These columns provide an enlightening perspective on the business of being an entrepreneur. For a start, that's the real business of the businessman and woman - being enterprising, spotting and seizing opportunities.
Opportunity abounds. There's nothing else in common between running conference centres for other businesses, making fabrics for office furniture, providing stock-taking services, forecasting the business future, etc, etc. Each provided an opening that non-entrepreneurs would have ignored or rejected.
Everybody has probably had one or several business ideas of a similar nature: a product or service which (like puncture-proof, environmentally friendly bicycle tyres) is either not being provided, or not being provided well. But there's a huge jump between seeing the possibility of a unique business and creating it.
For virtually all the entrepreneurs featured, that giant leap was hazardous, with a grave threat of falling short. The despair felt by the founders of the Harrogate Management Centre in their first, money-losing months has been experienced by many others. Persistence in the face of adversity is indispensable.
Persistence beyond adversity is equally vital. These entrepreneurs are perfectionists. Good is never good enough. Camborne Fabrics, with its costly efforts to improve on a 97% next-day delivery record, is only one example of the continuous entrepreneurial drive to create a better business with even more satisfied customers.
That emphasis on customers wouldn't have figured anything like so prominently a decade ago. Customer-first policies have been preached to big companies by management gurus, but small entrepreneurs reached the same conclusion through practical necessity. Like being good, just having customers isn't enough today.
The only sure defence against the competition, to which the dissatisfied modern buyer will turn in a flash, is to make good customer service into excellent. It's the toughest task in business, because no two customers are the same, and because no system will ever generate perfect service. Only people can - and they often fail.
That's why people have moved into the forefront of business thinking, along with the customer. If you don't satisfy and train the men and women who work with and for you, they're most unlikely to satisfy the customer, still less to produce excellence. Big companies agonise over this fact - but here smaller firms have the edge.
The proprietor can get to know everybody, not just by name, but as real people with a real contribution to make. Talk to employees in any large company, and you'll be struck by two things: the depth of their knowledge of the business and how it can be improved: and management's lack of interest in that profitable know-how.
The large company concentrates too much on profit, too little on the non-financial elements that create that bottom line. In contrast, the entrepreneur, however good at the basic business, often lacks a sound grip on the business basics - among them, stringent cash control, earning a goodly return on capital and minimising debt.
Return on capital is an equation. Earning a decent profit is only half the battle. Keeping the capital employed as low as possible is the other half. Achieving rapid growth carries risks: growing revenues fast while restraining overheads and maintaining effective controls is the demanding, but perfectly feasible task.
It's become much more feasible because of developments like the personal computer, business information services of all kinds, advanced telecommunications, and fragmenting markets - all of which mean that the smaller business can go for growth with far fewer of its traditional disadvantages.
As a London Business School survey showed, however, many small companies aren't keen on expansion. Even among those who were, a quarter of the study lived by the philosophy : 'I am very keen to expand the business and then find a buyer to buy me out' (which happened to the conference centre company, Style).
Though others say that 'I am very keen to expand the business and continue to run it myself' takeover may still be the end-result. That's no tragedy. Even if the entrepreneur doesn't stay on, making one small fortune provides the wherewithal to start on the road to another - and there's always another road.
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