4 out of 4 stars
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Empowered: The Business Owner's Guide to Leadership & Success is a look at how you can make your business run more smoothly by leading more effectively. Dominica Lumazar provides a brief bio that leads up to starting her own business, then becoming a consultant helping other businesses with marketing and leadership solutions. The majority of Empowered is dedicated to a broad spectrum of advice from Mrs. Lumazar that is roughly divided into three parts: Leading for success, which covers you as a boss and a person. Business value, relationships and marketing advice. Business clarity, your habits as a boss, and looking at where you and your company are going.
The thing I liked best was that she gets specific with her advice. She gives point by point guidelines for what to look for and what you as the boss can do to make positive changes in your company. Other books of this type that I've read never seemed to get especially detailed. Having specific points of your business to check for correction increases the value of the book. That's not to say she gets bogged down in the details. She keeps the book interesting with examples from her own experiences and some good general advice as well. I particularly liked that she provided links to specific sites when she had them.
The thing I disliked most was that Mrs. Lumazar occasionally drops into “corporate-speak.” It's a minor gripe and only happens a few times. It just bugs me when you call firing someone “personnel reallocation” or some other word or phrase designed to somehow soften an unavoidably rough situation. I prefer more raw truth. That is absolutely a personal preference though, and more of a problem with corporate culture in general than Empowered. In the end, the occasional uses of more “careful” language were a minor annoyance at best. It's still a fantastic guide to many different steps you as a business owner can take to help your company grow.
Empowered proves that there can be truth in advertising. Mrs. Lumazar provides a useful guide that is meant to help everyone who runs a business. From someone starting a business in their garage to someone already running a large company, this book has stratagems for increasing success. I especially enjoyed that even though she recognizes that bosses do have to fire people sometimes, she views employees as more than interchangeable pieces.
This book is a 4 out of 4. The title says it all. This book is by a business person for business people. While I'm more of a “solo-preneur” than an entrepreneur, I still found more than a few of her tips and strategies useful in my own life. She doesn't add in unnecessary filler to pad out her book. Every chapter focused on a different aspect of business or marketing and how to improve it. The book is also professionally edited.
If you're any kind of entrepreneur, this book contains helpful tips for you. Mrs. Lumazar covers everything from improving customer relations to mindsets that can help you survive the grind to specific websites you can visit for help with specific problems.
She also offers her services as a consultant, if you need that live help. This could have backfired on her, turning the book into nothing more than a shameless commercial. Instead, it is genuinely great advertising for her, as she conveys her ideas so thoroughly and clearly that her services are simply an extension of the help she offers in Empowered.
I would recommend this book to anyone who runs a company they want to improve. I found it a down-to-Earth guide to not only improving your bottom-line but your own life outside of work as well.
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Empowered
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