Success Made Simple Why Amish Businesses Thrive

As I was doing some reading, I cam across this book… Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive. I always enjoy visiting different Amish communities whether they’ve been in Tennessee, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. I enjoy seeing Amish culture where families work together. For the most part the Amish work at home, though the homes are generally “farmsteads” with more land and outbuildings that the average “home business”. And the businesses are not “internet based”. In Lancaster, PA even the phones are community phones – there are (or were) no phones in inidividual homes or business places.

Here is a blurb from the book’s self description:

Business can be discouraging. According to US Department of Labor figures, only 44 percent of newly-opened firms will last four years. Amish firms, on the other hand, have registered a 95% survival rate over a five-year period. And in many cases, those businesses do remarkably well-as Donald Kraybill writes: “the phrase ‘Amish millionaire’ is no longer an oxymoron.” Success Made Simple is the first practical book of Amish business success principles for the non-Amish reader. The work provides a platform of transferable principles–simple and universal enough to be applied in the non-Amish world, in a wide variety of business and management settings.

• Learn how to develop profitable and fulfilling enterprises as Amish explain how to build fruitful relationships with customers and employees, prosper by playing to strengths, and create an effective marketing story.
• Includes interviews with over 50 Amish business owners outline the role of relationships in business and the importance of the big picture-taking in long-term goals, the welfare of others, and personal integrity.
• Offers ideas on practical application of Amish business practices to non-Amish businesses, with bullet summaries at the end of each chapter reviewing the most important take-away points

With a focus on relationship-building and the big picture, Success Made Simple offers business owners everywhere the tools for better, smarter, more successful enterprises.

I’m looking forward to getting into the book more…

The drawbacks I see for many of my visitors who are interested in “making money online” is that there’s a sense in which they wish to make money without all the hassle of building these relationships or even caring about a product. As an affiliate marketer, for instance, one can’t control the quality of a particular product batch. One is focused solely on marketing. The closest thing to “relationship building” online is social media… but the basic strategy for online marketing still is “get a name, bombard with email”. It alienates more customers than attracts them.

Can these lessons be applied online? I hope so…. But I think the book is going to prove VERY interesting.

Note: The above links are Amazon Associate links.