A Business In A Kit

 

It is a standard joke in publishing circles that the ideal paperback best-seller would be about a quiche-eating cat with thin thighs. Before long, however, the joke-tellers may have to add: "who starts a business." If advance sales are any indication, Garfield may soon be facing stiff competition from a new series of Starting Business Kits by an accountant with the unlikely name of Lawless J. Barrientos.

Actually, Starting Business Kits are not so much books as collections of government forms, one set for each state and the District of Columbia. The goal is to bring together all the basic information needed to start -- and maintain -- a business in compliance with state and federal regulations. Aside from the blank forms, there are instructions, filled-in samples, lists of due dates, and directories of tax agencies. Published by Simon & Schuster, each kit costs $14.95 and is tax deductible. In addition, the publisher claims that the book can save all kinds of time, to say nothing of the money that would be spent on penalties for failing to file the right forms at the right time.

Barrientos, a 36-year-old Tallahassee CPA, says that he put together the original kit two years ago precisely because most of his new clients were coming to him already owing such penalties. "They hadn't registered properly. They didn't even know about the unemployment tax. They were concentrating on getting the business started and figured the bookkeeping could wait."

He saw a need for some kind of businessman's guide through the bureaucratic thickets and swamps of Florida. So he sat down one Christmas and put one together -- gathering the various documents, adding a little text, running off copies on a Xerox machine, and assembling "the whole kersmoot," as he says, in spiral notebooks. He then proceeded to test the market.

The market went wild. Barrientos started off advertising the kits by direct mail and got a 10% response. "I was disappointed. I didn't realize the average was 1 1/2%." Next, he tried selling them through office-supply stores and bookstores and outstripped Norman F. Dacey's How to Avoid Probate, a perennial best-seller in the category. The Florida Chamber of Commerce began ordering copies to distribute through its local chapters. A bank took 1,000 copies for its new business customers; 100 more orders came from attorneys responding to an ad in The Florida Bar News. "I even put some copies in grocery stores," says Barrientos. "Damned if they didn't sell as well."

By then, Barrientos was having the kits printed. He had also worked out a deal with the Florida Chamber of Commerce to do kits on other states to be distributed through local chambers, and orders were rolling in from California, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Illinois. The situation was getting out of hand. "I was writing. I was marketing. I was running a company, and I was going to have to hire a bunch of people, which I didn't want to do." Through a friend, Barrientos approached Simon & Schuster, which jumped at the opportunity to publish the series, offering him a six-figure advance and a royalty arrangement he could not resist. "In the long run, I suppose I might have done a little better on my own," he says. "But if you can get almost the same profit without the hassles and the risks, why go through the trouble of setting up a company?"

Barrientos wusn't able to avoid all of the hassles, however. These days, he spends much of his time traveling around the country, gathering material for his kits. He has completed work on 30 of them; the other 21 are due in the fall.

The whole experience has been a little bewildering to Barrientos. "It's kind of like a fairy tale," he says. "You know, I sold my accounting business. I'm strictly doing the books right now."

And which does he prefer?

"I like to think this is related to accounting," he says. "I've just broadened my client area -- to the whole country."