Entrepreneurship Small Business

Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty is Harvey Mackay's last word on how to get what you want from the world through networking. For everyone from the sales rep facing a career-making deal to the entrepreneur in search of capital, Dig Your Well explains how meeting these needs should be no more than a few calls away.

Why do so many business owners dread looking at the numbers? Financial statements, ledgers, profit and loss reports--many avoid these and treat them like junk mail and phone solicitors. Nevertheless, it’s true--you’re not a numbers person. How can you learn to make sense out of all this Greek? This easy-to-follow guide demystifies your company's financial dashboard: the Net Income Statement, Cash Flow Statement, and Balance Sheet.

The future of your nonprofit rests on successful fundraising: discover how to do it right. Being part of a nonprofit is one of the most inspiring and passionate lines of work someone can do. But as passionate as you are and as hard as you work, your nonprofit won’t be able to achieve its goals without enough funding. This is a struggle many nonprofits experience, and they end up wasting a lot of energy on ineffective strategies that just don’t seem to work. You need to understand the best practices out there that will help your organization access the funds it needs to keep going.

Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose. In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of "category kings".

Adopter les principes de Sun Tzu, c'est devenir un maître dans l'art de la guerre commerciale ! Il y a plus de deux mille ans, Sun Tzu écrivait L'Art de la guerre, traité de stratégie militaire empreint de sagesse. Sa philosophie unique a traversé les siècles et influencé la pensée de leaders d'horizons variés, jusqu'aux chefs d'entreprise les plus brillants de notre temps. Dans ce guide destiné aux entrepreneurs en devenir, le journaliste économique Mark Smith transpose L'Art de la guerre au monde des affaires.

The Business of Expertise, David’s previous book, set the stage by suggesting a narrow focus and then capitalizing on the patterns that emerge from repeated application of your expertise. This book builds on that work by suggesting how to craft a consulting practice with those insights.

Six-Figure Pet Business is a business success book for dog trainers, dog and cat groomers, dog day care owners, and other pet service providers. Learn how to create the foundation for success, ensure business success from the very start, remove the roadblocks to let financial success in, hire the right staff members, and more!

Mark Siebert, franchise expert and author of Franchise Your Business, flips his script from franchising your existing business to offer entrepreneurs a comprehensive guide to succeeding as franchisees. The Franchisee Handbook tells listeners how to take a systematic approach to assess and invest in franchise opportunities, so they end up with the right fit for their entrepreneurial style. Sharing tales from the trenches and real-world anecdotes from successful franchises, Siebert lays out everything you need to know before signing with well-known franchises.

To achieve unimaginable business success and financial wealth-to reach the upper echelons of entrepreneurs, where you'll find Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sara Blakely of Spanx, Mark Pincus of Zynga, Kevin Plank of Under Armour, and many others-you have to change the way you think. In other words, you must develop the Entrepreneur Mind, a way of thinking that comes from learning the vital lessons of the best entrepreneurs.

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.

As anyone in business knows, strategic planning is critical to achieving long-term success. In How to Be a Power Connector, super-networker Judy Robinett argues that strategic relationship planning should be your top priority.

It has never been harder to find good employees. Government handouts and programs, publicly traded behemoths with an insatiable appetite for front-line staff, and a burgeoning gig-economy has made hiring extremely hard for small business owners. The golden question is how do we attract good talent and then retain them long-term? How do I determine rates of compensation for my highest performers that are always demanding raises? How do I scale my business without having to constantly micro-manage my Team when they are in the field working? The answer is Pay-For-Performance (P4P).

Cara Alwill Leyba's riveting voice and kinship with her audience drove the self-published success of Girl Code, a book that encouraged women to support each other in the business community. Now her many fans are ready to take the next step: building sustainable confidence from the ground up. Most women who are insecure look for the equivalent of a sugar rush, such as telling themselves they're better than other people or changing the way they look. But those tricks won't protect them from losing confidence in the future.

Great startups don't waste time on small stuff. If you study the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried. But most needed years of experimentation to find their growth levers. This book aims to shortcut that process. Generic tactics like paid ads, SEO and referral programs will only get you so far. Growth levers are things like the professional photographs that made tens of thousands of customers trust AirBnb when they otherwise wouldn’t—a crucial move that unlocked explosive growth.

The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than 15 languages, the authors' clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Wisdom lies in recognizing a team's unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits.

In 1986, fresh out of college, Paul Downs opened his first and last business: a small company that built custom furniture. With no idea how to run a business or how to build custom furniture, Downs spent a year teaching himself the business, and in 1987 he hired his first employee. That was when things got complicated.

When pioneering business journalist and Inc. magazine editor at large Bo Burlingham wrote Small Giants, it became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem - how to handle the pressure to grow. Now Burlingham is back to tackle an even more common problem - how to exit your company well. Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs leave their businesses and all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated.

The nonprofit sector of our society is growing rapidly, creating a major need for guidelines and expert advice on how to manage these organizations effectively. Management guru Peter F. Drucker provides excellent examples and explanations of mission, leadership, resources, marketing, goals, people development, decision-making, and much more. Included are interviews with nine experts that address key issues in the booming nonprofit sector.

The best entrepreneurs balance brilliant business ideas with a rigorous commitment to serving their customers' needs. If you read (or listen) to nothing else on entrepreneurship and start-ups, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you build your company for enduring success.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.