Betties Book Brief – Street Smarts
It’s time for another Betties Book Brief and we are extremely excited to chat with you about the book we read in August. Street Smarts: An All-Purpose Tool Kit for Entrepreneurs was written by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham and is a no-nonsense comprehensive guide full of tips that you can actually implement today. With 104 raving reviews on Amazon, we had to see what the hype was about and we were pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable of a read this book actually was.
Street Smarts is full of anecdotes that really offer a been there, done that point of view on many pitfalls small businesses face. We’re excited to share our favorite takeaways below!
6 Key Points We Loved in Street Smarts
- Don’t discount your extra capacity just because it’s available. Rationalizing that you’d rather have some money than no money is never a good idea and ultimately a really bad decision.
- Always negotiate quietly. Listen to what the other party wants, haggle and be flexible on it, then come back to what matters to you and offer “I’ll give you X, but I’ve got to have Y.”
- You cannot do business with everybody. This is the number one rule in business. One word that you must master is “No!”.
- Small, high-margin customers > large, low-margin customers. No single customer should be more than 10% of your business and large customers as a whole should be less than 30% of your business.
- Raise prices regularly. Don’t piss off your customers by doing this too much, but avoid the sudden hike in prices later on because you didn’t raise them a little at a time earlier.
- Don’t buy a business that grossly undercharges. Keeping an existing customer base during a sale is hard enough. If your first order of business has to be raising prices, you’ll be in for a rude awakening.
Have you read this book?
What did you think?
Did you come up with any great takeaways that we haven’t listed here?
