How to Start a Small Business

#How to Start a Small Business#

When listing the entrepreneurial hubs of the United States, Spanish Fork, Utah generally does not come to mind. However, Rich Christiansen and Ron Porter—of Spanish Fork—have built a highly profitable small business literally from the ground up and want others to do the same. Rather than safeguard some secret bootstrapping recipe, these two entrepreneurs have chosen to write a book detailing exactly how to start a small business at any stage in life and maintain sanity, balance, and an income.

From 27 attempts, Rich has found the discovery for how to start a small business. The secret? There isn’t one, but there are principles, tips, and tricks. Through his entrepreneurial experiences, Rich started gathering ideas and tools. At his family’s urging (and with more than a little ambition), a book began to be born. Ron, a friend and partner on past time businesses, came together and the two started cultivating plans, values, and mission statements.Ron, however, wasn’t satisfied just with text. If the book were to work, he reasoned, he and Rich should probably try it. The result? A business was cultivated by them, CastleWave, which started from only $2,500 contributed by each partner. It made over a million dollars of top-line revenue in the first year and is still growing. As they finish concluding editations of their work and maintain goals of publication, they explain the CastleWave story through their online entrepreneurship community, http://www.BootstrapBusiness.org.

Now, Sharon Larsen—a recent member of the Bootstrap Business and CastleWave team—brings a fresh take on the company history at http://blog.bootstrapbusiness.org. She has started from the beginning, showing how Rich and Ron were able to start a small business that went big. Even greater than outstanding acheivment, though, the blog and book show greater principles. In a world where big businesses wield quite the clout, not only knowing how to start a small business but also knowing how to keep it afloat is a huge deal. In one chapter, Rich and Ron show how to play with the big boys without overstepping either scruples or bank account. From programming a phone system to developing an escalation path, Rich and Ron give practical tips and engaging stories to keep all readers interested and all entrepreneurs informed.

That is not the only chapter, though. All the way from the nail-biting start to the graceful exit, Rich and Ron cover all levels and stages in learning how to start a small business. Each chapter builds on the last, meaning that nail-biting grit and determination are followed by ideas, ideas by market analysis, and market analysis by cash flow plans, by rules, by business structures, by everything an entrepreneur could want. Rather thanwing around the bush with hard to understand principals, the book is aimed at practicality and practice. Stories that help the principles stick, such as Rich’s pilfering his son’s candy machine, flavor the process with real-life applications. After they finish blogging their story, Rich and Ron will turn to blogging the book, effectively giving it away for free.

Though serial entrepreneurs now, Rich and Ron were not always living the wild and free venture-starting life. Maintaining the aptitude to continue forward and realizing how to begin were large steps for both; once each tried it and tasted success, though, they never went back. Their story shows that Spanish Fork, UT isn’t the only small hometown that can succeed. It doesn’t take a secret recipe. It just takes principles, practice, and knowing how to start a small business—and Rich and Ron both know how and teach it.