Book Review: Eat Mor Chikin

By S. Truett Cathy

Eat Mor Chikin

This wonderful and inspiring book is the story of S. Truett Cathy’s life as he started and built up the fast food franchise known as Chic-fil-A. I wanted to read this book primarily because it was the story behind a company that was completely service driven. Their business model was based on customer loyalty and not customer manipulation. Reading the book made me want to tip my hat to Cathy, each chapter takes you a bit deeper into the man behind the chicken.

Cathy has over 100 foster children and he loves and supports them all. Do I see a reality show, Cathy and Jeanette plus 103. His love for life, and appreciation for honesty and integrity show through each chapter of the writing. This man puts God first in everything and has seen much success. Not often do you see such a publicly known for profit company with so much of its business model based on servitude for the Lord. Commendable if you ask me.

Eat Mor Chikin, will help you think about giving back. You will often put your decisions against his and realize areas in your life where you can offer more help or any help to those around you. I think this book is a good read for anyone let alone people who are interested in business and the Chic-fil-A history. S. Truett Cathy is an inspiring entrepreneur who we should all try to be a little more like. On another note though, I was expecting to read a bit more about the business. I wasn’t turned off when reading about the foster care, and the evangelical acts and random kindness that Cathy wrote about, I just was looking for more… meat. Good book though, I’ll keep this one around.

Rated 4 out of 5

Book Review: Twitter – Tips, Tricks, and Tweets

Twitter - Tips, Tricks, and Tweets

By Paul McFedries

Wanting to delve deeper into social networking and all the ins and outs, I decided to purchase a book to help me demystify Twitter and all the terms deriving from Twitter. Tweeting has become a new social phenomenon, similar to blogging and then Myspace & Facebook. The average person wants to jump on Twitter and just post a few things about what’s going on. Twitter when used to its full potential can be used as a vast network of up to the minute information about any topic you wish, all fed by its users or tweeters.

With that said lets talk about the book shall we? This book goes over every single detail involved in setting up a Twitter account and using it in many ways. Most people will end up thumbing through the first couple of chapters explaining account creation and setup etc but I imagine the 9 people completely ignorant to Twitter will appreciate the information.

The meat and potatoes of the book comes in handy actually. Before reading this book I was satisfied with a basic Twitter page and I only used it to broadcast my own tweets. After reading the book I had a custom Twitter background advertising many of my sites. I also learned how to utilize the powerful search features for finding tweets on any subject. My favorite tip that I pulled from the book was the listing of links that provided tweet tracking. You can find out who is talking about you, or referencing your tweets, which I didn’t know about before hand but now I find myself checking out daily. You can check out my new and improved Twitter page @larrycharlesjr and remember to follow!

This book is a great reference for the beginner to intermediate tweeter. You’ll learn the basics and a few tricks to help you promote or use Twitter. I’d lastly like to note Twitter etiquette is also covered in this book… who knew? There was a lot of information that I skipped over because it was commonly known but a fair amount of the information was useful to me. It will be on my bookshelf until someone asks to “borrow” it.

Rated 4 out of 5

Book Review: Start Small Finish Big

Start Small Finish Big

Start Small Finish Big – Fifteen key lessons to start and run your own successful business

By: Fred DeLuca

I just finished reading this inspiring book which was a page turner from cover to cover. This book has fifteen lessons that any new or soon to be small business owner should know. With each lesson presented, Fred also does a great job of either tying in his personal experience or the experiences of other former (and now famous) small business owners. For those of you who don’t know, Fred DeLuca is the cofounder of Subway. He brings you the essential guidelines for a business owner in 311 pages.

I was initially attracted to the book just by the title. Start Small, Finish Big. Every small business owner should wish to achieve that sort of success and I was no different. It wasn’t so much a how to start small and finish big tutorial for business. It was mostly a collection of proven practices that have helped many other small business owners that if you do follow or adhere to the same mindset, you yourself might see similar success. I can tell you that this collection of writing has improved my mindset and optomisim about running my business. You will see examples of some quite famous companies that started from a simple idea and some without a real plan, that evolved over time into a few of the most familiar brands that we recognize such as Kinko’s, Little Caesars and of course Subway.

I think this book is great for anyone who is a new or potential small business owner, these are valuable lessons that you cant afford to ignore. It was a pleasure to read and I might even hold on to it for a re-read somewhere in the future.

Rated 4 out of 5