An optimistic, highly personal game plan for helping small businesses thrive.
A business strategy expert shares his ideas for helping small businesses excel.
Kaza opens his nonfiction debut with an account of his early efforts to help small businesses survive and flourish, describing how this commitment initially got him involved in the private equity lending group ForwardLine Financial, which was dedicated to getting small businesses successfully financed and prioritized a very personal, hands-on approach. All of this was going well, with both client businesses and ForwardLine thriving, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The author prioritized helping ForwardLine’s customers over its bottom line, and as a result, many small businesses came through the worst of it intact when they might otherwise have been forced to shut their doors permanently. Even so, almost 30 percent of ForwardLine’s customers had gone out of business as a result of the pandemic, and many of the survivors were struggling to survive. Told by friends that “Big businesses always win. Scale always wins,” Kaza found himself wondering, “Are small businesses really destined to fail when faced with bigger competitors?” Pondering this question led him to develop what he calls “Underdog Principles” built around “positioning, proximity, and purpose” and designed to help small businesses compete with their larger rivals by embracing their differences and using them to craft innovative marketing strategies. He focuses his chapters on the stories of small businesses and the entrepreneurs who build them, people who are often “not just CEOs, they’re also the janitors, receptionists, accountants, and HR managers all rolled into one.”
Running through all of Kaza’s advice and examples is a refreshingly sincere empathy, a genuine interest in the stories and needs of small businesses that one might not expect to find in money managers and loan officials. Whether it’s “a quality place to eat” or “I need my 5,000 psi hydrostatic drive to be rated for both high and sub-zero temperatures,” the author always tries to put himself in the shoes of the customers. “Don’t worry about matching your cost analysis exactly to the customer decision journey stages,” he advises his readers. “Focus instead on where you can track concrete numbers, such as how many clicks your ads get or how many trials convert to sales.” Most of this advice revolves around his “Underdog Principles,” which are winningly simple: positioning (having a well-defined customer base), purpose (sometimes focusing on a problem that needs solving rather than “conventional business metrics”), and, perhaps most important of all, proximity (knowing your customers well enough to understand what motivates their decisions). The homespun quality of Kaza’s business anecdotes helps to underscore the viability of these principles. For instance, the author tells of meeting body shop owner Mike because his own car needed work, and Mike’s Yelp reviews were superb because he’d taken to asking satisfied customers to leave reviews. “Sharing your personal story or business challenges with your customers can feel a little risky,” Kaza writes, but “The trust you build as a small business owner is your most valuable asset.” This consistently personal tone fills the book with a sense of optimism that will be much appreciated by entrepreneurs and small business owners at all stages of the game.
An optimistic, highly personal game plan for helping small businesses thrive.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781646872053
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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