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Adams, 41, runs a $10 million publishing concern that he started in his basement. He's a veteran of 11 business start-ups, each funded with $2,000 or less and each begun with little or no experience -- disobeying his own rule that entrepreneurs should be experts on the fields they're getting into (or buy that expertise from a franchiser).
At college, he started a newspaper. Every summer during school, he had a different business-renting bicycles on Cape Cod, dealing in used boats (including one sold to Norman Mailer), painting houses. All these adventures took place before he went to Harvard: The lessons he learned were "streetwise," not academic.
Adams exudes a missionary zeal about small business. "This country was started by a bunch of independent farmers, hunters, and fishermen," he says. "Then the industrial revolution came along and everyone was working in a factory. Now it's changing. I see a renaissance of entrepreneurship. I'm making millions of dollars a year. Other people could do that, too."
It seems like your book is a good laboratory to study competitive advantage. There are zillions of business books out there. How do you differentiate this one from the others?
It doesn't come easily. I have a break-even of 50,000 copies. This book has to become one of the best-selling small business books of all time just to break even. But I put a lot of extra value in here. I spent $15,000 on the graphics inside, to make it highly accessible. I have made it comfortable, so people can understand the information in easy terms, and I've made it digestible. There's not a lot of text that you wade through. And that approach has worked: even before the publicity and marketing hit, this book was selling very fast off the shelf. People saw that value right away.
I'm not just trying to convey information to people. I'm also trying to convey confidence-because I don't just want people to buy this book, I want them to use it. I want them to start small businesses.
The book seems to assume that the reader will be a rather down-to-earth person-a model employer. But we all know how many crazy bosses are out there.
One reason people behave like that is stress. It's not the only reason; there are some people you just can't do anything about. But one of the keys to being a nicer boss in a small business is being able to be in control of your business-running it according to a plan, a strategy and a budget, and being in control of your cash. Serious cash flow issues can get people very uptight. From our chapter on money, they can find out a few basic things about how to control cash. If they can learn how to do that-to take expenses down when they're running out of money-they can feel in control.
I was struck by the amount of attention you devote to lawyers in the book. Are they really so much a part of the small-business experience?
What I'm mostly going over are things that every business person needs to know about the law, even the ones who employ only one or two people. I believe that half the businesses out there violate a trademark at one time or another-and don't know it. In hiring people, and in the sexual harassment area, just being nice and fair isn't going to keep you out of court. There are basic things about the law that everyone should know without bringing in an attorney. But when you get into a really sticky situation, like an employment issue or a trademark battle, that's when you need to hire a specialist.
Many people who are very talented in lucrative ways still have a hard time communicating in the business world. What advice do you have for the poor communicator?
A lot of people go into business feeling that they have strengths in one area and weaknesses in various others. My feeling is that just about anybody can become adequate in each field necessary to run a small business. That's one aim of my book: to help people improve in that one area where they may be weak.
Different people have different communication styles. I understand that, but in my own firm I try to encourage one consistent style, with one-to-one talking as a starting point. Memos very easily get people irritated, and electronic mail can be an easy route to miscommunication and hard feelings.
Several times in the book, you stress the need for firm policies on various issues. But isn't there also a need for a certain creative chaos in a growing business?
I think that's a big myth. It's being perpetuated by a lot of the small business magazines and self-appointed management gurus who are not really out running businesses. There have been a few highly publicized businesses that have been phenomenally successful that way-Ben & Jerry's, for example. But the vast majority of businesses that don't have policies run into trouble-legally and in other ways. You need some soft edges; you don't want to get too carried away. But generally, policies will do much more to bring people together than to drive them apart.
E. Thomas Wood has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and other publications. He is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (John Wiley & Sons).
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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