Three Star Leadership

There are two kinds of books to read if you're thinking about starting a small business. There are the books that tell you, step-by-step, how to proceed. And there are the books that offer you insight, wisdom and ideas.

The Engine of America is in the latter group and it's an excellent example of the genre. The author is Hector Barreto who grew up in small businesses, ran some of his own and wound up as the Administrator of the Small Business Administration.

There's lots of good advice here. Some of it comes from entrepreneurs you've heard of. Fred Smith of FedEx and Tom Stemberg of Staples are two examples. A lot of it is embedded in the stories of entrepreneurs you've probably never heard of.

One example is Linda Alvarado who was one of the few women to found a construction company and make a success of it. She's now part owner of the Colorado Rockies. There's Thanh Quoc Lam and Earl Graves and Mitchell Rubinson, all people I'd never heard of until picking up this book.

And there were Steve and Lori Leveen. I'd never heard of them either, though I've bought things from their company, Levenger, for years.

Barreto mixes the entrepreneurs' stories with his own story and the story of his family's various businesses. He blends in advice from others, a financial planner here, an academic there.

The result is a well-written book that's loaded with excellent advice and helpful examples. It's also structured sensibly.

In section one, you're introduced to the author and his family and his reasons for writing the book. Section two is about the principles of success, things like "Plan, don't just wing it" and advice on finding a niche and surviving the inevitable mistakes and nasty surprises.

In section three, the author offers up "Tools for Success." For me this was the weakest part of the book. There's a bit too much about how the government and big business want to help you and not enough about how they often seem to hide it well.

As is usual for books written by Small Business Administration people, the SBA sources of information and help are described and hyped far out of proportion to their usefulness to small business owners I know. But even so, there's a good list of available government programs here that will be helpful to many small business owners.

The Tools section has several good chapters. One is on overcoming intimidation. And, there's some good, clear advice in the chapter on "Demystifying Capital."

The Summing Up section has a wonderful chapter on the "ABC's of Success." It's a little hokey, but it's good. You may be tempted to skip right there. Resist that temptation. There are too many good stories and too much you can learn from reading the book through.

To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.