Empire Builder
The Road to a Billion
Leading by example, Empire Builder is an incisive guide for building and selling profitable businesses.
Adam E. Coffey’s business guide Empire Builder advises ambitious entrepreneurs on building a billion-dollar company.
Geared toward the pursuit of audacious dreams, this book suggests pathways to creating a sustainable enterprise, including advice for scaling upward and selling for a windfall. It draws from personal experience (Coffey built three different major businesses) in outlining its strategies for surviving marketplace odds to become one of the 7 percent of businesses to clear $1 million a year in revenue. There’s advice on finding a market niche, raising capital through private equity, and building a strong company culture too. Its analyses on subjects with which Coffey has past experience are particularly incisive and will prove handy even for those whose entrepreneurial aspirations are closer to making a living than becoming a billionaire.
The book’s organization is broad, covering both the basics of forming a solid foundation and more advanced tools. Its general tips include guidance on buying an existing business with an established track record to minimize risk, but there’s also hyperspecific advice, as on the specific online tools that a person can trust when assessing the financials of an acquisition target. But in anticipating the possible questions that a potential entrepreneur might ask, it becomes quite granular in focus—for instance, where it outlines, at length, particular methods for taking care of one’s employees to ensure their loyalty and productivity.
Still, the book’s progression is linear and logical, moving from startup principles to maximizing profit, growing through acquisition, and planning an exit. And it drills down into particulars in covering topics as of sharing financials, attaining the best return on an investment, and rollover investing. Its examples range from those of a landscape maintenance business to commercial real estate investment. Didactic in orientation and mentor-esque in tone, it ends each chapter with takeaway points. These are reinforced via repetition, too, with the book emphasizing points about investing in what one knows and focusing on customer needs more than once. It also deploys periodic pullouts and charts to illustrate its critical information in greater detail. And it builds to a detailed roadmap for how to cash out, spelling out all the preparatory work that is needed to make a sale successful. Its brief wrap-up recapitulates much of the practical knowledge imparted throughout.
An actionable business guide, Empire Builder aims to help entrepreneurs pursue their wildest dreams.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
