First Business

Alan Meckler was the first person to start a venture in the commercial internet space in October, 1990. There were few means to connect to the internet back then. Yet Meckler anticipated that the internet would be a "black swan event" and that it would revolutionize all aspects of personal and commercial life. The book is a history, but also a very personal memoir of a career entrepreneur and all the difficulties one encounters with raising funds, dealing with cash flow shortages, personnel, and getting people to believe in the next big thing.

Driving to distant cities to meet with people she didn't know and pitching fashion-based ad campaigns is old hat to Marny Sands, but from the very beginning this particular trip was different. For one thing, what kind of a fashion company held a business conference in a remote place like Butte, Montana? She dutifully went to the meeting, but the man she found there definitely was like no other she'd ever seen. Tall, sexy, Italian, his very presence fired her up to fever pitch.

As humans in today's modern society, we are wired to seek more, crave more, have more, and do more. But if you slow down and get honest with yourself around your purpose and life, what do you really want? What do you really seek? As a Purpose First Entrepreneur, it's your job to seize the opportunities in front of you. Discover your purpose and create a life and business that matter. The risk is always worth it.

You may want to start a home business and don’t know where to start or don’t know if you are ready. There are many steps in starting a home business, but you may not know where to begin. Answering these questions will allow you to begin the process of moving forward with your home business.

Are you looking to start a business, or have you just started one? As we all know, most businesses fail within the first five years, so award-winning entrepreneur Adam Stott talks about the main reasons businesses fail and how to stop this from happening to you. Learning about business can be daunting, but Adam makes it easier than ever by giving you all the big ideas simply explained. Adam shares the secrets of his own business experiences to give you the tips to take your business to the next level.

Ray Zinn founded his semiconductor company without venture capital and ran it for 37 years, 36 of them profitably - an enviable record. He went blind weeks before his company went public, yet he led it for another 20 years. Tough Things First, the distillation of Zinn's astonishing career as CEO of Micrel, is a comprehensive, inspirational head-to-toe training program for entrepreneurs and leaders.

Decades ago, the Visitors descended on Earth. They claimed to bring peace and prosperity. Their real goal was the total subjugation of humankind. But humanity did not give up its only home without a fight. After a devastating war, the Visitors were driven back to Mars. Their millions of willing human collaborators were left behind. The task of hunting down these former alien collaborators and bringing them to justice falls to Federal Recovery Agents like Nathan Foster.

From the heart of Africa, a spellbinding true story of entrepreneurship, media, culture, and tradition all tastefully rolled into one! Absolute Radio is an authentic story of girls and boys who became women and men—and heroes—on the wings of a radio station. Running the course of 25 years, the story comes from the culturally stylish twin city of Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana with global footprints. It is the most tantalizing and groundbreaking body of work about Ghana’s private broadcasting industry.

In Vitagraph, Andrew A. Erish provides a comprehensive examination and reassessment of the company most responsible for defining and popularizing the American movie. This history challenges long-accepted Hollywood mythology that simply isn't true: that Paramount and Fox invented the feature film, that Universal created the star system, and that these companies, along with MGM and Warner Bros., developed motion pictures into a multimillion-dollar business.

The familiar adage that “It’s a jungle out there” applies to sellers and sales organizations now more than ever. Competitors are hungry for business; decision makers are wary of change; and the market is crowded with products and services that are barely distinguishable from one another. Meanwhile, the tried-and-true sales methods of the past are simply no longer effective in a world where customers aren’t sure whom to trust.

The First-Time Leader provides basic frameworks, processes, and tools to help first-time leaders and their teams deliver better results faster. Leading is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.

Trust Yourself First: Cultivating Self-Awareness, Confidence and Resilience, seasoned executive coach Doris Sew Hoy shares her expertise, research, and original tools of the trade curated to help you unlock your personal and professional potential. This guidebook poses thought-provoking and incisive questions to ask yourself, interspersed with Doris’ own candid musings.

More than ever, people are looking for experiences, not products. And not just any experiences—but real ones that turn transactions into engagement and materialism into experimentalism. The pandemic has changed our view of the world, shifted us away from consumerism, and made us appreciate the basic human needs of finding balance and focus. In this new era, customer experience is not just a digital experience, but a perfect combination of real life and digital interaction.

In The First Five, Patrick brings to light the realities of teaching, especially in the first five years. He immerses you in his world with personal stories that lead to lessons, questions, and exercises to help you reflect on your own journey. If we want to make a long-lasting impact, we need to know more than just what to do; we need to start sharing our stories, not just our strategies. The work we do together throughout this book and beyond will leave you feeling hopeful, empowered, and challenged. No matter where you start, know that this work is ongoing.

Louise passionately believes that all women deserve to reach their potential in every way possible. To make this a reality, all women need to make themselves the priority. Far too many women are putting everyone and everything else before themselves and paying the price. Far too many women are ignoring their own fundamental needs and feeling drained and depleted.

The Start Up Starter Kit is a fast-moving, jargon-free guide to starting and building a company you’re proud of. It will teach you the essential skills you never realized you needed, blended with the right level of fear necessary to keep you from believing your own press releases. This is not an academic guide–these are real world successes and disasters to help you create a successful enterprise.

Shhh Listen. Hear that? That's the sound of your business. The conversations taking place online and in the marketplace tell you nearly everything you need to know about your company and your customers - what people are saying about you, how they use your products, whether they'll buy or recommend your product, and how they respond to your marketing and advertising. Listening provides unrivaled insight. If you do it right, you'll have a decisive edge over your competition as you adapt faster to customer needs and market changes.

Real-time business gives companies the ability to monitor and react to changes and address problems as they occur. But no matter how sophisticated their information-gathering and data mining systems are, they're still playing catch-up. In The Power to Predict, Ranadive forecasts the next step in achieving breakthrough business performance, a new approach he calls Predictive Business: the ability to anticipate business problems and opportunities and to act preemptively.

Microsoft: First Generation uncovers the range of surprising success secrets behind the upstart company that defined the Age of Information - and reveals, once and for all, exactly what makes Microsoft tick.

Advertising veterans Mike Sullivan and Michael Tuggle unpack the poorly understood and grossly underleveraged connection between brand and culture. Filled with fascinating case studies, entertaining stories, and engaging insights, the book examines the true essence of what makes a company a challenger brand, unveils how successful challengers of all sizes use culture to create extraordinary brand distinction, and finishes with a detailed blueprint for building your own transcendent culture.