StartUp
An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business
By Kevin Ready
Learn the secret of starting, building, and making a graceful exit from a successful and profitable business from one of the country’s leading authorities on the subject. Kevin Ready has been there and done that, and in his newly released book, Startup: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business (Apress, December 2011), he has chronicled the building blocks that have worked for him time and again in all kinds of businesses and industries. Ah, the romantic story of the entrepreneur: tinkers in a garage, throws something onto the market, is startled by the demand, scales up, becomes rich. Nice story, but Kevin Ready says it’s not quite that easy, that there’s a whole lot more you’ll need to know to make it happen.
Many people are good at something, like coding, web or product development, or building things, or marketing. Oftentimes this success in their avocations makes them wonder if they can turn all of this into a profitable startup. Ready encourages the reader with good news: “If you have the will to start a new venture, you can succeed.”
So, what does it take, really to build a successful new venture? Kevin Ready—author, speaker, entrepreneur, consultant—has made this journey, and more than once. And, he is candid about the pitfalls of rushing headlong
into it without first counting the cost and understanding the landscape: “I earned my MBA—Master of Bruise Acquisition—through numerous encounters with harrowing entrepreneurial situations,” he says. These included a lack of money, broken alliances, marketing misfires, lazy employees, and dishonest partners. Startup illustrates in riveting detail the lessons Ready learned the hard way—so readers don’t have to. Besides providing dozens of lessons learned and other takeaways , Startup shows readers how to use metrics to guide decisions, recruit and manage team members, forecast sales, put customer feedback—especially complaints—to use, and exit the business profitably. Best, the book is spiced with insightful tales from Ready’s entrepreneurial experiences.