In Search of the Small-Business Bible

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So here I stand, every bookstore owner's nightmare come to life: the premeditated browser. I'm armed only with a credit card, a library card, and a four-subject notebook for keeping track of my reactions to everything from Ty Hicks to Importing from Singapore. (Somehow, neither of those makes the Top 40.) I now spend my days in fear of attracting the seemingly inevitable attention of some bookstore employee as I paw through the store's entire small-business inventory.

From this experience, I draw valuable lessons. They can be summarized as follows:

1. You can get an amazing amount of reading done in leanly staffed urban bookstores. Some even have nice chairs.

2. Part of the explosion in small-business titles is sad. There is no shortage of folks out there preying on the deep fearfulness in our contemporary American economy, promising poor silly souls like the ones Ty Hicks addresses that self-employment is somehow the answer to their job woes. One result is the many "fill-in-the-blank-with-a-number of best businesses to start from home/for $500 or less/while commuting" (yes, I'm making that last one up) books that end up on the shelves. Somehow lost in the breezy little descriptions of dozens of businesses is the fact that there are no businesses that are best for everyone, that starting a business is one of the most individual acts a person can make. Yes, you can start a successful business in an industry you don't know -- but you'll have to work like mad to compensate for your ignorance. Besides, too often those books include businesses because they're easy to enter, not because they're particularly promising. Count on it: the great fortunes made in parking-lot striping and organizing male beauty pageants will be few and far between.

3. On a more positive note, much of the apparent growth in the small-business-book arena simply reflects an expanding, maturing market that can support more-specialized titles. As fundamental changes in our economy are pushing, pulling, and dragging more people into self-employment, a market is developing out there for titles ranging from Marketing for the Home-Based Business to the Prentice Hall Small Business Model Letter Book. That's good news for experienced company builders as well as new ones; if you are stuck on that learning curve for importing from Singapore, these days there's a book that may help. While not all the new titles are good, the sheer quantity of material being published makes the market for small-business information more competitive. As a result, a savvy reader can likely find more good books than ever before.

4. Carpe diem, as a Roman author once suggested: seize the day. Or in this case, seize the book. Maybe it's just the dismal Massachusetts economy, which has laid-off engineers and middle managers desperately seeking start-ups, but I had no idea that my local bookstore was such a cutthroat shopping environment. I found that good small-business books -- particularly those about the start-up process -- don't stay on good bookstores' shelves long. Meanwhile, my friendly urban public library proved next to useless in this task: would-be entrepreneurs had long ago stolen -- or at least informally borrowed (kind of like those people who take 90 days to pay your company) -- many of the best and most recent titles in circulation. Almost all the rest were legitimately out.

At the library, that left me sifting through bad memoirs of high-flying 1980s entrepreneurs, things hopelessly outdated, and things with call numbers so obscure the thieves couldn't find them.

Jennifer sounds a little shaky on the phone tonight. She and her highly significant other, Cos, have headed down from Maine to the Philadelphia area to settle for the foreseeable future. Jennifer's apprenticeship on an organic farm has come to an end, and she and Cos have gone to a region where he has family. At first she wasn't so keen on the idea. (She claims there are, from a Maine farmer's perspective, awfully hot summers in southeastern Pennsylvania and too many ticks carrying Lyme disease.) But she warmed to it in part because she had heard, through one or another of her organic-farming networks, about someone in the area who had land to let to an organic farmer at a reasonable price. Jennifer was excited about the possibility, and it got her thinking she might even start farming by spring.

But nothing is ever that simple. When she visited, Jennifer discovered the land wasn't suitable for several reasons. The local health-food store was quite happy with its produce distributors, thank you. Worse yet, the farmers' market Jennifer had been told about as a possible venue of distribution was a whole different animal from those she had worked at in Maine: it was indoors and expensive to join. Now, she is quite clear, the land-finding and market-research process will be hard and lengthy. She will have to go back to her original plan: to spend the next year working while spending her spare time researching locations and financing, studying her market, and preparing a business plan. April 1994 is much too soon to start.

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