First Business

The world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition. Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success.

Construction industry business coach, speaker, and author, Shawn Van Dyke, has taken the core concepts of Mike Michalowicz's Profit First and customized them to address the specific needs of the construction industry. Profit First for Contractors addresses the major struggles contractors face and provides clear and actionable guidance on how to overcome them. Shawn shows contractors how to go from simply getting by to becoming permanently profitable.

Content Inc. is the go-to guide to building a solid small business by establishing a loyal audience before you sell products or services. In this audiobook, Joe Pulizzi provides a lower-risk, more effective way to create a path to startup success by re-engineering the process that so often leads to failure: You’ll learn how to develop valuable content, build an audience around that content and then create a product for that audience. Content Inc. walks you through the entire process.

How do you run a big meeting? Help your employees meet their goals? Hire someone? Master these skills and more with this indispensable guide to the first 30, 60, and 90 days in your new management role. Jump into the job with confidence as you navigate the dos and don'ts of first-time managers, learn to communicate effectively, delegate responsibilities clearly, and build the 5 qualities all great bosses have.

Many owners of lawn care and landscape businesses found their companies on the belief that they would make more money working for themselves than they would as employees. Dedicated to the maintenance and beautification of properties, they believe that their hard work and expertise in softscape, hardscape, irrigation, or snow plowing will guarantee their success. But technical knowledge alone won't generate profit or help a company grow.

Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.

If you want to start and grow a landscaping business or if you want to demolish self-limiting beliefs and transform yourself into a warrior of a self-employed lawn and be a landscape contractor, then this audiobook will change your life.

In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you'll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. What do you want to learn?

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire.

Learn to conquer every challenge like a pro with the clear, candid advice in The First-Time Manager. For nearly four decades, this trusted guide has brought newcomers up to speed on the nitty gritty realities of managing people. The updated seventh edition delivers new information that helps you manage across generations, use online performance appraisal tools, persuade with stories, oversee remote employees, build a team dynamic, match a boss’ style, and more.

High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a groundbreaking guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people's opinions (FOPO).

It’s time to stop feeling guilty and lean into the sacrifice. Your willingness to chase your dreams is what sets you apart, and your personal competitive advantage and the strategies presented in True Founder will help you double down on the sacrifice.

The Miracle Morning for Network Marketers uses Hal Elrod's global phenomenon to give you the strategies, mindset, and daily rituals that match the top 1 percent of all network marketers, so you can grow yourself and your business faster than you ever thought possible. Once you've nailed down your miracle morning, Hal Elrod and Pat Petrini's book shows you exactly what you should be doing with "the rest of your day".

Martha Piper and Indira Samarasekera had vastly different career paths on their way to becoming the first (and so far only) female presidents of two of Canada's largest and most respected research universities and directors of some of the nation's largest market cap companies, but what they had in common was their gender, their willingness to take risks when leadership opportunities presented themselves, and a work ethic second to none. It was not always easy, pretty, or fair, but it was always the result of choosing to answer the call to lead.

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

You Win in the Locker Room First draws on the extraordinary experiences of Coach Mike Smith and Jon Gordon - consultant to numerous college and professional teams - to explore the seven powerful principles that any business, school, organization, or sports team can adopt to revitalize their organization.

Having lived nearly her entire life below the poverty line before going on to attain wealth and success as an entrepreneur and investor, Arlan Hamilton knows that money is power—but not for the reasons most people believe. Money is power, she says, because it provides us with options: to pursue our passions, take risks, and change our situation in life.

People don’t open restaurants just because they want to start a business. People open restaurants because they are building a dream. You can create the restaurant of your dreams. You can also be profitable, pay your vendors, your staff, and yourself, and savor the joys of hospitality without stress and uncertainty.

Here's the hard truth about leadership: It either forces you to get stronger or it slowly destroys your life. There is no in-between. Kevin Lawrence has discovered 17 habits that allow any leader to transcend the perils of success and keep achieving - habits that have already helped hundreds of CEOs and executives become stronger and more resilient.

Business partnerships are wonderfully complex entities. As with all relationships, they are vulnerable and subject to fallibility. If you think the fact that one in every two marriages in the United States ends in divorce (that's one every 36 seconds!) is unbelievable, then consider this: The number is significantly higher for business partnerships; about 70 percent of them fail. As a business partnership relationship coach, my mission is to help flip this fail/succeed ratio.