“Unleash your inner company” by John Chisholm

by Alfredo Pascual and Federico N. Fernández

If you’re looking for inspiration and practical advice to become a successful entrepreneur, read Unleash Your Inner Company. It will help you understand how you can combine passion and perseverance to take your future into your own hands.

The author, John Chisholm, provides you useful guidance and perspective. The book is structured in a way you can easily follow, a ten-step process centered on finding your own passions, looking for customer needs in those areas, finding the solutions you can provide to them, examining your own resources and advantages, and finally launching and scaling up your own start-up. It shows you how to achieve freedom, independence, and to live your life doing what you love.

One of the most stimulating parts of the book is right at the beginning, when the author emphasizes the importance of passion and perseverance. As you discover how to combine them, working on your business becomes easier and more natural. The positive feedback loop of passion and perseverance is what makes magic happen.

Reading this book will let you understand, among other things, how to spot real customer needs, and how to satisfy the gap between your customer’s current state and preferable state. The book helps you not to give up in the face of difficulties, and shows you how to use your limited resources as an advantage.

Chisholm explains how to focus on your resources, called STARS: Skills, Technologies, Assets and accomplishments, Relationships and reputation, and Strengths (as in inner strengths). You learn how you are already a technologist. You’ll also learn how to protect, develop, and leverage your mind, and how to live and work with little money.

You’ll learn how important it is to be different, because different is better than better. You learn how to find the right cofounder and build a team with cognitive diversity. You also learn about how to deal with regulations that can block you, and how common law is better for progress and society than civil law.

Throughout every chapter you’ll find plenty of rich examples. Many of those examples are from Chisholm’s personal career, such as when he survived the tragedy of the dot-com bust and what he learned from it. In addition, Q&A at the end of the chapters answer some of the questions you might have thought about while reading the previous pages.

After reading this book you’ll also know how to price your product, get a business loan, and raise capital, with an emphasis in modern-day sources of financing such as crowdfunding. This book can help you either become an entrepreneur or be a more successful one.

Chisholm finishes the book saying why entrepreneurship is ethical, quoting Adam Smith. He’ll inspire you to make the world better.

“Unleash your inner company,” by John Chisholm, Greenleaf Book Group Press, us $21.15, 413 pages, available on Amazon.