Do You Have a "Knack" for Business?

Recently a publicist sent me a fascinating book that I believe will help entrepreneurs in their efforts to build their business. It is called “The Knack: How Street Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up” by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham. It is the compilation of the work of other successful entrepreneurs: their life stories, brilliant strategies, and “hands on” experiences.

The book isn’t scheduled for release until October 2, 2008, so you are getting a sneak preview of it in this blog post.

I receive many interesting books every month, several of which fall under the radar screen because of the large number of them. This one caught my attention. Frankly, the destructive power of Hurricane Ike has me thinking I might have to think differently about business.

What I like about it is that it is both profound and quite simple. It isn’t merely lofty strategies on business that you would find in the classroom, but “rubber meets the road” issues such as what to do when your customers stop paying in a timely manner, what to do with the problem of creeping expenses, how to keep customers when your competition pursues serious price cutting, and more.

However, the book is rich in areas that many (if not most) in business think about. In it the authors explain:

Why you should never confuse good sales with good cash flow
Why having competitors is better than being first to market
Why a “sales mentality” is dangerous to your business
Why it is smart to hire sales people from outside your industry
How to judge if your business is viable

What impresses me most about the authors is that they are, on the one hand, serious business writers with years of experience writing a column in Inc. Magazine. On the other hand they are serious entrepreneurs in their own right, having had mentored many successful business leaders.

I read a great deal of business literature for this blog and my radio show and over time it is pretty easy to cut through the rhetoric of those in academics that know little about business in the real world and the true business leaders that know exactly what they are talking about. Brodsky and Burlingham fall in the latter. When October 2 comes, get your copy.

Kevin Price articles frequently appear at ChicagoSunTimes.com, Reuters.com, USAToday.com, and other national media.

Kevin Price is Host of the Price of Business (M-F at 11 AM on CNN 650) and Publisher of the Houston Business Review. Hear the show live and online at HoustonBusinessShow.com. Visit the archive of past shows here.

Recovering from Ike

It would be nice to say that this storm is behind us, but its impact will be with us for weeks or months to come. It is the most devastating storm that I have ever seen and its implications are far worse than I have ever experienced (Allison pounded me personally and was horrible for many, but won’t touch the impact of Ike).

Ike is strange. On Saturday I enjoyed the Internet and had water pressure. Now I am boiling water and using almost any means necessary to get information online. A day after writing this post I have full water pressure and the Internet. It is all very interesting. It is clearly a situation of two steps forward, one step back. This creates a sense of vulnerability that I had not felt just on Saturday. You want to feel as though you are only making progress. Storms such as this are not always so accommodating.

We were very fortunate in that we lived just a block or so from a hospital. Our neighborhood was a priority and we are not enjoying power. Most of my friends are without power and have no idea when it will return. Oddly, I actually feel a little guilt. Don’t worry, I will get over it, but it is life after a hurricane.

The long term economic implications are going to be significant. Everyone whose business is Houston has customers at various levels of stability. We are better off than most, but we are only as well off as our weakest clients. We are going to be limping along like our customers.

I have lived in the Houston area since 1990. Since that time the benchmark of a major Hurricane had always been Elisha from the early 1980s. Now people say it is the biggest one since Carla (from the early 1960s), which means Ike will become the most common benchmark. When people in the Houston area talk about “the big one,” it will be Hurricane Ike.

Kevin Price articles frequently appear at ChicagoSunTimes.com, Reuters.com, USAToday.com, and other national media.

Kevin Price is Host of the Price of Business (M-F at 11 AM on CNN 650) and Publisher of the Houston Business Review. Hear the show live and online at HoustonBusinessShow.com. Visit the archive of past shows here.

Dispatch From Ike

I have lived in the Houston area for almost two decades and I have slowly become desensitized to those things called Hurricanes. Ike, however, was a big one though and we Houstonians don't like Ike. It actually made me very nervous days before it hit. But my family always stays. We stayed for Rita while others died on the road trying to get away from it. We have decided that if the government wasn't explicitly telling us to leave, we were staying. We weren't part of the evacuation orders and we were not going.

We lost a gate, accumulated a nice body of water in the back, have limbs and leaves all over the front yard and that is about it. But the surrounding area looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Most stores remain closed and those that are open remind me of the old Soviet Union where the lines were long and the product choices were short. It isn't pretty. We were told to expect up to four weeks to get power restored . We lost ours around 2 am and it was back by 8.30 pm. It helps to live a block from a hospital. Millions, I am told, are still without power and we have a curfew that begins at 7 pm.

Still, there was an upside to the storm, especially on a personal level. I didn't lose anything, unlike the situation with Allison who took my home and car in 2001. But there is also the sense of community that comes from such a storm. Neighbors helping neighbors. People outside and talking to each other because it is more comfortable than being in the house. Parents spending more time with the kids and siblings actually playing together rather than video games, because electricity is out. It is all very nice and reminds me of the good old days that we all miss.

Then again, we couldn't be happier when we saw the truck from the power company come down the street. It was already pitch blank and we gave collective applause we saw that multi-light, crane connected, dream machine cruise down our street. Quickly we were on the quest for the remote and dying to get to the refrigerator that we needed to keep close all day because of our power problems. So much for simpler times! We did all enjoy fighting over the remote though. Together.

Kevin Price articles frequently appear at ChicagoSunTimes.com, Reuters.com, USAToday.com, and other national media.

Kevin Price is Host of the Price of Business (M-F at 11 AM on CNN 650) and Publisher of the Houston Business Review. Hear the show live and online at HoustonBusinessShow.com. Visit the archive of past shows here.