Small Business Management

The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead - and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they're mopping floors and scrubbing toilets.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

In Startup Life, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his own personal experiences with his wife, Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his 20 years of experience in this field to addresses how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.

ALL IN is the pinnacle book in Mike Michalowicz's Entrepreneurship Simplified series, setting the standard for building high-performing teams in today’s challenging work environment. Whether dealing with remote work, flex schedules, or generational divides, ALL IN provides a proven framework for recruiting top talent, transforming underperformers into superstars, and cultivating a culture where every employee is as dedicated as an owner.

A unique and significant guide to selling more books through personal appearances and online interviews, brimming with information and resources as well as tips and ideas from nearly two dozen author-speaker professionals.The most powerful tool in your book promotion toolkit is your personality. The fact is that personality sells books.

Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously executed principles and practices - shared here for the very first time.

The EOS Life will help you to discover, clarify, and customize the life you want to live: one where you do what you love every day, with the people you love doing it with — while at the same time making a huge difference and impact, getting compensated very well for doing it, and still having plenty of time to pursue other passions, hobbies, and interests that energize you.

In his long-awaited memoir, Yvon Chouinard - legendary climber, businessman, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, Inc. - shares the persistence and courage that have gone into being head of one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth. From his youth as the son of a French Canadian blacksmith to the thrilling, ambitious climbing expeditions that inspired his innovative designs for the sport's equipment.

What are the underlying handful of fundamentals that haven't changed for over a hundred years? From Harnish's famous "One-Page Strategic Plan" to his concise outline of eight practical actions you can take to strengthen your culture, this book is a compilation of best practices adapted from some of the best-run firms on the planet. Included is an instructive chapter co-authored by Rich Russakoff, revealing winning tactics to get banks to finance your business.

These six daily practices will fuel your efforts to create and sustain positive change in your life. Now The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs brings you these principles in a whole new light - alongside the entrepreneurial elevation principles and the entrepreneur's elevation skills. These are essential skills that you need to create a successful business and personal life.

The Landlord Entrepreneur shifts the focus from dealing exclusively with residential real estate to building a dynamic property management business. By following the step-by-step instructions in this new guide, anyone can create a fully functioning, professional property management company in only 10 days. With Chavis's modern take on real estate, you will learn the five phases of property management and the skills needed to successfully move through them - as well as the hacks and tricks to build your profitable business from the ground up.

Blueprint to Business is the ultimate guide to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Best-selling author and CEO Mike Alden puts aside the rainbows and sunshine, gets real about what it takes to "make it", and gives you the real-world guidance you need to hear. Through anecdotes and advice, he shares his experiences along with those of other top founders and entrepreneurs to give you a realistic picture of what it takes to build a business. It's a bit of tough love, a healthy dose of reality, and a tremendously motivating guide to striking out on your own.

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

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.

Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work. Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.

Jay Abraham, a trusted advisor to many top corporations, brings together more than two hundred brilliant business-career ideas in this, his first major audiobook. Abraham reveals numerous new profit and personal advancement opportunities “hidden in plain sight” in and around every business organization today. He also demonstrates how all of us can maximize our careers and our incomes by applying fresh ways of looking at our many options in the vast new opportunity society that’s around us.

Written by Sir John Whitmore, the pioneer of coaching, and Performance Consultants, the global market leaders in performance coaching, this extensively revised and extended edition will revolutionize the traditional approach to organizational culture. Brand-new practical exercises, corporate examples, and coaching dialogues strengthen the learning process, whilst a critical new chapter demonstrates how to measure the benefits of coaching as a return on investment, ensuring this landmark new edition will remain at the forefront of professional coaching and leadership development.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape - which launched the Information Age - and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the $1 trillion healthcare industry on its head.

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.