Fight Outside the Box

Battling Big Box, by Henry Dubroff & Susan J. Marks, teaches niche businesses how to go head to head with retail giants. The authors’ five key ingredients are employee empowerment, effective branding, your customers and effective sales, control over your cash and vision that leads to innovation. Don’t look here for surprising contrarian assertions; instead, the authors give a common sense toolkit of best practices for small business, whose most surprising lesson is to take some things that sound like big business problems, like human resources and brand building, seriously. “From the Trenches” boxes give first hand anecdotes about building a small business.