A Selma native and businessman has written a book to help small businesses survive and thrive when competing against big companies.

Selma native Mark Peterson, authored the book ‘Guerrillapreneur: Small Business Strategy For Davids Wanting to Defeat Goliaths’ with a goal of guiding small business owners to success in the marketplace against bigger businesses.

Peterson was Selma’s first African-American winner of the Boy of the Year award and graduated from Selma High School in 1987.

He attended Dartmouth College where he obtained his MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business in 1993, and co-founded PrideRock Holding Company, Inc., a biometric and identity verification business in 2003, among other business ventures that have seen him work for and own many different types of businesses.

“When I left Selma High School back in 1987, I went off to Dartmouth, then business school shortly after that and became a strategy consultant,” Peterson said. “I spent a number of years working with some of America’s largest companies—Coca Cola, some of the country’s largest retailers—just on business strategy and how to grow their companies.”

Peterson said that experience inspired him to write his books in an effort to help out small businesses.

“Over that time period, I also got a chance to reflect on businesses that I started from the time I was here in Selma all the way up through undergrad, and thought in the back of my mind ‘wouldn’t it be nice if someone developed a business strategy book for small businesses?,’” Peterson said. “My book focuses in on trying to help the little guy — the David — take on the Goliath, and provides frameworks and business cases to show when to attack, when to be docile, when to partner, so that small businesses — like the ones we have in Selma and around other small communities — can go on to become more prosperous.”

Peterson takes examples of companies who started out small and used tactics he discusses in the book to become big and be successful, and talks about Selma in the first two chapters and how it helped him develop small business frameworks.

Peterson said a central strategy is to find a specialty and perfect it before moving on to the next thing.

“The book lays out a central strategy when competing against the big guys, and that strategy is called Niche Encirclement — focus on a small market, perfect it, dominate it and move on to the next market … that’s the central theme,” Peterson said. “The key message I want small business people take from that — and that’s the key lesson I learned in Selma — is to learn how to conserve and utilize your capital, learn how to reutilize your waste into something profitable and make that work for you.”

Peterson’s book is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

For more information, visit facebook.com/Guerrillapreneur or www.guerrillapreneur.com.