Title: Be Your Own Boss
Author: Bill McGowan
Publisher: ‎ Austin Macauley
ISBN: ‎ 1398420336
Pages: 190
Genre: Business, Career
Reviewed by: David Allen

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Shamans the world over will tell you that the remedy for many tropical poisons and plants is often found within inches of the offending agent. Or, that opportunity, money and success are, like air and water, super abundant: they are all around. The art and magic is knowing how to catch ‘them.’

Look around you. Franchises are everywhere. McDonald’s and Burger King being the most obvious and blatant examples of the same. Bill McGowan, a forward thinker and entrepreneur-extraordinaire from Australia, takes us on a delightful and supremely informative tour of his Wanderjahres, his formative business years in which he saw the writing on the wall, saw the remedial and facilitative agents of change everywhere — and did something about it.

McGowan became the founding father of Fastway Couriers, an international company based on reliable, expert handling of courier mail, business mail, and packages. McGowan, a self-starter and impressive autodidact, did his homework. He went out and did market surveys. He pored over the literature. Wherever he saw a need, he approached it. When he encountered an opportunity — more power to him! So much groundwork, so little time…

But so much ambition! With humor, and a heart of gold, Bill McGowan generously and sumptuously provides readers with sketches, theory, working plans, questionnaires and bullet-pointed To Do lists. Like-minded readers can stand on McGowan’s shoulders and strategize their very own onslaughts.

Be Your Own Boss is organized into two major sections. First there is the backstory of the company, of McGowan’s self-propelled rise to business and personal success; then there is the very useful workbook which follows, comprising the second half of the book. Readers setting out upon, or dreaming of, businesses of their own will be heartened by McGowan’s unselfconscious and mostly modest account of his own rise. The take-home lessons in this book are extremely valuable — not only to business-minded readers, but to any reader seeking personal, career, and financial liberation.

The illustrations by collaborator/cartoonist Steve Panozzo provide a suitable and breezy accompaniment to the text.  Hold on: there’s more. Readers will also cheer McGowan’s uncanny ability, time and again, to align corporate goals with societal and personal ones. Franchises can contribute to Green! A business — and hopefully this book — will be on your event horizon.