- 2025-01-21 13:32:00

The Starters’ Book: packed with advice

2 min

Fun to read, punchy and packed with advice about how to launch a business successfully: the Starters’ Book lives up to its promises!

Starting an entrepreneurial project is also about bringing as much enthusiasm and energy as possible into your fledgling business. And moving forward by focusing on the essentials. This same dynamism is what comes across in the Starters’ Book published by the Belgian business federation SDI*. Throughout its 192 pages, the book presents advice in a clear and playful way using visuals, infographics and captions. No waffle, just practical advice to allow business founders to get inspired without wasting time.

The right advice for starters

For Olivier Kahn, author of the book, "the challenge of the Starters’ Book was to give entrepreneurs crucial advice to help them make the right strategic, financial, commercial and legal decisions. The advice comes from real life: we interviewed hundreds of starters to cover as many topics as possible. And we present it in a highly practical way with lots of impactful images so that the book can be read in a relaxed way, anywhere and at any time."

Finance: the crux of the matter 

Among all these topics, Olivier Kahn highlights one that’s essential to the success of a project, but which starters sometimes forget: "Finance! When you launch your business, you're bursting with enthusiasm for your products or services, you want to attract customers in order to develop, but often, the amount of time spent on the numbers is very limited, partly because not many people find accounting and management all that exciting. And that's a shame, because with a bit more consideration of financial aspects and with some key pieces of advice, many projects would be doing wonderfully well."

Olivier's top tips 

Among all the other advice in the Starters’ Book, Olivier emphasises two things that are essential in his eyes: "Stop selling products and services. Instead, offer value and benefits. Similarly, forget the idea that price is the main driver of a purchase: discounts can bring your business to its knees! Leave them to others and prioritise other techniques to attract customers."

Sharing experiences: a must

And to conclude, Olivier gives us one last tip: "Share your entrepreneurial experiences! One way of doing that is by setting up mini-steering committee meetings, attended by people close to the company. Bringing together different brains is often very productive. And it can be an enjoyable occasion, for example involving a good breakfast or a drink!"

Order your copy of the Starters’ Book 

If you want to take advantage of the advice in the Starters’ Book, you can order it online.

*ASBL Fédération des Commerçants, Artisans et PME du SDI, Drève Richelle 161 K, 1410 Waterloo, Belgique – TVA BE 0471.795.627 - RPM Nivelles