The Sole Trader Handbook
The Sole Trader Handbook
The Sole Trader quick start handbook will be your companion and guide as you embark on one of the most challenging and exciting journeys of your life, starting and running your own business. If you need that extra nudge to get you started then this is the book for you. Turn to Sole Trader when you need encouragement and inspiration. When you are not sure what next steps to take, use this book to find out whom to contact and where to go for further support. In Sole Trader you will discover why it is important to develop yourself along with your business; you will learn why market research and your customers are all-important and how to market your product or service. Business finances, such as keeping records, working out a cashflow and calculating your break-even point are covered using worked examples to clarify explanations. The final chapter offers an annotated template to get you started with your Business Plan.
Author - Sue Hunter
Author - Sue Hunter
Sue has worked with young people and sole traders for many years, encouraging and supporting them to start and grow their businesses. Sharing their hopes and dreams, and their problems along the way. She has distilled the learning into this simple book so that others might benefit and avoid the common pitfalls that result in many new businesses failing before they have had a chance to show the world what they can do.
Reviews
“This concise 119-page book by Sue Hunter, is described by her as ‘..a compact and easy to read guide for those contemplating self-employment.’ The author is well qualified to write such a volume, having been working with small businesses and sole traders as a business and training adviser for the past 12 years.
The book is designed not only to encourage and support people looking to start their own business, but to help them avoid the most common pitfalls. Divided into six easily readable and well presented sections, topics covered include market research and marketing; pricing, budgeting and cashflow; record keeping; and producing a business plan.
The printing and layout of the book is very clear and inviting, presenting the information in small, easily digestible portions, and internet links are dotted throughout the text wherever further help would be useful. Tables are used to encapsulate information to which this type of presentation is suited, and guidance is given to the writing and utilisation of questionnaires in market research. Advice on the legal side of running a small business is clearly presented, including obligations with regards to insurance, and the reader is also directed to a website which provides help with banking.
Overall, Sue Hunter has written a useful and very readable guide for anyone contemplating setting up a small business in this difficult climate, and will be a most welcome help to those already up and running”
Lymington Times — 12/3/2011
"Napoleon may well have called Britain an Island of shopkeepers at the end of the seventeenth century, but by the end of the nineteenth century those same shopkeepers and their descendents had developed their entrepreneurial skills to help make the British Empire the greatest the world had ever known. If Britain is to be great again it will not be thanks to her politicians but to the entrepreneurial skills of her people. Sue Hunter's deceptively simple little book will do far more to prepare the entrepreneurs this country desperately needs to make her great again, than any other book that I have read."
P. Torkington - Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Politics Liverpool University
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"Many years as a chief executive has convinced me that the only way out of our current economic malaise is to create the environment in which men and women with new ideas and inventive minds can flourish. It is imperative however, that their enthusiasm is channelled in the right direction and educated with the requisite knowledge before it is buried beneath red tape and the complexity of legal requirements.
This little book is the best and simplest guide that I have come across to enable anyone with ambition to transform their dreams into reality."
Alan Blair MBE
"Sue Hunter has such a comprehensive and complete grasp of her subject that she is able to communicate her ideas with commendable simplicity. Her literary style flows effortlessly excluding no one from benefiting from the wealth of her experience. It is an indispensable guide for anyone who has the courage, but lacks the knowledge, to go it alone and set up their own business. For them it should be mandatory reading."
F. Rayner — former Dean of Studies at the National Radio, Television and Communications Centre at Hatch End.
"In these very difficult times when more and more people have lost their jobs, been made redundant, or simply failed to find employment my surgery seems to be fuller than ever before with patients suffering from clinical depression. Not everyone is capable of setting up or founding their own business, but some are and when they are, I am delighted that I can recommend Sue Hunter's brilliant little book, so much more valuable than prescribing yet another dose of anti-depressants."
R. M. Howes GP.
Cover and book design by RULER www.thisisruler.net
First published: December 2010 Paperback, 120 pages at £6.95 by Dash House Publishing: