In the mold of bestsellers Who Moved My Cheese? and The One-Minute Manager, author Michael Colburn gives us the parable of Julia, a toy and game designer who, after her husband’s untimely death (“Carl literally was hit by a bus”), upends her life. She quits her job, sells her stuff, and moves to Paris. Eventually, she wants to go back to work, so she calls her old boss, who has bad news: he’s going out of business. With no other leads, she moves back to the U.S. and opens her own design firm.
The firm struggles at first, but then business takes off. Realizing she needs help, Julia turns to an old friend and business consultant, Mark Darden. Mark agrees to help Julia, and over months of Monday morning meetings and Friday night dinners–plus a romantic New York getaway–he educates her on contracts, billing, collections, time tracking, chargeability (how much of each day’s work can be billed to clients), bill ratio targets, revenue targets, pricing jobs, salary administration, strategic planning, and more. Gradually, Mark helps Julia turn her small firm into a behemoth, falling in love with her in the process. It’s the Wharton Business School meets Harlequin Romance.
Colburn’s goal in writing HOW JULIA FOUND HAPPINESS AND FINANCIAL SUCCESS (Your Guide to Making Money in a Service Business) is to share the fruits of his 40+ years of working in the design industry. He certainly achieves that goal, offering more details of day-to-day management than similar books. How one would extrapolate the book’s lessons to other industries is unclear; Colburn sticks to what he knows. In the final chapter, he inexplicably drops Julia’s narrative, replacing date nights and Hamilton tickets with step-by-step instructions on calculating your company’s net effective multiplier. The book ends by observing that Julia and Mark are “very happy, and financially successful,” and it isn’t hard to grasp the central lesson: to get ahead in business, plan well, work hard, and take risks–like marrying your accountant.
A management text couched in fable, Michael G. Colburn’s HOW JULIA FOUND HAPPINESS AND FINANCIAL SUCCESS combines limited business advice with a feel-good narrative.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader