Minding My Business: The Complete, No-Nonsense, Start-to-Finish Guide to Owning and Running Your Own Store

by Adeena Mignogna

Overview

Taking a leap and making the choice to start a business can be hard, but all that comes after—the planning, loans, marketing—can be even harder. Every new business owner needs an easy, clear, and useful guide to follow when embarking on this venture, and Minding My Business will make the process as simple as possible.

With no previous business experience, Adeena Mignogna decided to open up her own retail store, a paint-your-own pottery studio. In this part memoir, part handbook, she details all the things she did right, and wrong, so that anyone following in her footsteps won’t make the same mistakes. Minding My Business explains how to:

• Deal with leasing and landlords
• Obtain loans and manage finances
• Hire, retain, and treat employees
• Market and advertise your business
• Deal with stressful situations
• Create an exit strategy if you decide to close
• Sell your business
• And everything in between

Mignogna chronicles all that went into opening the doors to her store, successfully managing it for several years, and then finally deciding to close it. If you’re ready to take the risk, you’ll need this book to help you navigate through the tough and perplexing world of small business.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628735123
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Adeena Mignogna quit her engineering career to follower her entrepreneurial dream and open her own retail store, The Pot & Bead. After the store closed in 2008, she went back to her engineering career while writing and looking for her next business opportunity. She lives in Frederick, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Preface: Why I Wrote This Book vii

Part I My, What a Cute Little Store! 1

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 The Pot & Bead: A New Life 11

Chapter 2 You Want to Do What? Perceptions of Retail 19

Chapter 3 Leasing, Landlords, and Opening Late 25

Chapter 4 Safe and Secure 31

Chapter 5 Employees 39

Chapter 6 Follow Your Gut (Or How to Lose a Lot of Money Trying to Buy Someone Else's Business) 54

Chapter 7 Customers… Ya Gotta Love Them 60

Chapter 8 Competition 66

Chapter 9 They Gotta Know You're There 71

Chapter 10 Putting the Social in Social Media 78

Chapter 11 Hard Work Does Not Equal Money in Your Pocket 87

Chapter 12 Other Things That Keep You Up at Night 96

Chapter 13 How to Survive Those First Two Years 100

Part II What Ever Happened to That Cute Little Store? 107

Introduction 109

Chapter 1 A Double Life 115

Chapter 2 Money Mistakes We Make 121

Chapter 3 Money In, Money Out 131

Chapter 4 More on Employees 148

Chapter 5 The Internet-It's for Businesses Now! 161

Chapter 6 Exit Strategy: Getting the Business Ready to Be Sold 171

Chapter 7 At Leases End … 177

Chapter 8 Take My Business, Please! 184

Chapter 9 For Sale, by Owner 196

Chapter 10 Closing the Business 211

Chapter 11 So You Still Want Your Own Cute Little Store 216

Chapter 12 The Final Word-Why Exactly Are You in Business? 219

Appendix A Timeline 225

Appendix B Business Plan 229

Appendix C Financial Data 251

Appendix D Lease Clauses 257

Appendix E The Reading List 329

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

09/15/2013
In 2002, Mignogna (former owner, The Pot & Bead) left a career in engineering to pursue a lifelong dream of owning her own business. During her time as a small business owner, she encountered many people envious of her position and contemplating it for themselves, assuming that being one's own boss meant more time and money. Here, Mignogna disabuses readers of this notion and documents the steps—both right and missed—that she took to obtain the business, to have the business successfully running, and, finally, to get it closed and sold. Intending this work as both a personal account and handbook, Mignogna keeps the chapters short, ending each with bullet-pointed key ideas, and supplies heavy appendixes of documents and reading lists. While the book does not add anything new to the discussion about owning a small business, it is written to alert the interested layperson about the harsh realities involved and to deter the fainthearted. VERDICT Not enough of a memoir to offer general interest and lacking enough substance to benefit the dedicated business professional, this book is recommended for those who have only given thought to starting a small business and would gain from learning about one person's mistakes and efforts.—Laurel Tacoma, Strayer Univ. Lib., Washington, DC

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