Great inspirational story for anyone thinking of starting a company

books:


	• Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch Kenneth L. Hess S-Curve Press, 2001 - 301 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bootstrap, by Kenneth Hess

This is a thoroughly insightful chronology of the author's journey from employee to technology start-up entrepreneur, and back around again (though substantially wealthier). Business tactics, mistakes, family life, and attendant emotions are the main topics.

I'd like to operate my own business someday and I've dog-eared numerous pages of this book to refer back to for insights like:

"A product's sales volume is like a rolling snowball. As the snowball tumbles along, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. In a similar fashion, having a higher sales volume at one retailer makes it all that much easier to obtain distribution at yet another retailer, further increasing sales. Higher volumes also make it more cost-effective to do sales promotions, which in turn increase sales. A collection of [mediocre] products would not have this snowball effect, but one single, strong product would."

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Great inspirational story for anyone thinking of starting a company

The 10 year story of starting a company scratch with no outside money, and taking it to US$17/million annual revenue and 80 employees over the span of 10 years.

Lots of great advice for any owner-CEO, especially in the high-tech software field.

A page turner for anyone thinking of starting a high-tech software company (me), or working on high-tech marketing or product development.

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Wonderful Story

Hess writes a wonderful story about his experiences of starting, growing, and selling a successful software company. The narrative intertwines his family life into the never-ending responsibilities of entrepreneurialism. The book is full of "lessons learned", although don't expect this to be a step-by-step roadmap for bootstrapping a company. This book serves as a testament of what can be achieved through planning, motivation, leadership, and passion. If you are creative and desire control and freedom, then this book will get you excited.

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Lessons from real life.

A story that talks as much about the satisfactions, disappointments, and inter-personality issues (both people-wise and corporate-wise) involved in starting a business as it does about strategy, finance, product development, and marketing. I found it very enjoyable to read and essentially filled cover to cover with insights and lessons learned. I would highly recommended it. Read other books to learn the details of running a business; Read this one to expose yourself to one man's hard-earned wisdom.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Bootstrap serves as a useful reference for the prospective or newly established entrepreneur and offers valuable lessons for anyone interested in building a self-funded company, regardless of industry. Ken Hess lets the reader step into the shoes of the entrepreneur, and benefit from first hand experiences on what worked well and what failed. Written in narrative form, the book takes the reader through the evolution of a company, from one employee to one hundred, and highlights the fundamental business philosophies that enabled this entrepreneur to achieve success. The book covers topics applicable to any company, such as: how to hire the right employees, developing a functional organizational structure, creating a vision that translates into actionable objectives for every employee, managing the product portfolio, and understanding your customers needs and market trends to stay one step ahead of the competition.

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