Manager's Mentor: A Guide for Small Business
About the Book
Consider the man with a sprained ankle who, when the emergency-room nurse asked if he could use crutches, answered, “Yeah, sure” and took the pair she offered him. He put one foot forward and fell on his face. “I thought you said you could use crutches!” the nurse exclaimed. His answer:
“Well, I’ve watched other people using them and it didn’t look hard."
Before they start, many business dreamers think running a business looks easy. Indeed, the naive onlooker’s view is like the satellite image of a hurricane: deceptively and beautifully simple. But managing the countless details of a business might make one think surviving a hurricane would be easier. All the daily pressures are difficult enough. Add to them the constant awareness that success or failure affects not just the owner or manager but also the employees—and their families. Well, such responsibility is not for the faint of heart or the unprepared.
While more than half a million businesses were opening in 2000 with enthusiasm and high hopes, 234,300 others had to close, because of reasons as varied as the businesses themselves. Inadequate cash flow, poor employee-management, and too many inefficiencies are but three of the pitfalls. To see one’s business fail after putting in the long hours, hard work, and worry, not to mention money, counts among life’s biggest heartbreaks.
Manager’s Mentor: A Guide for Small Business will help the reader avoid that heartbreak. Based on my 30 years as owner and manager of a small business recognized for quality and achievement in its industry, this book explains the principles, and their practical applications, that have helped me develop good business sense and guided me toward successful decisions.
My rural memories, featured in “A Sand Hills Farm Education” and in vignettes at the opening of each chapter, are in this book because our family farm was the training ground for my business success. There I learned many of the values, thought processes, and strategies that have served me well and that I share with you in the pages that follow.
A note of caution for the gender-sensitive: My industry, manufacturing, still tends to be mostly male, and Judith, my wife, who put my ideas on paper, thinks “his or her” phrasing is awkward. So except for the clear references to women, this book is written in the masculine gender. We hope you’ll overlook that nod to traditionalism and attend to the message.
We’ve done the easy part. The hard part—thinking—is up to you, as you consider the information and decide how to apply it to your circumstances.
Copyright 2007-2008. Prairie Sky Publishing. All rights reserved.