Small Business Management

Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. Broken into three sections with 100-plus insights, this no-nonsense audiobook will help you find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

In Scaling Up Excellence, best-selling author Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: scaling up further, faster, and more effectively as a program or an organization creates a larger footprint. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever-better work practices.

Every company needs a 3HAG - a three-year highly achievable goal! The 3HAG way is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. You’ll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals.

Your business might be humming along fine, or it might be struggling to stay afloat. Either way, you know that your company has a lot more potential than the results show. What if you had a quick, effective way to ramp up productivity, morale, and your bottom line - a process you could begin right now, a strategy that would immediately start to improve broken functions without disrupting the parts of your business that don't need fixing?

Do you feel like your pay check just passes through your account each payday, all spent up before you even get a chance to look at your account? Do you always find yourself scraping money together just to pay your bills? Do you often wonder where all your money goes, even if you’re making a decent income? If you do, then let’s face it - you need a budget. No matter how much money you have coming in, without a consistent way to keep track of it, that money is bound to vanish as soon as it goes into your pocket.

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.

In the newly revised third edition of Value-Based Fees: How to Charge What You're Worth and Get What You Charge, best-selling author, speaker, and renowned consultant Dr. Alan Weiss delivers a thoroughly updated guide to proposing, and receiving, consistently high fees that are based on the value you deliver to each client you serve. The author walks you through the many reasons that time-and-materials pricing models are outdated and inadequate and how to convert existing clients to your new value-based fee model.

Directed at managers on all rungs of the corporate ladder, this thoroughly updated and expanded edition of the best selling Managing Transitions provides practical, step-by-step strategies for reaching goals and minimizing the disruptions caused by workplace change. It is an invaluable managerial tool for navigating an inevitably tumultuous time.

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.

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.

Based on six years of research, Harvard Business School Professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why industries are disrupted and what established companies can do to respond - as well as what potential start-ups must master if they hope to gain a competitive edge.

Explore the universe of potential buyers. Learn how to assemble a team of expert advisors to prepare your business for sale. Walk step by step through a typical investment-banker-led midmarket sale process from start to finish. Adam Coffey has spent the last 20 years as CEO of three private-equity-backed national service companies. Through his experience executing a buy-and-build strategy, he has bought and sold more than 100 companies ranging in size from $1 million to $1 billion. Selling your business is an art.

The number one reason most new businesses fail is that their owner or owners did not have enough business knowledge. An established and highly successful entrepreneur himself, John cuts through the motivational pep talks and teaches you proven business-building methods that have been used by the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. He provides you with specific steps you must take to build a profitable business that lasts.

To win in business requires a winning business plan. To write a winning business plan requires listening to Garrett Sutton's dynamic audiobook on the topic. Writing Winning Business Plans provides the insights and the direction on how to do it well and do it right. Crisply told and featuring real life illustrative stories, Writing Winning Business Plans discusses all the key elements for a successful plan. Topics include focusing your business vision, understanding your financials,and more.

Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve and profitable. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level. By challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries, anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity.

Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing 10 times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.

Beyond the E-Myth embraces the fundamental premise of that first book - that a small business only succeeds to the degree its owner goes to work on the business rather than just in it, creating the systemic operating system that makes that business unique in the marketplace.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

The Risk-Driven Business Model will help you manage risk better by showing how the key choices you make in designing your business models either increase or reduce two characteristic types of risk - information risk, when you make decisions without enough information, and incentive-alignment risk, when decision makers' incentives are at odds with the broader goals of the company. Leaders who understand how the structure of their business model affects risk have the power to create wealth, revolutionize industries, and shape a better world.

What’s the secret to business growth and innovation and a purpose-driven career in a world that is becoming vastly more complicated by the day? According to Marc Benioff, the answer is embracing a culture in which your values permeate everything you do. In Trailblazer, Benioff gives listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most admired companies. He reveals how Salesforce’s core values - trust, customer success, innovation, and equality - and commitment to giving back have become the company’s greatest competitive advantage.