Contrary to popular imagination, starting a new small business does not always involve waltzing around in a sharp pin-stripe talking to venture capitalists about start-up funding.
Instead, it quite often involves long evenings hunched over books and magazines, or topping up on facial radiation in front of your computer screen, learning about topics which may have seemed unimaginable, even unpronounceable to your former self. Not many of us understood double-entry bookkeeping, tax law, health and safety regulation or search engine optimisation before starting our businesses, but we sure as hell had to learn them. Sure, there’s a subset of entrepreneurs who are happy to farm out as much as possible to the specialists, but as I’ve argued before, even if you can afford it, you’ll be a much more effective manager if you can understand what the specialists are actually doing.