Small Business Development

Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast.

In 2008, with no event production experience and two college degrees between the four of them, Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz became business partners and set out to build a global events company. With passion and tenacity, they began cold calling as many inspiring company founders as they could and tried to convince them to attend their first event. In the beginning, only nineteen people said yes.

An Insider's Perspective on the Chief of Staff explores every aspect of the Chief of Staff role in a straightforward and engaging way. Author Emily Sander provides one-of-a-kind insights, combining her own experience as a Chief of Staff with perspectives gained from colleagues and her coaching clients. Sander offers her unique perspective on how the role fits into the organizational big picture, with real-life examples to drive home her points.

Founder of Slutty Vegan, Pinky Cole has spent her life dreaming of financial security. After a fire destroyed the New York City restaurant she put everything into building, she was back to square one, working hard for someone else's dream. Her life has been a series of lessons that have given her the tools to build a business that drew the attention of some of the world's top investors. In I Hope You Fail, Pinky tells her own story to empower you in yours.

In the wake of economic downturn, foreign competition, spiking oil prices, and even war, American business throughout this decade has been thrust into crisis. To improve their performance, corporations everywhere have adopted a wide range of tools and techniques, yet many continue to struggle. Going Lean points to a better way.

There's a common strategy used by the fastest growing and most successful businesses of our time. These companies are building their entire customer experience around their digital products, delivering software that is simple, intuitive, and delightful, and that anticipates and exceeds the evolving needs of users. Product-led organizations make their products the vehicle for acquiring and retaining customers, driving growth, and influencing organizational priorities. They represent the future of business in a digital-first world.

It’s hard succeeding in the trucking industry without the right knowledge. This book tables all the lessons Key and her trucking boss husband learned from over a decade of experience for you to be profitable quickly.

Networking is often considered a necessary evil for all working professionals. With social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at our disposal, reaching potential investors or employers is much easier. Yet, these connections often feel transactional and agenda-driven, leaving professionals feeling burnt out and stressed out.

It's easy for scale-ups, giddy from early startup success, to get ahead of themselves and stumble. It's even easier to be slowed down by the many forces of resistance working against them: drag, inertia, friction, and waste. Drawing on a mastery of lean-based methods for achieving maximum effect with minimum means, private equity operators Matthew E. May and Pablo Dominguez provide listeners with a powerful framework of universally applicable principles that enable any company to effectively accelerate its ability to scale and grow.

Scott Wozniak leverages his decades of brand-building experience within some of America’s most-loved companies to show you how to create world-class customer experience. After years of battle-tested work, Scott realized that there was a set of systems that all the great brands used to create raving fans. He captured these practices in an engine diagram, a simple tool to help leaders become legends. If you use this approach, you can build a Customer Experience Engine that will create those same kinds of raving fans that always seem to dominate dinner-party conversations and water-cooler chats.

In The Introvert Entrepreneur, professional coach Beth Buelow shows listeners how to harness their natural gifts (including curiosity, independence, and a love of research) and counteract their challenges (such as an aversion to networking and self-promotion). She addresses a wide range of topics.

Tim’s Guide to Furniture Restoration: Turning Passion into Profit is the ultimate step-by-step guide for turning your passion for furniture restoration into a thriving business. This comprehensive book provides practical advice, clear instructions, and actionable steps to help you start, grow, and sustain a profitable restoration enterprise.

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

This book will help you perfect the art of chitchat until it becomes second-nature. For many communication students, this is the final piece of the puzzle needed to turn one into a master conversationalist. At the very least, becoming confident in your ability to engage in small talk will make conversation more enjoyable and increase fulfillment in your social life. But the potential rewards are so much more far-reaching, both professionally and personally, that it is well worth the relatively small effort to attain.

For the socially conscious, the intellectually curious, or the creative soul comes an inspiring, New York Times best-selling handbook for success in business, life, and the all-important task of building a more compassionate world—by the visionary founder and CEO of KIND Healthy Snacks.

Meant for More is the rare personal development book that offers tangible skills for all areas of your life, including work, to increase your success while also doing good - a How to Win Friends and Influence People for the modern age. It shows you how to stand out in an increasingly noisy world by simply offering your unique skills and talents and helping others do the same. It speaks to people looking to leave the 9-to-5 for more freedom and fulfillment; stay-at-home moms going back to work; young Boomers worried they're too senior (and expensive) to find new jobs.

This super-practical guide to personal success is packed with no-nonsense tips that will get anyone where they want to be in business and in life.

In this book, Krista Mashore will share the specific techniques and strategies she used to build a coaching business from zero to over $1 million per month in just 4 ½ years.

Are you seeking financial freedom? How about a thriving business and healthy relationships? What about all that, plus a vibrant faith that impacts the world and enough time in your day to make it all happen? Then Expert Ownership is for you!

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.