small business and entrepreneurship

The whole book is so well laid out and helpful, and it completely met and exceeded my expectations. I have used one of the author's other books--The Successful Business Plan--in college, so I have some idea of her style: clear, honest, and very inspiring. I was afraid that there would be a lot of MLM pyramid-type schemes, but the businesses in this book all seem to be viable. She backs up the selected businesses with government outlook and industry data, which really helped me look at my options with a well informed perspective. And if a business is very hard or expensive to start, or has a high failure rate, it says so--no sugar coating in this book. But the real gem in this book is the E-Type test. Very perceptive. Abrams has discovered the way for me to match my goals and skills and tendancies with a good sized list of practial business options. This is a great book for anyone who wants to start a business and doesn't know exactly what kind, or for someone who already has the business idea but wants to verify that it's the right one!

So many of the start-your-own-business books out there focus on *how* to get a business up and running--but here's one that focuses on deciding *what* business to start, which seems to be just as critical to launching a successful business as anything else.

How do you determine if your business idea will work? How do you turn your past work experiences and training into a business that will be successful? How do you take all your ideas and determine which are best? How do you turn the things you love doing into a way to make a living?

Abrams' book answers these questions (or, rather, shows us how to answer them ourselves) through a series of self-analysis exercises, discussions on what makes a small business successful, and reviews of the most popular industries and businesses for new entrepreneurs.

I'm impressed with how Abrams manages to exercise both sides of our brains in guiding us towards our final business idea. She gives us a lot of right-brained introspective self-discovery tasks to help us understand what we'd like to do and be good at, but also delivers plenty of left-brain oriented data and statistics to help us understand the realites of how our ideas will work out in the real world.

I'm especially grateful for her "can-do" attitude. She makes it clear that you don't need to be a Type A, salesmanish, work-a-holic to own a successful business. That alone was worth the price of the book.