LAURA SLATTERYreviews Common Sense Rules: What You Really Need to Know About BusinessBy Deborah Meaden; Random House Business Books; £19 (€22)

HERE’S THE pitch: successful holiday park operator wins big by selling out at the top of the market and earns her place as the token female “Dragon” on the BBC2 show Dragons’ Den, where she can cherry-pick all the “crazy, but it just might work” business ideas and use her new-found celebrity to front a book about where it all went right, and how you can do it too.

Deborah “I’m out” Meaden is looking for €22 for 265 pages. So, is it time to practise those sceptical eyebrow manoeuvres and put your tongue on standby for a round of Dragon-like tut-tutting, or should you make an investment before everyone else beats you to the bookstore?

In the spirit of lesser “how to” books than Common Sense Rules, let’s consider the dos and don’ts.

Don’t buy this book if:

you’re hoping for Meaden to dish the dirt on fellow Dragons Duncan Bannatyne, Peter Jones, Theo Paphitis and James Caan;

you don’t run a business, are not thinking of starting a business and have never considered starting a business;

you believe “360 degree thinking” means you’ll succeed where rivals with shorter-angled mental capacities will fail.

On the other hand, do buy this book if:

you’re looking for Meaden’s blunt opinion of Dragons’ Den contestants, including even the odd dig at the ones she has actually invested in;

you run a business, want to start a business or think dabbling in some light entrepreneurship could be a good “fallback” plan should you be made redundant;

you believe “360 degree thinking” is cliched nonsense used by not-very-bright people suffering from high-esteem.

For there is much in Meaden’s gently ambling tome that will be worth the effort: her “common sense” is not revolutionary, but it’s also not “common” enough to make this book as unnecessary as, say, a “Q-Top” lid for preserving cucumbers, which was just one of the many wrong-side-of-quirky Dragons’ Den pitches that Meaden has rejected.

The book is punctuated by punchy “business cliches I could live without” and it’s hard to disagree with her choices, which include such hoary old sayings as “when one door closes, another opens”, “be proactive, not reactive” and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

The kind of world-weary affectation that leads business owners to proclaim that “every day is a new challenge” is dismissed with the matter-of-fact observation that “every day is not a new challenge, because that would be impossible to sustain”.

Referring to “little issues” such as customer complaints or delivery problems as “challenges” is quite simply wrong, Meaden asserts.

Her own background is the perfect case study in how to inculcate commercial steeliness from an early age. After her parents split up when she was two, her mother would take her and her sister to work with her because there was no money for a childminder. Instead of filling in colouring books they would make themselves useful. By the time Meaden was 10, she had chalked up stints counting money in an amusement centre, stocktaking in a chemist’s shop and handing out tickets in a bingo hall – “more business experience than some people get in a lifetime”.

Her story of serial entrepreneurship began proper at the age of 19, when she started importing ceramics from Italy. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as being too successful, and it soon became obvious that the retailers who couldn’t get enough of her products would eventually cut out the middlewoman and import the goods directly.

Knowing when to call it quits (a trick she says many proud entrepreneurs fail to pull off), Meaden immediately wound down the business and started again by opening a franchise for Italian clothing firm Stefanel, before eventually joining her mother and stepfather’s leisure company, Weststar Holidays.

She staged a management buyout (MBO) in 2000 and sold the business in 2007 for a cool £83 million (€95.9 million), a sum which hundreds of bank-rejected Dragons’ Den contestants are now doing their best to run down.

Meaden’s business career thus covers all the bases and gives her a sharp sense of all the real “challenges”. She is scathing about the vanities and delusions of the wannabes she encounters: from those who demand she sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before they deign to reveal their top secret life-changing business idea, to the cash-seekers who show a distinctly un-entrepreneurial reliance on one state grant after another. It is also perhaps not the best idea to declare to your potential business angel that you are “the ideas person, not a numbers person”.

Then there is how to deal with those awkward moments once your business is established: how to make sure the deputy managing director knows he’s not in line for the top job (some people are “born to be second-in-command”); how to stop a convivial working atmosphere from mutating into a customer-alienating clique; and, most importantly, how to walk away from it all.