I wrote this book primarily for owners, managers, supervisors and soon-to-be supervisors in small to medium-sized businesses. Non-fiction authors are supposed to write what they know about, and for many years my ad agency employed 65 people with annual sales revenue of over $10 million, which is classified by the Small Business Administration as a medium-sized business. Over the years I also had the opportunity to work for a number of small to medium-sized business, so I’ve witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly from the perspective of an employee as well as an owner/manager.

This book was also written for college graduates who are entering the workforce in positions well above the summer job positions they’ve previously held. Looking back on my own career, I wish a book like this was available to me after graduation because I was thrown into supervisory positions with absolutely no mentoring or practical management advice what-so-ever. Yes, my college professors provided me with a wealth of intellectual information about planning, leading and managing employees, but nobody provided me with rubber-hit-the-road tips about negotiating, personal selling techniques or how to conduct effective employee performance reviews. A quote by
Mark Twain comes to mind when I consider those years, “The first half of my life I went to school. The second half of my life I got an education.” So I hope this book serves as a quick education for those college graduates who feel like they need one.

How to get the most out of this book

There are a total of 88 business lessons. Knowing that business executives and supervisors are time starved, and utilizing my advertising agency training and background, each lesson will take you less than a minute to read. Like great advertising or poetry, for that matter, you will soon discover that the brevity of each lesson does not reflect the amount of knowledge compacted into each page. So I encourage you to go ahead and read through the entire book quickly, but after you’ve done so, read and put into practice one lesson a day. I also suggest that you access the wealth of information associated with each lesson provided in the resources section at the back of the book.