Small Business Success

Like financial classics The Latte Factor and The Richest Man in Babylon, The Money Tree uses a compelling story with captivating characters to share its core insight: You are never at the mercy of fortune as long as you have an appetite for hard work and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

When a career-ending injury left elite athlete and professional football player Lewis Howes out of work and living on his sister's couch, he decided he needed to make a change for the better. He started by reaching out to people he admired, searching for mentors, and applying his past coaches' advice from sports to life off the field. Lewis did more than bounce back: He built a multimillion-dollar online business and is now a sought-after business coach, speaker, and podcast host.

In this invaluable book, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you.

Martha Stewart is an undeniable force in the business world. One of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, she turned her personal passion into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a billion dollar business. This fall she's breaking new ground with two television shows from NBC -- her reality show The Apprentice: Martha Stewart and her daytime syndicated show Martha -- as well as a radio program on Sirius satellite radio which will provide daily round-the-clock how-to content. What's her secret for success?

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.

Earl Nightingale said that he came to his “aha” moment at the age of twenty-nine while reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich - specifically the words “we become what we think about”. Shortly thereafter he recorded The Strangest Secret which went on to earn a gold record and became the largest selling non-entertainment recording in record industry history. Think and Grow Rich is the standard against which all motivational books are measured. The book (and audiobook) has helped millions of people create their own success and realize their dreams.

Much of what we hear about who gets to the top, and how, is wrong. Those who become chief executives set their sights on the C-suite at an early age. In fact, over 70 percent of the CEOs didn't have designs on the corner office until later in their careers. You must graduate from an elite college. In fact, only seven percent of CEOs in the dataset are Ivy League graduates - and eight percent didn't graduate from college at all. To become a CEO you need a flawless résumé. The reality: 45 percent of CEO candidates had at least one major career blowup.

Using the greatest material from his popular Blog Maverick, Cuban has collected and updated his postings on business and life to provide a catalog of insider knowledge on what it takes to become a thriving entrepreneur. He tells his own rags-to-riches story of how he went from selling powdered milk and sleeping on friends' couches to owning his own company and becoming a multibillion-dollar success story.

Longtime Dollar General CEO Cal Turner, Jr. shares his extraordinary life as heir to the company founded by his father Cal Turner, Sr. and his grandfather, a dirt farmer turned Depression-era entrepreneur. Cal's narrative is at its heart a father-son story, from his childhood in Scottsville, Kentucky, where business and family were one, to the triumph of reaching the Fortune 300 - at the cost of risking that very father/son relationship. Cal shares how the small-town values with which he was raised helped him guide Dollar General from family enterprise to national powerhouse.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

We live in a hierarchical world where experience has traditionally been the key to promotion. But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people's interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what's next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most importantly, to pursue the things that interest you.

Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).

Non-profits are big business. As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy, and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. In Five Good Ideas, 40 professionals from successful nonprofits large and small offer information, strategies for action, and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the cliches they hear about how to make a start-up succeed - from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions. This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of start-ups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey.

First Things First is a revolutionary guide to managing your time by learning how to balance your life. Traditional time management suggests that working harder, smarter, and faster will help you gain control over your life, and that increased control will bring peace and fulfillment. But the authors of First Things First apply the insights of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to our daily problems of struggling with the ever-increasing demands of work and home life.

Are you ready to go from being stuck and complacent to courageous and capable of creating a business offering you the time and financial freedom you never dreamed possible? Amy Porterfield, host of the top-rated podcast Online Marketing Made Easy and a 9-to-5 escapee who built an 8-figure online business on her terms, shares her tried and true strategies, inspiring stories, and mindset shifts.

From Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First, Clockwork, and The Pumpkin Plan, comes the ultimate diagnostic tool for every entrepreneur.... The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is that they don't know what their biggest problem is. If you find yourself trapped between stagnating sales, staff turnover, and unhappy customers, what do you fix first? Every issue seems urgent—but there's no way to address all of them at once. The result? A business that continues to go in endless circles putting out urgent fires and prioritizing the wrong things.

In The Millionaire Messenger, Brendon Burchard pulls back the curtains on the once-secretive "expert industry" and shows how to become an influential and highly paid advice expert through websites, books, speeches, seminars, coaching, consulting, and online programs. Blessed to receive life's golden ticket - a second chance - after surviving a dramatic car accident, Burchard has dedicated his life to helping others find their voice, live more fully, and follow their dreams. By following his 10-step program, average, ordinary people can learn to become experts in anything they choose.

Have you ever wondered why some people are super-achievers and seem to go from success to success while others never seem to get out of the starting blocks? In my 40 years of coaching high-achieving entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that they all go through a process to help them break through to the next level of success. I call this process "The 4 C’s Formula". The 4 C’s Formula is a universal process that can be used by anyone who wants to achieve greater success in any part of their life.