How Julia Found Happiness and Financial Success by Michael G. Colburn
“That’s a lot better method than a dart board.”
Words from the young entrepreneur Julia in Michael G. Colburn’s short book with a long title, How Julia Found Happiness and Financial Success: Your Guide to Making Money in a Service Business. The book is written in novel form, but its purpose is to share valuable lessons about starting a business, running a business and making it profitable.
Entrepreneurs by their nature are visionaries, ideas machines, thinking up products and solutions and driving, sometimes like bulls in China shops, in pursuit of those dreams. Julia is a product designer whose life is turned upside down when her husband suddenly dies. After she has a chance to regroup, she embarks on a company of her own.
She has the creative chops but not the understanding of how to run a successful business. Hence, the dart board reference — clearly producing great products and generating a good client base but shooting in the dark in terms of managing her operation.
An Author with Invaluable Experience
What better guide than Colburn, who for close to 50 years was a creative entrepreneur himself, founder of a design and engineering firm, and founder of Ideas Well Done, a company specializing in inventing.
“I made about all the financial mistakes one can make,” Colburn writes. “I thought I could save others a lot of time and aggravation if I could write a small book describing the financial tools for time and service-based businesses.”
Colburn was wise to offer his lessons disguised as a story. That’s because there is a tremendous amount of valuable data to absorb and numbers to calculate and process. This book is hardly a motivational “pep talk” — it is a no-nonsense, down and dirty blueprint for time management, figuring hours and costs vs. revenue, and developing systems for tracking and evaluating activity and performance.
In Julia’s Story, Time Is Money
In the book, Julia enlists the help of a consultant friend, Mark, who, by making simple observations and asking basic questions, exposes some of the key elements that Julia is neglecting. When pointing out, for example, that she is letting collectibles slide, she chocks it up to the thought that she is too busy and that these are repeat clients, so no need to worry. Mistake number one.
Mark stresses that Julia is in a time-based business. “Your financial success,” he says, “is entirely based on how you measure and monitor time and how you apply what your time records convey to you.”
When he later notes that Julia’s company is making less profit than other companies with similar revenue, it’s hard for her to turn the other way.
A Useful Guide for Anyone in the Business
Colburn laces his narrative with charts, spreadsheets and formulas for monitoring performance and results. He summarizes — and details — all the key tools for running a business, as basic as timesheets, to cost of employee vs. revenue generated, to product pricing strategies.
He also considers a company’s early growing pains and ponders when it might be time to change course and/or seek various sources of financing.
In How Julia Found Happiness and Financial Success, Michael Colburn has provided a practical and readable guide to helping businesspeople get a grasp of their operations and understand financial ramifications of every penny. It is sure to be a useful volume for anyone starting a business or others within a business wondering how everything works and why it works.
But it all comes back to what that very wise American writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and philosopher so aptly said a long time ago, “Time is money.”
Michael G. Colburn has spent more than 45 years founding and running businesses based on creativity and design. In 2005, he and his wife, Mary Esther Treat, launched Ideas Well Done, a firm that focuses exclusively on inventing new products and bringing them to the marketplace. Since then, he has created over 25 inventions and has patents issued in multiple countries. He lives in Vermont.
