Today’s graduates face the toughest job market in 10 years. Their peers only a few years older, who just started their careers, are now back on the job hunt with few prospects. There is a highly competitive pool of applicants for companies that aren’t hiring. What options do these bright, young, ambitious people have? To wait for the economy to recover and recruiters to come knocking? Or to take that ambition and passion and turn it into something tangible? Now is the time to become an entrepreneur—take that drive and start realizing your dreams.

Yikes. What is a young go-getter to do? One of the first things that I would recommend is picking up a copy of “Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking out on Your Own”, by Robert Tuchman. I have read this book and found it to be very motivational, in fact I would have loved to have received this advice 15 years ago, when I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I may no longer be a “spring chicken” but I do consider myself to be a “young gun” (I feel younger now than I did 10 years ago!), and as an entrepreneur in my own right I agree with what Tuchman is getting at with this book. Instead of a bunch of useless cliches, Tuchman gets right to the point: you can start a business, you can make your dreams come true. With some excellent examples and anecdotes he underscores the most important part of creating a business – focus on customer service first.

I really like the chapter featuring the Seven Priorities for the First Year, a short list of basic practices that any business would do well to refresh their memory on. I believe that these seven priorities are so fundamental that they deserve to have a place in your thinking well after the first year. For example, the concept of “Building a culture of action & enthusiasm” is absolutely vital. Maintaining this culture, however, will take work, discipline, and responsible leadership but the return on this investment is incalculable. (You can read more of my thoughts on the Seven Priorities here.)

Other chapters focus on salesmanship, marketing (“Talk to absolutely everyone about what you do“), accounting, and more. In fact, this is one of the very few ‘business books’ that I have read that had a chapter devoted to creating and maintaining relationships with the vendors that support your business. This is fantastic advice, speaking from my own experience. In a ‘former life’ I built a million-dollar-plus sales position based on word-of-mouth and references from vendors that knew me and my work. This kind of insight is gold.

You can read more about this book at the Young Business Executives site (link).

What are your thoughts or tips for young entrepreneurs just starting out? Leave a comment and get a chance to win an autographed copy of Robert Tuchman’s book “Young Guns”.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Tuchman is the founder of Tuchman Sports Enterprises, a company he started out of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan at the age of 25. TSE has gone on to appear on Inc. 500’s list of “America’s Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies.” Tuchman now serves as president of Premiere Corporate , a division of Premier Global Sports. A frequent guest on “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” he has also appeared on CNN, the “CBS Morning News,” and BET. He has also been the subject of features in USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Entrepreneur Magazine. He recently had two books published, Young Guns The Fearless Entrepreneurs Guide To Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own and 100 Sporting Events You Must See Live . He writes for entrepreneur.com, rentacarnow.com, and espn.com.