Small Business Management

If you want a no nonsense "crash course" in how to sell your business for the best possible price you need to hear this book.

The best entrepreneurs balance brilliant business ideas with a rigorous commitment to serving their customers' needs. If you read (or listen) to nothing else on entrepreneurship and start-ups, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you build your company for enduring success.

With over $500 million a year in sales, the Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. But beginning in the 1980s, the Bassett company suffered from an influx of cheap Chinese furniture as the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately was forced to send its production offshore to Asia. Only one man fought back. That man is John Bassett III, a descendant of the Bassetts who is now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of over $90 million.

In Business Basics Bootcamp, author, successful entrepreneur, and branding expert Mitche Graf draws on 35 years of experience launching cutting-edge new businesses and coaching budding entrepreneurs to offer you proven and powerful methods for quickly scaling business ventures, while working less and playing more, utilizing his heralded "24-7 mentality". You will learn how to maximize efficiency, overcome procrastination and self-doubt, and earn significantly more money than you can make in your nine-to-five job, while putting your lifestyle at the top of the food chain.

In this lesson, learn about acquisitions and mergers, the role they play in business and how to use them successfully. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to rapidly expand their business and safely buy a functioning company or companies.

The ultimate guide to managing your career - at every level, through every transition - The McKinsey Edge culls the best practices of an exclusive group of executives and consultants from McKinsey & Company, the legendary consulting firm that services eighty percent of the world's largest corporations. Drawing on his time as an engagement manager with McKinsey, Hattori presents rigorously selected, battle-tested tips that will give you the edge you need to up your game, raise your profile, and take your career to the next level-using a proven four-step program:

Robert Rosenberg took over as CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts in 1963, 13 years after the first restaurant was founded by his father William. In his remarkable 35-year run, he grew the company from $10 million in sales to over $2 billion with more than 3,000 outlets. Through his tenure, Robert learned important lessons on running and scaling a family business. Rosenberg shares his insider perspective on all the dramatic highs and lows that are part of the Dunkin’ Donuts story to guide you to your own success story.

The Simple Six system will teach you how to grow your business one step at a time while avoiding distractions.

Get your mind around this: a company without org charts or hierarchy. Some firms do operate this way, but this download, The Centerless Corporation, explains how they work and why. Give this a listen and maybe it'll show you how to change your company. You can bring it up with the, uh...boss.

For us to thrive - not simply survive - in this accelerating economy, we need to adopt small, intentional behaviors and practice them each day. From simply taking care of our rest and exercise to building our self-confidence and embracing challenges, author Shawn Hunter's latest book Small Acts of Leadership will guide you through a series of incremental steps you can take to build a stronger version of yourself and make a broader impact in the world.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

Best-selling author Laurie Beth Jones brings you the ultimate guide to transforming your team and sparking inspiration in your business. In Jesus, CEO, Jones compares Jesus to a CEO who turned a disorganized "staff" of 12 into a thriving, long-lasting enterprise. With the 25th anniversary edition of Jesus, CEO, Jones revises and updates her original modernized guidance, ensuring that everyone can continue to apply the ancient wisdom pulled straight from the Bible.

Do you wish you knew how to manage your team better, and get them to commit to your bold vision? The truth is...the majority of managers are simply not very good at goal-setting. (Because they were never taught how to do it properly.) Most corporate goals are never completed on time, and even your highly-educated employees are (usually) not working on essential tasks during the workday. This can be damaging to your career, and can destroy your productivity.

You and a partner go into business together and split the equity 50/50. You do all the work and your partner slacks off. He owns half your business - now what? Slicing Pie outlines a process for calculating exactly the right number of shares each founder or employee in an early stage company deserves.

You will learn: How to value the time and resources an individual brings to the company relative to the contributions of others.

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

Although successful women excel in every way, many resist the idea of seeking help due to fear of being viewed as weak or incompetent. Instead, they struggle alone and sacrifice their happiness and peace along the way. If you feel this way, you’re in the right place! In Get Over “I Got It,” author and podcast host Elayne Fluker shows you that this isolated mindset is the reason you are overwhelmed, depressed, and even unfulfilled.

How to Close A Deal like Warren Buffett offers an original spin on Buffett’s near-mythic dealmaking prowess that will catch the attention of millions of Buffet fans worldwide. Here, Tom Searcy and Henry DeVries acknowledge leaders in sales and sales training and deconstruct the Buffett approach for dealmaking to give listeners a wealth of Warren wisdom to help close every deal.

Driving around the city in any metropolitan areas we all see trendy coffee shops everywhere and not all of them are Starbucks. Do you ever wonder why there are so many new boutique coffee shops popping up everywhere? Well, according to National Coffee Association, it is not a hoax, but the new trend. The coffee industry and the coffee shop business have boomed in recent years, especially with regards to specialty coffees. If you are thinking about opening a coffee house, here are the 13 steps that you will need to take....

Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders.

If you want to succeed in your career, or make more room in your life for the nonwork stuff, then you need to free up some time. And what's the key to finding time? Delegation. Let Gail Thomas teach you to art of delegation. Stop wasting your time on tasks you're overqualified for and see how you actually can focus on the important stuff. And you won't just learn how to delegate 'down' - Gail will also help you master upwards delegation.