The Big Enough Company: Creating a Business That Works for You by Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams, Portfolio, 288 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, September 2011, ISBN 9781591844211
Entrepreneurship. Starting your own business. Running your own company. These words and phrases are ripe with potential, optimism, freedom. They mean realizing your dream, saying no to the corporate grind, being your own boss, setting your own value.
But of course it is far more complicated than that. Once you get your business off the ground, once your business becomes a success, it’s entirely possible that your little business, much like a child, will have developed a mind and personality of it’s own. And, as a result, you really aren’t going to have a lot of freedom, and you’ll be too tired for a lot of optimism, and identifying more potential will also mean more work.
Unless, of course, you have a plan—a plan that can help you establish and sustain a “big enough company,” big enough by your standards and no one else’s. Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams, owners of In Good Company, a community for women business owners, have authored a new book to show you how to develop such a plan.
The Big Enough Company follows the bifurcated advice the authors give on how to create a company that fits:
It is not enough for your business to be a means of fulfilling your personal motivations. Your business needs a purpose of its own in order to last in the marketplace.
The first half of the book is absolutely stuffed with real-world examples and case studies of entrepreneurs who followed their own authentic vision for the creation of their company. In the second part they get more prescriptive, concentrating more specifically on the decision-making and networking needed to help you keep your company doing the right things the right way.
The Big Enough Company tackles a timely topic while offering a fresh voice that defends the choice to create a company that is specific to your needs and values, and the right to say no to the chorus of “grow! expand! merge! sell!”
