Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

April 15, 2024
Brisk yet comprehensive, Campbell’s guide to launching, building, and eventually selling startups offers a wealth of advice, action steps, red flags, and hard-won wisdom for each step of the cycle laid out in its title—a cycle that Campbell has lived, with successes and failures both, as have members of the Startup Club of entrepreneurs whose experiences power the text. Campbell’s guidance is clear, practical, and inspiring throughout, a crucial road map laying out best practices for finding the idea that can power a new business (“The best ideas solve problems”) to building a team (“Do-it-yourself is more of an attitude than it is a skill set”), ramping up (“build your human resources, your funding—everything around the 10X mindset”), and knowing when and why to sell (“once you get some entrepreneurial success, take some chips off the table, then rinse and repeat”).
The result is illuminating, a book that makes no false promises of an easy path to success but instead lays out the processes for incubating an idea into a startup and that startup into a business that beats the odds. Campbell writes with crisp authority, sharing some telling anecdotes from his own career but wasting few words as he points readers to the big questions related to each stage of Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. The Start section, for example, digs into how to test and nurture an idea, catch a “new technology or regulatory wave,” avoid others’ mistakes, and “build a moat” around a startup so that it has time to succeed first as a business and then to scale up, exponentially.
Crucial to Campbell: working from the start to build systems and teams that can move a startup toward “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant” Stage Gates—and then scale up “in zeros.” The book’s structure is smart and intuitive, with each of the four major sections addressing “Story, “People,” “Money,” and “Systems,” each offering unique insights for macro goals while deftly reinforcing what’s laid out elsewhere. This is a thorough, indispensable tool.
Takeaway: A crucial roadmap to founding, growing, and selling startups.
Comparable Titles: Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder, Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s From Impossible to Inevitable.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Starred review from May 15, 2024
Campbell offers a guide to success for startup owners and entrepreneurs. The author, an entrepreneur who's successfully started and exited a series of tech-oriented businesses, shares some of his secrets, breaking his process down into the four imperatives that provide his primer's title. The book's short chapters cover a variety of topics, including coming up with successful ideas, proving your concept, scaling quickly, knowing when to sell, and starting all over again. The author imparts plenty of firsthand knowledge, supplemented by input from experts from all walks of business life discussing both successes and failures. Some of these experts include Richard Hanbury, who created Sana Health following a near-fatal car accident; John Mullins, whose specialty is customer-funded companies; and Stacy Spikes, one of the co-founders of MoviePass. The chapters are peppered with pithy pullout quotes that actually seem helpful: "Banks aren't the only organizations with money"; "The cheapest way to fund your business is by running it lean"; "Who you pitch to is as important as what you pitch." This attention to detail, in addition to the reader-friendly organization of the book, helps to elevate this business guide above the many competing books in the genre. But what really distinguishes the work is Campbell's expertise and his wonderful ability to write for his audience. The book is a breezy read--Campbell can be blunt, but he's funny and engaging, too. His entertaining guide is filled with all sorts of useful tidbits and insights; unlike some how-to books, filled with ego-driven anecdotes and not much useful information, this is a must-read for those starting their first business as well as more seasoned professionals looking for a quick reminder of some of the keys to business success. Useful info and a readable structure make for a top-notch how-to for business owners.

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