6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business

Go to any supermarket magazine rack and you’ll encounter a treasure trove of “list articles,” which claim to give you such things as “The 7 Keys to Losing Weight,” “10 Things You Need to Do right Now to Land a Job,” and “8 Signs He’s Cheating on You.”

The reason behind the popularity of the list format is fairly straightforward; in fact, there are 2 key reasons:

1. It’s a familiar and easy format to write.
2. It’s a familiar and easy format to understand.

Most of the time, these missives are productions that are quickly slapped together and meant to be consumed quickly and discarded just as quickly.

Because of this format, there is an initial sense, in picking up John Bradberry’s first foray into writing, 6 Secrets to Startup Success, that he’s a neophyte author in need of such a crutch to map out his thoughts.

However, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that he’s taken the time to write both an engaging and informative addition to the crowd of entrepreneurial books on the shelves these days.

As the CEO of a successful consulting business, Mr. Bradberry writes from both personal experience and researched case studies. He manages, for the most part, to meld the two into a well-written narrative.

What are his six steps? Mr. Bradberry lays them out in the Introduction:

1. Ready yourself as a founder.
2. Attach to the market, not to your idea.
3. Ensure that your passion adds up.
4. Execute with focused flexibility.
5. Cultivate integrity of communication.
6. Build stamina and staying power.

If there are only six steps, one might wonder why one would need to read his entire book. But if you think about it, the key to losing weight can generally be summarized in just two steps:

1. Eat less.
2. Exercise more.

Yet there is a plethora of weight-loss books on the market because it’s not the steps that are important, so much as the mental understanding of these steps and the emotional commitment to them. This is a concept that Mr. Bradberry seems to firmly grasp; in fact, he doesn’t actually get into the meat of his hypothesis until Chapter 3.

Along the way, he provides some new examples of entrepreneurs, such as the story of Lynn Ivey’s story and her business that he weaves throughout his book. Ivey’s story, like many of the others that Mr. Bradberry provides, are stories of fairly ordinary people that have taken what the author calls the “entrepreneurial passion” and created successful ventures like Ivey’s adult day care facility.

If you are in full entrepreneurial mode, either with a fledging business or just the germ of an idea, 6 Steps provides an excellent roadmap to not just pursuing your dreams, but also to figuring out if the dream is worth pursuing in the first place.