Day moved to Florida as a young man with the goal of developing his own commercial, property and casualty insurance company. With help from his wife Donna, and his father’s example before him, he succeeded. Now, he offers advice from his experience and that of others, to help future entrepreneurs likewise achieve their dreams. He discusses how to come up with ideas for products and especially services which meet people’s needs, and makes suggestions about how to build a business and keep it functioning through the crucial first year or so before it becomes profitable.
SET YOUR OWN SALARY offers useful advice, particularly when it comes to figuring out the things that make a successful market service – first, he suggests getting some experience working for a company already in the field, learning the business from the inside, and then improve a service being offered or find an underserved niche to offer it to. He also rightly emphasizes the importance of customer service and good people skills, and the value of using customer feedback to fine-tune a product or offering via the Lean Startup Method. The end summary bullet points and takeaways are useful, as are the further resources list and the glossary, but some of the graphics are more pretty than informational. The book is short, and there’s little here that isn’t covered in similar books, but his personal experience offers some additional value. He offers personal insights on, for example, why it is important to have contacts and friends throughout one’s field – as when he was negotiating the sale of his business and managed to counteract an attempt to undermine the sales price because he had a contact willing to make and follow through on a competing offer.
SET YOUR OWN SALARY is an engaging and thoughtful look at entrepreneurship, with some concrete advice drawn from the author’s experience.
~IndieReader.