Building Business

Due to a range of frequent and unavoidable mistakes, only ten percent of startups make it beyond five years. In this game-changing guide, startup veteran and serial entrepreneur Gregory Shepard combines twelve startup exits, four private equity awards, and decades' worth of expert insight and industry experience—including interviews with real entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs, Air Force Fighter Pilots, and more—to present you with straightforward, actionable strategies for mapping out your startup and achieving success.

As a leader, you have work that is complex, full of ups and downs. Your ability to be resilient - to pick yourself up after setbacks and keep on going no matter the challenges - is critical not only to successful leadership but also to fostering teams, generating collaboration, and igniting your organization. In this breakthrough book, veteran consultants Joan McArthur-Blair and Jeanie Cockell show that Appreciative Inquiry can be an invaluable tool to build that resilience.

Your future as a well-paid professional within a service-based industry is in serious jeopardy. Whether it be real estate, mortgage, insurance, wealth management, or similar, it is time to pay attention to what is happening. Little by little, your customers are warming up to the easy, safe, convenient and non-committal benefits of your complete or partial replacement by ever-advancing technology offerings. I introduce to you a new, or alternative method, The Upstream Model, which allows you to leverage the pros of cold-market (scalability) with the pros of warm-market (relationships).

Startup Boards draws on the authors' experience and includes stories from board members, startup founders, executives, and investors. Any CEO, board member, investor, or executive interested in creating an active, involved, and engaged board should listen to this audiobook—and keep it handy for reference.

As Lawrence Ingrassia shows in this timely and eye-opening audiobook, a growing number of digital entrepreneurs have found new and creative ways to crack the code on the bonanza of physical goods that move through our lives every day. They have discovered that manufacturing, marketing, logistics, and customer service have all been flattened - where there were once walls that protected big brands like Gillette, Sealy, Victoria’s Secret, or Lenscrafters, savvy and hungry innovators now can compete on price, value, quality, speed, convenience, and service.

In Anticipate Failure, Lak Ananth—CEO of global venture capital firm Next47—describes the most common patterns of failure in innovation. He starts with the premise that building a business based on innovation is a perilous endeavor, and failures big and small are always around the corner. Ananth then dives into instances of failures, guiding the listener to understand root causes. Finally, he provides listeners with insights and coaching that will enable them not just to avoid failure, but to anticipate it and then get through it on the way to success.

Business and organizational leaders spend well over half of their professional time engaged in this process. It is the way they do deals, lead employees, and manage relationships. Most leaders learn to negotiate on the job through a long process of trial and error. In today’s competitive marketplace, there is no time for experimentation, nor room to make mistakes. The good news is by mastering negotiation, the next level of success is actually closer than it appears. The actionable advice and practical guidance offered in this book give a roadmap for every type of negotiation.

Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font, or color scheme, and is essential listening for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it's time for a change. Listeners will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, and how to make use of knowledge, metrics, and management systems in order to build and protect a brand's Distinctive Assets. Building Distinctive Brand Assets is divided into three sections that capture the processes involved in brand asset creation, implementation, and ongoing management.

Do you wish you had more qualified, committed, and mission-oriented leaders in your church to share the ministry workload? Do you have a passion for cultivating the God-given leadership gifts in others? Most pastors say that the need to identify and develop leaders is critical to the health and growth of their church, yet most churches do not have an intentional plan for doing this.

As a professional realtor, it's easy to forget that you're not just selling real estate, you're running a business. Chances are, the training you've received has been focused on regulations and legal issues, but did nothing to increase your sales, marketing, and financial savvy. This book will change all that. It's time to start thinking like an entrepreneur. In Blueprint, Garry Creath and Chris Scott show you how to develop a solid business plan, set long- and short-term goals, research a potential market and structure, track your finances, and much more.

A brand's meaning—how it resonates in the public heart and mind—is a company's most valuable competitive advantage. Yet, few companies really know how brand meaning works, how to manage it, and how to use brand meaning strategically. This groundbreaking book provides the illusive and compelling answer. Using studies drawn from the experiences of Nike, Marlboro, Ivory, and other powerhouse brands, the authors show that the most successful brands are those that most effectively correspond to fundamental patterns in the unconscious mind known as archetypes.

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.

Each and every one of us has a unique perspective on what it takes to be a successful leader. And we all understand that there is no cookie cutter formula that will hand you the magic keys to unlocking a high-performance culture. The 9L's will expound on the key principles, the core concepts that each and every person can apply and use, no matter what their background or leadership beliefs are!

It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors. Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management - by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. McDargh guides the listener through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in.

When it comes to estate planning and the effective transfer of wealth, most discussions involving the terms wealth and money use those terms interchangeably. Although the two are not the same, most estate planners today do not even broach this concept with their clients or include the less-tangible aspects of wealth as they draft an estate plan. They simply develop an estate plan that prepares the family's financial assets to be dumped, divided, deferred, and dissipated among the members of the next generation.

In today's world, there is a permanent advantage to becoming known in your field. Those who are known get the customers, the better jobs, and the invitations to exclusive opportunities. But can anybody become known? In this path-finding book, author Mark Schaefer provides a step-by-step plan followed by the most successful people in diverse careers like banking, education, real estate, construction, fashion, and more.

Tony DiSilvestro is the master at experience creation. He’s scaled dozens of businesses and shares everything you need to know about how to do the same. In The Business Scaling Blueprint, DiSilvestro walks you through exactly how to apply these principles to your own business. He is the founder of over thirty-one businesses including Ynot Italian, Ynot Build and Design, Ynot Wind and Solar, and Employee Launch.

Since the boom of social media in the mid-2000s, tens of millions of people have started their own platforms in hopes of creating success on their own terms. But with great visibility comes great vulnerability. We become riddled with self-doubt and trapped performing a version of what we believe will be acceptable to others—optimized for more external approval and algorithmic success. What if the mere act of being followed—including the criticism, judgment, and expectation social media creates—could actually become a tool for your personal growth?

From disengaged employees to underserved customers, business failures invariably stem from a culture problem. In The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change, acclaimed culture transformation expert and global executive Siobhan McHale shares her proven four-step process to demystifying culture transformation and starting down the path to positive change.

A culture of trust for all companies large and small is invaluable. Trust turns deflection into transparency, suspicion into empowerment, and conflict into creativity. And what many have learned unfortunately is that no enterprise is too large or too successful to withstand a lack of trust within its walls. In The 10 Laws of Trust, JetBlue chairman and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Joel Peterson explores how a culture of trust gives companies an edge.