In Tiny Business Book Money, small business expert Elaine Pofeldt offers solid advice on starting and operating a microbusiness, which she defines as a business with fewer than 20 employees.
This is a follow-up to Elaine's first book on solopreneur businesses - Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses.
While researching that book, she discovered that many solopreneur businesses turned into highly successful employer small businesses.
So she decided to chronicle how these firms scaled and reached high levels of sales and profitability.
In this book, Pofeldt profiles nearly 60 microbusinesses that have reached $1 million in annual revenue and describes the tools, techniques, and methods they used to succeed.
Our favorite section of the book is chapter two, Mindset Makeover.
It's our favorite because our research shows that an entrepreneur's mindset is crucial to success. And Pofeldt does a great job describing the kinds of mindsets successful entrepreneurs have.
We also liked chapter 6 - Set Yourself Up for Success - and its description of the lean way most very small businesses run.
In particular, Pofeldt describes five basic models tiny businesses use to run their businesses. These are:
- The automated approach
- The freelancer/contractor model
- The outsourced model
- The traditional employee model
- The partner model
A key goal of all these models is to run lean and stay flexible.
The book points out that most microbusinesses use several of these models, and our microbusiness is no exception.
We decided early on not to have traditional employees and instead rely on contractors, business partners and outsourcing. We chose this for lifestyle reasons and to help us achieve our work/life balance goals. And in our case, it worked.
See the book for more details on each of the models and "real-life" examples of their use.
Certainly, anyone thinking of starting a solopreneur business or microbusiness will find the advice and information in Tiny Business Big Money of great value.
Existing solopreneurs and microbusiness owners will also find useful advice.
For example, our firm plans to implement some of the automation ideas we found in this book.
As the book points out, the pandemic has led to a surge of interest in starting microbusinesses. And Tiny Business Big Money provides a guidebook for successfully doing so.
