I got my first bad review for Built To Sell this week on Amazon.com.  He gave Built To Sell 2 out of 5 stars and didn’t pull any punches:

“I was excited to order and recieve this book in the mail after reading all the positive reviews. What the hell!? Did the author pay for or write these reviews? This book is TERRIBLE. It is written in story format rather than an instructional format, so you have to read these fictional stories and try to get the “tips” or messages out of the story in order to get any usefulness out of the book. Ok, so I went though the book and wrote out all the tips on a piece of paper. Now that I am looking at the paper I see that 90% of these tips are obvious common knowledge, and the other 10% don’t apply to me.”

-Jeremy S, Manchester, U.K.

When I first read Jeremy’s review, I was disappointed but didn’t think too much of it reasoning that in the world of social media, everyone is entitled to have their say. There are 22 more positive reviews on Amazon so I thought Jeremy’s review would be irrelevant.

I was wrong.

Almost immediately after Jeremy posted his review, Built To Sell fell off  Amazon’s “entrepreneurship” category” Top 100 list and is now in the penalty box somewhere between “How to start a dog walking business” and “Fax machines made easy”. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do to kick start sales again.

It was a good reminder for me of how one person can have such a dramatic impact on results. In Jeremy’s honor, I’ve written two articles below about the impact  (good and bad) individuals can have on building a sellable business

Hire do-ers, not thinkers, for a scalable business

~ published June 29, 2010 the Globe and Mail

One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got came from an adviser of mine: “The secret to creating a valuable company is to find something you can build once and sell many times.”

The advice sounded simple but it was devilishly hard to implement. At the time, I had one of those nasty businesses that require a custom proposal for every job. Each client wanted something unique, and the variety and complexity of their requests meant I would personally have to review pitches. It seemed like we spent more time writing proposals than actually doing the work. »more

Did you find a Jerry Maguire to sell your company?

~ published June 30, 2010 the Globe and Mail

When I finally got serious about wanting to sell my events business, I asked around about how the process worked.

I soon discovered there are people who make a living selling and buying businesses. Like the Tom Cruise character in the movie Jerry Maguire, these agents go by the title of business broker, M&A (mergers and acquisitions) professional or investment banker, depending on the size of the companies they sell. »more