[Review] The Big Enough Company

Making mistakes may be your best way to learn, but learning from someone else’s mistakes is probably a lot less painful.

And if you’re an entrepreneur and need advice about your small business, “The Big Enough Company: Creating a Business That Works for You” by Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams uses plenty of case studies, success stories and personal anecdotes to dispense advice on how you can find the best way forward for your company. The co-authors draw upon the stories of the almost 100 entrepreneurs they interviewed and have put together an extremely insightful book that helps any business owner focus and work on their problem areas.

Lancaster and Abrams together run In Good Company (a community, business learning center, and shared workspace  for women business owners based in New York City) so it is not surprising that many of the stories shared are their clients – women entrepreneurs and their businesses. Lancaster and Abrams dissect the issues faced by these businesses by asking them questions – figuring out what’s in it for them, identifying a role that suits their strengths, for example – and providing advice based on their answers.

The reason the book is called the “The Big Enough Company” is very simple – the idea is that you need to build your company based on the goals that you set when you started it in the first place. The trouble is that we tend to end up building businesses that, while making money, seemed to fall short of our original goals and motivations and leaving us frustrated and unfulfilled. This happens when we accept advice from well-meaning sources – management books, for example – that helps to propel growth, but sometimes in the wrong direction.

If you find that happening to you – especially if you are a woman entrepreneur – you’ll find the stories within “The Big Enough Company”  heartening, encouraging, and filled with useful advice that will set you thinking about how you can position your own business better for profit and personal satisfaction.

This way, you may just avoid some of the mistakes these entrepreneurs have made along the way as well.