Improve Your Odds
The Four Pillars of Business Success
This is one of the better single sources for entrepreneurs looking for counsel in their newly minted businesses.
Small business consultant Alan Yong offers entrepreneurs a comprehensive playbook in The Four Pillars of Business Success: Utilize the System Approach to Make Your Business a Success.
Entrepreneurs often have the passion to start a business but not the requisite skills to operate a business successfully. Recognizing this, Alan Yong, an entrepreneur who started several businesses and now consults, distills his forty years of business experience into a book that is both comprehensive and highly readable. In an informal and conversational writing style, Yong authoritatively discusses virtually every aspect of starting and running a business in chapters that are brief yet filled with insight and wisdom.
One of the book’s defining strengths is its organization into “four pillars” of success, which anchor the book around key conceptual areas. The chapters of the book lead logically from one area to another, addressing issues that are sometimes isolated in business books. For example, Yong provides an intelligent discussion of “winning strategy” in one chapter, followed by an important chapter concerning execution, a topic that is too often given short shrift; particularly valuable in this chapter is a section entitled, “The Cost of Execution Failure.” Just as essential is the chapter on delegation, an area that challenges a great many entrepreneurs; Yong observers that “managers who fail to properly delegate can upset the entire structure of any company’s operations.”
Many of the sections of The Four Pillars of Business Success, such as “Eight Areas Where You Can Strive to Be Best in Class,” are worth reading and rereading. The author’s considerable knowledge of approaching a business systematically, his commentary on hiring and appraising employees, and his deep insight into the importance of customers all contribute to the book’s relevance to owners of new businesses. This may, in fact, be one of the better single sources for entrepreneurs looking for counsel in their newly minted businesses. Because Yong started both a restaurant and a technology company, the content is broadly applicable to many types of business.
The engaging text is augmented by a final chapter offering a superb summation of the entire book, plus two detailed case studies of small businesses that followed the principles covered in the book. Yong’s writing is a pleasure to read, because of both the conversational tone and the author’s ability to convey a great deal of sound advice in a concise format. The Four Pillars of Business Success is an excellent book that should accomplish exactly the improved odds the cover promises for almost anyone who is starting a business.
Reviewed by
Barry Silverstein
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.
