PREFACE

      Running your own business is an armload of responsibilities. Marketing your company is still another Everest-sized bump in the road you must surmount. If you market with less than the skill of a guerrilla, you poison your business and your future. If you know what the guerrilla knows, marketing gives your business vigor and immortality,

      Although precious few know this, there actually is a way to assure that you’ll market the right way and attain the profits that are the fruits of guerrilla marketing.

      That way is to start in the right place. Many business owners start out in the wrong direction, doomed to become a depressing statistic in reports of the 50 percent of small businesses that fail the first year and the 95 percent that fail within the first five years. Many of these now forgotten companies had the goods to carry them to greatness. But they didn’t have the marketing savvy.

      There are so many businesses just like those that are now sad memories that we wrote this book to set those ventures on the right course before it’s too late. In these pages, we stand behind them, take them by the shoulders, gently cradle their heads, aim them in the right direction, then give them a nudge and watch entrepreneurial gravity go to work.

      Some of these companies are at the starting line or nearing it. Other companies are already in the race, giving it their all. All these companies can benefit bigtime from the guidance offered in this book.

      Are successful guerrilla entrepreneurs born or made? Both is the right answer. You’ll learn the answer about yourself in a few pages and you’ll discover a few minor changes you can make to bring about major results. By results, we refer to an increase in your profits and your free time. That’s our goal with this book. If it’s yours, too, you’ve hitched to the right star.

      As you go deeper into the exhilarating options for marketing your business in true guerrilla fashion, you’ll walk the walk as we talk the talk. You’ll learn about a guerrilla marketing strategy, plan one, then create one that you’ll be able to use for the next one to ten years.

      The ease and the wisdom that went into that strategy will easily translate into the guerrilla marketing calendar you create to guide you through the up and down days of a high-energy economy and put you in control—a rare experience for many business owners.

      You’ll see just how you must proceed to get the most from the internet—a giant until you realize that it’s a pussycat in disguise. We’ll help you get cozy with the internet because it now ranks up there with oxygen, water, and sunlight.

      We figure that our Guerrilla Marketing books will be a whole lot more valuable to readers now that they can start at the start as you’re about to do.