“The One Minute Entrepreneur” is a mixture of a fictional story and a reference book. The author's main intention is to share advice they consider useful on the path of becoming and being an entrepreneur, dealing with potential problems along the way and building a lasting success.

Unlike usual reference books, “The One Minute Entrepreneur” provides these advice by telling the fictional story of Jud McCarthy, an American who evolves from a troubled student to a successful self-made businessman.

Talking about the story itself, do not expect a lot of excitement or surprise. Neither the main character nor the storyline is able to create a feeling of sympathy or particular interest in the life, development and problems of Jud McCarthy, his family and business.

Jud is introduced as a good student and successful football player, who happens to get into an unfortunate situation which gets him into prison for a night. Thereafter he continues his studies as a good student and develops a passion for the field of sales. He starts off as a salesperson with a helpful mentor and moves on from being a successful salesman to become a speaker about sales in various events. The positive feedback he receives permanently increases until he gains interest in starting his own speaking business. With the support of friends and mentors, Jud and his wife Terri, who happens to be in the speaking business as well, start off with their own business. Success does not come overnight but has to be earned. Eventually, the company becomes a successful business, but after a while, the business and personal life of Jud and Terri has to face tough times, caused by environmental as well as personal exercise of influence. After all, Jud and Terri manage to get the company as well as their family out of all the troubles and build a legacy to be proud of for their children. Throughout the whole story, family, friends and mentors provide a number of advices which are the essence of what the authors want to share with the reader.

Talking about the advice given, I have to differentiate. In the first part of the book as well as at the end, the recommendations given by the authors, Ken Blanchard, Don Hutson and Ethan Willis, do not include any new realizations or even any guidelines business persons can not think of themselves without asking a book or anyone for advice.  

Examples for such self-evident guidelines are:

-           The right leader at the right time can help steer things in the right direction;
-           Making a profit is always a necessity if you want to stay in business;
-           When opportunity knocks, seize it;
-           Never let your expenses outstrip your revenue;

Frankly, even without studying any business related subject, a person with common sense does not need a book to realize that these are musts when starting and running a business.

To be fair though, the book does offer some interesting and most likely not commonly considered ideas, such as:

-           The best management includes day-to-day coaching that teaches people doing things right and redirects their efforts when they are off base;
-           Passionate people and loyal customers drive success in your organization; 
-           Everyone should be encouraged to be a leader;
-           A strength taken to the extreme can become a liability;

Furthermore, the concept of creating so-called “moments of truth” is something, every business should think about, since it can be exercised in a lot of ways and have a great impact on clients. Depending on the creativity and resourcefulness of the respective company and its people, it only takes little to create something valuable for the business.

For a reader who would like to have a look into the advice given without making the effort to read their way through the entire story of Jud McCarthy’s life, the book features the basic points at the end of each chapter in form of short phrases. These phrases reflect the conviction of the authors that the best advice are the ones given in less than one minute rather than a long essay. This belief obviously also contributed to the finding of a title for the book. Of course, advice given in such a short time can only be profound to a certain extend.

Due to that, “The One Minute Entrepreneur” is an easy and quick read. It may not be a safe guideline to establishing a successful business and the story as well as a lot of the advice given may not be new or astonishing, but it does offer some interesting ideas, which are worth considering when starting and running a business. Yet the book fails to provide certain actions to be taken to induce these ideas into an actual work environment. However, if you decide to give “The One Minute Entrepreneur” a try and eventually conclude that it was not worth reading, it will at least not have taken a lot of your time and who knows, you might just find the little idea in this book, you had not thought about before, that makes your business special.