The Value of Experience

When you start off building your business there's so much you don't know. About sales and marketing, about managing people, about getting systems to work especially the IT and about the realities of getting money into the business. You might also want to have a few thoughts about how to fatten the business up to sell it so you can enjoy some of the fruits of all your hard work.

When I started out in business in 1981 I was very naive and really knew not a great deal about business except that I had been taught to read balance sheets and knew a bit about accounts.

So this e-book tries to capture some of the things I've found out during nearly 30 years of doing it. In that time I've been involved in setting up and running 4 business. Two IT businesses specialising in Computer Aided Design. One that specialised in business research and training programme development. And one that continued that work but somehow along the way developed into a clutch of horticultural businesses selling plants on-line, growing organic vegetables and selling products for keen gardeners.

We've employed staff, run sales teams, managed cash flow defensively, done a management buyout, bought a plant nursery on a bank loan, bootstrapped by starting a business with 2 computers and the clothes we stood up in, developed new products and lived to tell the tale.

What the book does is turn our experience into stories that we think you will find helpful. They tell you about some of the things we did wrong as well as the things that turned to be successful.

After all when you start up you have no way of knowing how it will turn out. You just do the best you can to minimize the risk and give it your best shot.

 

. If you want a sneak preview you can read it within this special frame courtesy of a new site called completely novel

So if you can get what you need to know here that's great. However if you would like a PDF to keep and print out you can buy it by following this link for a mere £9.40.

21 Business Stories

What else we can do for you

We can help you set up systems to monitor how well you're doing. Off the shelf we can offer our Grow Your Business e-book, a CD based Grow Your Business training programme and a Creating value workshop which helps you get to grips with these issues in a sympathetic environment - and which is effectively a 1 day MBA

Why we can help you

Unusually for a consultancy company we practice what we preach. We have 25 years experience of running growth businesses in IT, Business Training, Internet trading and horticulture. Currently we run a £0.5 Million internet trading company - Plants4Presents - and a 10 employee Organic Vegetable Business. These give us a real-life basis for our consultancy and training business that underpins our research into how companies actually use IT to promote themselves and improve performance as they grow.

Much of these materials was developed for the IT advisers of UK online for Business which was the IT wing of the Business Link between 1997 and 2004. Some was developed for Business link for London and later found its way into the EU Leonardo project e-Tranee.