Small Business Management

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.

A one-stop start-up guide from an accountant-turned-restaurateur. Ninety percent of all restaurants fail, and those that succeed happened upon that mysterious X factor, right? Wrong! A man of many hats - money-guy, restaurant owner, and restaurant consultant - Roger Fields shows how a restaurant can survive its first year and keep diners coming back for years. Featuring real-life start-up stories (including many of the author's own), this comprehensive how-to walks listeners through the logistics of opening a restaurant: concept, location, menu, staff, and, most important, profit.

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.

From living on Jess's wages as a makeup counter sales clerk, to achieving dramatic success as network marketing partners, to running a multi-million-dollar coaching and training company today, Ray and Jessica Higdon have built their lives on a shared desire for freedom and balance. With 10 simple rules for redefining what's possible in your life, this book will help you build confidence, shift your mind-set, and learn the tools to take control of your life and start on a path toward your own definition of freedom.

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.

The breakthrough concepts of Pattern Breakers come from the observations of Mike Maples Jr., a seasoned venture capitalist, who noticed something strange. Start-ups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft had achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for “best practices.” In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right. Seeking answers, Maples and coauthor Peter Ziebelman set out to discover the hidden forces that drive extraordinary start-up success.

Leadership Hacks is the business leader's guide to getting things done. Over the years, the leader's role has expanded to encompass more duties, more responsibility, and more accountability - yet we're still stuck with the same 24 hours in every day. The evolving business environment leaves many of us struggling to achieve against constantly shifting priorities, competitors, and deadlines, and we are forever expected to do more with less. Is it even possible to make a real impact? Yes! This book shows you how to sort through the madness and get back to getting results.

Are you a business owner who has little experience with accounting notions? Do you want to optimize resources and lower the costs of managing your business? Learn to easily manage the accounting by using the software QuickBooks. If you want to manage your business well, optimizing accounting processes and financial planning, saving time and money to invest in the growth of your business, this audiobook will become your best partner.

Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball will dramatically change the way we approach the sales process, replacing the gratuitous complexity advocated by today's sales "experts" with an elegant and very effective simplicity. Studies have shown that the selling techniques of the last two decades have had very little impact on most of the sales population. Why?

Would you like to be able to draw people towards you like a magnet? This book is NOT just another communication book and is NOT just a book of tips. This is the ultimate communication system for talking to anybody, anywhere, and in any situation. Using the scientific principles of communication and ©POWER2MIND technology, it will have you talking and communicating to anyone with confidence, charm, and conviction, rapidly and naturally.

Project managers are no longer judged by the technical success of their projects alone. They're also held accountable for their contributions to the company's financial goals. Yet most project managers don't have the business knowledge necessary to make project-based decisions that lead to bottom-line success.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

People Skills is a communication-skills handbook that can help you eliminate these and other communication problems. Author Robert Bolton describes the twelve most common communication barriers, showing how these "roadblocks" damage relationships by increasing defensiveness, aggressiveness, or dependency. He explains how to acquire the ability to listen, assert yourself, resolve conflicts, and work out problems with others. These are skills that will help you communicate calmly, even in stressful emotionally charged situations.

The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet. Anyone can be visionary.

While Erik Z. Severinghaus has been to the top of the physical world (literally climbing Everest) and the business world (exiting companies for hundreds of millions of dollars), what has defined his journey is not the successes...but rather, the hard times of loneliness and self-doubt that nearly cost him his accomplishments and his life. This guidebook passes along the lessons needed in those dark times, with the hope that it will help every entrepreneur who is going through this struggle understand their journey and build the mental resiliency to succeed.

In an impatient world of infobesity, people don't want more information - they want to be intrigued and they want to be intrigued fast. After all, goldfish have longer attention spans than humans - nine seconds to our eight. So, right now, people want to know, "How is this relevant and useful to me? Why are you worth my valuable time, mind, and dime?" Bestselling author and ace communication strategist Sam Horn reveals her "secret sauce" for truly connecting with people - whether it's one or one million.

Is your business struggling? Equip yourself with proven financial strategies for growth and success. Fear not the daunting statistics: 20% of new businesses fold within two years, 45% within five, and a staggering 65% within a decade. However, 25% thrive beyond 15 years. What sets them apart? The answer often lies in mastering financial management, the hidden driver of long-term success. This book is your guide to joining that triumphant 25%, arming you with practical financial skills to propel your entrepreneurial journey from surviving to thriving.

Kym Gold's mantra - "never settle for a no, always look for a yes" - is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that she sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, she finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted,went on to become a giant, revolutionizing player in the fashion industry.

Are you among the thousands of retailers frustrated by market challenges and looking for ways to take control of your business? Are you looking for the advice of an expert consultant, but unable to spend the money? Then The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business is for you.

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.