This book bills itself as an essential guide to anyone who has started or is planning to start his or her own business.  It aims to remind the reader of the common sense rules for running a business they may have forgotten, as well as some more obscure ones they may never have considered.

The author, Robert Ashton is himself a successful entrepreneur, having built up and sold a series of businesses, and so is able to speak from his experiences.

It is, as you may expect, written as a series of lists, one hundred in total, based around twenty distinct topics.  These range from tips on how to come up with a successful idea, through to how to sell a successful business and come out ahead, as well as covering in an in-depth manner the various opportunities, problems and tasks that can arise in the running of a business.

Each list is made up of ten tips based on a specific topic ? 10 strengths that will make you successful, 10 ways to work out your true costs and 10 common people problems and how to solve them being examples.  As well as the list, each section contains some other notes and points to think about and occasional case studies supplied by successful, or budding, entrepreneurs.  It even manages to be fairly light-hearted, injecting some humour to the book rather than it being a dry collection of lists.

The book sets out to cater to anyone who has set up his or her own business or might consider it, and does a good job of doing so.  As someone who hasn?t given any serious thought to the idea of setting up a business I found that in reading the book I was increasingly filled with the thought that ?I could do that?.  The case studies work well in this respect, providing some fairly heart-warming stories of people overcoming their problems to achieve success.  They don?t provide much detail of how they have gone about this though, although that doesn?t seem to be the author?s intention here.  The checklists contain many useful ideas, for someone who has started a business and is finding it a struggle there may well be a simple idea in the book that triggers a way round their problems.

Ultimately the book is a collection of intelligent and wide ranging brainstorming points that an intelligent and resourceful entrepreneur (or would-be entrepreneur) with their own ideas could expand upon and make a great deal of use of.  It would also serve as a useful set of reminders of the basic points that might slip the mind of someone starting out in business for the first time.  All in all I?d say this could be a very useful book but only to someone who already has the ideas and drive to set up a business and make it work.

You can see this review on the IEE website here