The Martha Rules
By Martha Stewart
Rodale, 205 pages, $33.95
With all the commotion over Martha Stewart, it's easy to forget that she's an unusually successful serial entrepreneur.
She started as a freelance photographer's model, served as a broker on Wall Street, sold pies at a local market, opened a gourmet food shop within a clothing store, started a business-catering service and broadened her market with a book called Entertaining. Then she launched an array of publishing and broadcast endeavours that became a multimedia empire.
So it's reasonable for her to write a book of advice for entrepreneurs, a project she started during her recent prison term when fellow inmates asked her to speak at a forum on business practices.
The book revolves around 10 rules:
Passion: Build your business around something you love, something inherently and endlessly interesting to you. That may take some searching, as it did with her, until your passion becomes clear. "My life is my work and my work is my life. As a result, I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I am excited every day," she says.
Get a big idea: Passion can be untamed, so focus your attention and creativity on basic products or services that people need and want. Then look for a way to enlarge, improve and enhance that big idea. Walk in your customers' shoes, to understand their needs, and make sure your offering is better than any other available.
Get a telescope, a wide-angle lens and a microscope: The telescope represents the view of where you are going -- the long-term plan for your business. The wide-angle lens allows you to evaluate the broad landscape in which your business will operate. The microscope represents the need to bore down to the finest details and understand the mechanics of your business. Use all three ways of thinking to build your business plan.
Teach so you can learn: Care for your customers and teach them, as New York butcher shop Lobel's does by giving away recipes on its website, or a fishing guide does by posting a chart on local conditions. That builds a stronger connection with customers. "When customers know you care about them, you will acquire allies who help to promote your business," she says.
Spread the word: Grow your business by using smart, cost-effective techniques that will arrest the eye, tug at the heart and convey what is special about your business. When it comes to promotion, creativity without common sense is usually an expensive failure -- you don't want your slogans to be more memorable than your product -- but common sense without creativity is boring.
Quality is everyday: Put quality on a pedestal, striving for it with every decision, every day. Include quality in your vision statement and make sure you follow it always.
Build an A-team: Seek out employees who are brimming with talent, energy, intellect, optimism and generosity. Search for advisers and partners who complement your skills and understand your ideals.
If the pie isn't perfect, cut it in wedges: Early in her career, while catering a dinner for movie stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward that was crucial for her nascent business, Ms. Stewart got distracted, left the kitchen, and burned the edges of the Moroccan pigeon pies that were closest to the oven wall. While the pies weren't perfect, the majority of each was fine, so she cut them in wedges, discarded the damaged portions, and served the rest, lavishly garnished. The lesson is that when faced with a business challenge, evaluate the situation, gather the good things in sight, abandon the bad, clear your mind and move on. "Focus on the positive, stay in control, and never panic," she stresses.
Take risks, not chances: A chance is a long shot that depends largely on luck. Avoid those, but take well-calculated risks to advance your enterprise.
Make it beautiful: Listen intently, learn new things every day, be willing to innovate, and become an authority your customers will trust.
That advice is solid, with some twists on the usual prescriptions for entrepreneurs. What makes the book successful -- and it's a very good book -- is the knowledge she brings to each rule, telling stories from her own career and those of the many other entrepreneurs she knows who can help both beginning and ongoing entrepreneurs through the tough spots.
If you want a book on her recent travails or evidence she has learned from those mistakes, this isn't it.
But there's a lot else you can learn from this savvy entrepreneur.
