20/20 Hindsight: From Starting Up to Successful Entrepreneur, by Those Who'Ve Been There (Virgin Business Guides)

Rating:
Summary: Read before you dive in
Review: A must for anyone considering starting up a business however large or small. The author has interviewed entrepreneurs who have started their own companies - tiny ones you still haven't heard of, all the way up to Domino's Pizza. The insights they give into the pitfalls of company start-ups are priceless and take the reader through from the initial back-of-an-envelope ideas for their businesses right up to their launch and the first faltering footsteps. Even if you avoid one major start-up clanger by reading this book, it will have paid for itself many times over. Invaluable.

Rating:
Summary: 20/20 Gold dust
Review: It would be hard to find someone better qualified for a book about successful business practise than Rachelle Thackray. Anyone who has followed her columns in the Independent Newspaper over the last four years - Me and My Partner, The Digerati, My Biggest Mistake - will be familiar with the breadth of the interviewees she has covered, from the music business to deep sea salvage, from hotel designing to ethical farming. She clearly has the ability to not only ask the crucial question but formulate the replies into a priceless objective wisdom. Thoroughly recommended for all prospective or seasoned entrepeneurs, whether to study in one gulp or to pick up intermitently for bite-sized quotes and thoughts. If the book teaches anything, it is that in business you stop learning at your peril.