current Internet connection speed. Unfortunately the entire chapter does not seem to have been updated since the 1999 (the date of the statistics quoted) which as it’s only eight pages long is rather a shame.
I was surprised to find no mention of the flat rate VAT scheme in the chapter on VAT.
Overall though if you’ve never run your own business I suggest you buy the book as it’ll open your eyes to what’s involved and does provide some useful advice to get you started.
You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.
This blog is about business opportunities and ideas that I spot, think of or hear about and think are useful and interesting. It is intended to provide ideas and inspriation for you to help you find the right business idea for you to then grow it into a successful business.
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