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"Anita Brattina tells a story that probably sounds familiar to quite a few working professionals.
"I had a new boss, and my job description was being dismantled a little more every day," Brattina writes in her recently released "Diary of a Small Business Owner" (AMACOM, $21.95).
"The climate at work had really been getting worse over the last year. I felt less and less control over my department. The idea of running my own company with no bosses, no board of directors and no political gamesmanship was more alluring."
The rest was history, so to speak, which Brattina lays out nicely in this first person account of her evolution: from employee to startup business owner, and then finally to the point where her Pittsburgh firm--11-year-old Direct Response Marketing--eclipsed annual sales of $1 million.
By early spring, the book was in its third printing.
One reason for the demand: in each chapter, tucked amidst detailed diary entries, are "Lessons Learned."
A sampling: Lesson No. 17: Rising Above the Basic Need For Money: "Somehow I had to learn that it was okay to make more money than my parents made, more than my friends, more than the sum of our monthly expenses... Once I set my sights on growing the business large enough to support a well paid staff, pension and health benefits, enough money in reserve for slow times, and a paycheck I could be proud of, then the numerical goals changed. It was easier to set my sights on building a company that did $1 million, $5 million, $10 million in gross annual sales."
Lesson No. 39: Hiring the Next Person in Line: "In more than one instance, I made hasty hiring decisions because we were so understaffed.... I seemed to hire anyone who fell into my radius within a few days of the position being created. Looking back, I realize that if I had simply forced myself to put an ad in the Sunday newspaper, I probably could have had the choice of more experienced people. But I never thought I had the luxury of time."
Lesson No.62: Going National: "The way we got the national accounts still started locally. It was because I called on the local sales office of these national companies and did successful local projects. Then I started talking to the regional manager, national manager... And so on."
Who says you can't learn from others' mistakes?"
-Executive Report, May 1996
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