There is an old adage that says, “Free advice is worth what you pay for it.” In many instances, that is true; in the case of Go It Alone, by Yale professor Bruce Judson, it is not. This book is available online at no cost and it contains a lot of good counsel.

Go It Alone is written for entrepreneurs and those with entrepreneurial inclinations. But it differentiates between more traditional entrepreneurs and the new breed — those whose businesses are characterized by:

> little or no initial investment;

> one to six employees;

> unlimited economic potential.

What could describe the establishment of a financial advisory practice any better?

As Judson notes, the implications of these criteria are significant — not the least of which is that by starting with little or no capital, the business has to generate cash from the outset. There isn’t the luxury of spending months developing your offering or seeking customers. Sound familiar?

Here is another key difference: successful go-it-alone entrepreneurs focus their efforts around their special skills. They outsource all other functions to people who can perform them better or more cheaply. Their businesses are structured as systems that allow them to spend the majority of their time on the meaningful, productive activities that take advantage of their unique strengths, such as being in front of clients instead of dealing with compliance or administration.

The author refers to this systematic approach as “extreme outsourcing,” which means farming out everything except the core functions that capitalize on the entrepreneur’s greatest capabilities. In the world of the financial advisor, the obvious outsourcing opportunities are bookkeeping, accounting, technology and information management, and office services. Less apparent are functions such as marketing, client communications and even financial planning. Technology today permits all of those services to be delivered remotely both effectively and efficiently.

Another critical element to leveraging the business opportunity is to create “relentless repeatability.” From the perspective of a financial advisor, this means having a standardized system for managing prospective and existing client relationships. This doesn’t eliminate the need to respond to individual client needs, but it does mean that the process by which those needs are identified and the solutions implemented should be well defined and practised repeatedly.

With well-documented systems fervently adhered to, non-core activities outsourced and the entrepreneur focused on what he or she does best, it should be possible to build a business that has virtually unlimited scalability. As the business grows, however, it needs to be constantly re-examined, to be put back on course and sometimes reinvented to take advantage of momentum. That demands that the entrepreneur devote time and energy to working on the business, as well as in the business, which is another key differentiator for successful entrepreneurs.

As noted, flourishing businesses have repeatable formulas that rely on a small number of variables. The business owner needs to identify the crucial leverage points and know how to push or pull on them to control momentum.

For advisors, appreciating the value of each client in terms of revenue, long-term potential and ability or willingness to make introductions is important. So is knowing how many people are in the pipeline, what the expected flow-through is, how long it will take and the net economic potential after deducting costs of establishing and maintaining the relationship.

This is the first book I have tried to read completely online; for some reason, I found that difficult. Seeing only a page at a time and having to “page down” to the next page isn’t much different from flipping through a printed version, but I found it somewhat frustrating. Maybe it was the feeling that my laptop was controlling my reading.

Alternatively, you can download an Adobe PDF copy for $10. But that defeats the purpose of having it online — or was that the expectation of the author and his publisher, Harper Collins? Of course, the Web site (www.brucejudson.com) also allows you to order a hard copy if you wish.

You’ll see that the Web site is also a bit of an advertising billboard for Google, which means it probably was designed with revenue offsets in mind.

I wouldn’t let these distractions stop you, however, from at least taking a quick look. You can pick out the chapters that are of most interest and read them.

@page_break@You’ll find enough value to justify any inconvenience. IE