The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting Your Own Business

Reviewer's Bookwatch, Jan, 2005 by Betty Winslow

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting Your Own Business.

Edward Paulson.

Alpha Books

375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

www.idiotsguides.com

1592571387 $24.95 409 p.

Although The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting Your Own Business is written in the the short-attention-span, Sesame Street generation style for which the "Complete Idiot" guidebooks are famous (chock full of sidebars, icons, and bulleted lists), the value of the contents of this one outweighed my usual annoyance with this particular writing style. If you're interested in starting your own business or already have a business that you want to take to the next stage of growth, this book is where you'll want to start.

Edward Paulson, who has been starting and running small and medium-sized businesses (as well as writing about it) for about twenty-five years, has covered just about everything you will need to know about how to start your own business or ramp up the one you own to the next level. Some of the topics covered in the book include how and why to write a business plan, various methods of funding (several of which were new to me), picking a business type, whether to work at home or away, how to set up credit card sales (and when not to encourage them), marketing and sales, dealing with employees, tax realities, collecting customer debts, and making use of the Internet--and there's more, too much to mention here.

He even includes a business plan he himself wrote years ago, to show you how it's done, a resource list, a Business Buzzwords Glossary, and a comprehensive index. Then, he throws in a CD-ROM which contains dozens of forms, agreements, and documents that will help you keep from reinventing the wheel, as well as loads of extra information not covered in the book, such as doing business internationally and additional ideas on using the Internet effectively.

There are other books in this series that may be more useful to freelance writers, such as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Magazine Articles and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published, but if you want to expand into other areas (consulting, publishing, or web design, for example), the information you'll need is probably in here. My 19 year old son fell on this book with cries of delight. He's been wanting to start his own web design business since he left high school and wasn't sure where to start. This book has everything he's going to need to help him decide how to go about making it happen.