Entrepreneurship Small Business

In Startup Life, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his own personal experiences with his wife, Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his 20 years of experience in this field to addresses how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.

Non-profits are big business. As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy, and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. In Five Good Ideas, 40 professionals from successful nonprofits large and small offer information, strategies for action, and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function.

The best financial advisors are well equipped to succeed regardless of market conditions. Based on interviews with 15 top advisors, each doing several million dollars worth of business every year, The Million-Dollar Financial Advisor distills their universal success principles into 13 distinct lessons. Each is explained step-by-step for immediate application by veteran and new financial professionals alike.

Did you know that if you clean just 2 houses a day/5 days a week, you could make $3,700- $5,000 a month? Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. The average house cleaning price today is between $90 to $150. Let’s go with the average of the two $120. Now 2 houses a day means $240 a day X 5 days a week = $1,200 weekly X 4.2 (weeks in a month) = $5,040! Simple. Average commercial (office/retail) cleaning price is between $220 to $450 X 2 a day = $440 to $900 a day!

You’ve got big dreams for your business, but the odds are not in your favor. You’re struggling to scale. Sometimes, it’s hard to stay profitable. You know you need expert advice to grow. CEO coach and executive thought leader Adam Coffey has been where you are. He, too, dared to dream of that elusive billion-dollar exit. Then he took his companies to triple digit growth.

The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for "security," everything we thought was "safe," no longer is. But more and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real success. Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.

In The One Minute Entrepreneur, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the number-one best selling business classic The One Minute Manager); Don Hutson, CEO of U.S. Learning; and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning, tell the inspiring story of one man's challenges in creating his own business.

Based on the finest tools, techniques, principles, and strategies offered in Awaken the Giant Within, best-selling author and peak-performance consultant Anthony Robins offers daily inspiration and small actions (exercises) that will compel you to take giant steps forward in the quality of your life.

Unsure how to differentiate yourself in a busy market without slashing profits? Worried weak sales skills will doom your small business efforts? Need to generate higher ticket averages and fewer callbacks? Joe Crisara was once a struggling home service contractor. He’s now a worldwide educator, entrepreneur, and author who is inspiring everyone from startup managers to Fortune 1000 companies with his unique process. And now he’s ready to reveal his trusted playbook to help you double your income while staying confident in your ethics.

Few construction companies fail because of poor building practice; they fail because of poor pricing practice. To succeed in construction, you have to price your jobs to cover all labor, material, and overhead expenses, pay yourself a decent salary, and make a profit that will keep your company thriving.

The world's innovation economy is broken. If you have an idea, depending on who you are or where you live, you might never get a shot. A handful of people in a handful of cities are deciding, behind closed doors, which entrepreneurs get a shot to succeed. The determining factor? Potential profit. In The Innovation Blind Spot, venture capitalist Ross Baird demonstrates how to fix the problem by helping us find better ideas, looking at people, places, and industries often overlooked.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

There can be no doubt about the credentials of Bill George, former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, who has been named one of Business Week's "Top 25 Managers". In Authentic Leadership, George lays out his plan for improving corporate America's flaws through responsible leadership.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades.

People starting out in business tend to seek step-by-step formulas or rules, but in reality there are no magic bullets. Rather, says veteran company-builder Norm Brodsky, there's a mentality that helps street- smart entrepreneurs solve problems and pursue opportunities as they arise. Brodsky shares his hard-earned wisdom every month in Inc. magazine, in the hugely popular "Street Smarts" column he cowrites with Bo Burlingham. Now they've adapted their best advice into a comprehensive guide for anyone running a small business.

Most of what we know about how ideas spread comes from best-selling authors who give us a compelling picture of a world, in which "influencers" are king, "sticky" ideas "go viral", and good behavior is "nudged" forward. The problem is that the world they describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviors stay the same. When it comes to lasting change in what we think or the way we live, the dynamics are different: beliefs and behaviors are not transmitted from person to person in the simple way that a virus is.

Earl Nightingale said that he came to his “aha” moment at the age of twenty-nine while reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich - specifically the words “we become what we think about”. Shortly thereafter he recorded The Strangest Secret which went on to earn a gold record and became the largest selling non-entertainment recording in record industry history. Think and Grow Rich is the standard against which all motivational books are measured. The book (and audiobook) has helped millions of people create their own success and realize their dreams.

Based on the author’s experience in the world of inventing and promotion, Hardcore Inventing offers the kind of advice you can only learn from experience: how to developing an idea into an invention, how to build a prototype for show, how to safeguard intellectual property, how to market both strategically and in “guerilla" mode, how find investors, and much more. And all of that is based on his IP 3 Tacitical Method which breaks everything down to Invent, Protect, Promote, and Profit.