Great book for small firm starting up

....or regenerating
Reviewer: John C. Dunbar (Sugar Land, TX United States) , July 6, 2001

This is a gem of a book. It covers a lot of material (maybe too much) and yet it is a relatively small book. I liked the book for its comprehensive coverage and links to entrepreneurship as a personal mission... as well as marketing.

The authors are Canadian and I'd like to say that their nationality interfered with the topics or slant of the book... but it didn't. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that this Swiss-banking immigrant (Bender) and this successful radio broadcaster (Torok) in Canada really had their feet on the ground. They offered lots of practical marketing and strategic advice.

I would suggest that there are two major parts to this book. The first 1/6 of the book describes their concept of delivering value, tying your products/services to personal values, and your vision/mission statements, etc. I thought this was truly great and apparently some of it flows from Peter Urs Bender's other book: Leadership from Within. I see that it is favorably reviewed here at Amazon and I will order it right away (forthwith in Canadian?).

The remaining 5/6's of the book is an encyclopedic account of marketing techniques that you can (and should) apply for your business. The target market for this book is a firm of 1 to 30 employees... a small firm. This book would also do well for an individual working for a big company, as it tells you how to market yourself to become more valuable.

There's a ton of good ideas here. You won't go wanting of things to implement. There are new ideas that you won't see elsewhere.

For example, they speak about the need to write articles to establish your expertise. They then go on to list many different kinds of articles you can write. Under this section, one sub-topic was Tips Sheets. There they listed about 10 different kinds of tip sheets you could write. I knew about writing articles and tip sheets, but they provided excellent lead ideas to get me going. There were many other such new things in their book that greatly extended the topics I was already familiar with.

Because it was encyclopedic in coverage, I was worried that it would repeat a lot of what I already knew. But, instead I learned a lot of new ideas that I can implement. Overall, I highly recommend this book for any small business owner, or marketing chief... or any individual who wants to shine and promote himself within a corporation.

Now if we could just figure out some way to get these good business thinkers out of the cold socialist northern territories! I found the book in a Vancouver bookstore and have never seen it in the U.S.
-John Dunbar

George Torok, Co-author
Secrets of Power Marketing