I picked up this book by Clara Villarosa (with help from Alicia Villarosa) on vacation last month. My business has been seriously lacking lately, so I’ve been on the lookout for anything that can help me give it a boost.
This book was full of great information. Unfortunately, most of it isn’t relevant to me. The author, Clara Villarosa, was fired from her position at a bank when she was 52.
As a black woman living in Denver, Colorado, she had noticed there was no independent bookstore catering to black readers. She decided to fill in that gap and used her savings to start her own bookstore. It was so successful she was able to open another location in New York city.
As a result, the advice contained in the book deals mostly with people opening brick-and-mortar stores and selling products, rather than services. Villarosa is sure to include stories of women who opened all sorts of businesses. Some were successful while others weren’t. Many of them involved brick-and-mortar stores, although a few included online stores and one story of a woman who was selling her services, rather than products.
I don’t want to give this book a bad review just because it wasn’t relevant to me, personally. It was full of excellent advice for anyone looking to start their own product-based business and it still had some information I can use.
Villarosa breaks down a lot of the legal business speak to help you understand which business plan is best for you. She also provides warnings about the kinds of things the government will tax you for and how to set money aside so you’re ready for it. She even provides an outline for a business plan at the very end of her book. This is something I might actually use and I was glad to see it because, although everyone talks about the importance of a business plan, no one (that I’ve seen yet) has bothered to define it, or show me what that might look like.
Even if I didn’t find this book as useful as I was hoping to, I still enjoyed reading it. The stories of success, failure, and false starts followed by success give me hope that there is light at the end of this tunnel I’m in.
I also enjoyed Villarosa’s personal story of success. If it weren’t for the fact ebooks are on the rise, I would seriously consider starting my own bookshop, so of course I was interested to hear all about her experiences in that adventure.
What struck me the most was the story of how she got fired. She was allegedly told, “the word was I had pushed too hard, talked too much, and rubbed too many of my white colleagues ‘the wrong way’.” She said she realized those very qualities are needed in a good entrepreneur. She’s right, of course, but what really irked me is the fact a white man would be praised for these qualities, but because she was a black woman she got fired.
Just another reason I want to avoid going back to corporate America at all costs!
What did you guys read this week? Anything that was less helpful than you were hoping it would be? I want to hear all about it in the comments!
Photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32833271@N05/”>the UMF</a> / <a href=”http://foter.com/”>Foter</a> / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>CC BY</a>