Small Business Leadership

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.

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs - small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

Transform your leadership style with 'Lead With Empathy,' an insightful audiobook by Pete Srodoski, brought to life through Dan Wilson's engaging narration. This concise guide offers a wealth of practical strategies, real-world examples, and personal anecdotes to help you embrace empathetic leadership. Learn to navigate crises with confidence, enhance team innovation, and balance your well-being for more effective management.

Far from a dry listen, The Lean Law Firm is the first book published by the ABA to employ the novel to teach business lessons. Follow the engaging story of lawyer Carson Wright, who suddenly finds himself responsible for saving a small law firm, as his mentor Guy Chapman imparts the lean techniques that transformed his factory from the brink of bankruptcy to new heights of profitability. As you hear the The Lean Law Firm story unfold, you’ll see how your own firm is really just a system.

This isn’t just a story about nails, wood, or construction—it’s about resilience, about swinging a hammer with grit and determination until you’ve built something unbreakable. I’m Ana, and my journey started under a leaking roof, my dad’s calloused hands guiding mine to patch our home. “We fix what’s ours,” he’d rumble, his voice a bedrock of motivation beneath the storm, and those words ignited a fire in me—a spark of perseverance that turned a broke twenty-two-year-old with a junkyard shed into a legacy of craftsmanship and empowerment. I didn’t plan to write a ...

How does a suburban pizza joint end up profiled on national magazine covers and network TV news? (Hint: The secret is not in the sauce.) When Nick Sarillo decided to open a family-friendly pizza restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, people thought he was nuts. Having worked as a carpenter for much of his adult life, he lacked any formal experience in restaurants or in managing a small business. Everyone told him no one else would ever care about his place the way he did.

No matter how motivated and energetic you are - even if you're the greatest salesperson on the planet! - as a network marketer with limited time, there's only so much money you can make without great people to help you sell your products. Recruiting is the life force of any network marketing, multilevel marketing, or party plan business; it lifts the ceiling off your income, the key that will allow you to keep checks rolling in above and beyond what you can do yourself.

UTV founder and pioneer of the media industry Ronnie Screwvala is one of India’s most successful first-generation entrepreneurs. An avid philanthropist, he has penned Dream with Your Eyes Open: An Entrepreneurial Journey as one of the most inspiring entrepreneurial self-help books.

What if you created a business that provided amazing client experiences and set a new standard for what it’s like to work with a law firm? What if you slept great at night while traveling abroad for months at a time, knowing your team could run things without you with the help of thoughtful systems and optimized technology? Yes! It’s all possible. The Small Firm Roadmap Revisited will show you how to build something different—a law firm business that is people-centered, effectively managed, and ultimately more valuable.

We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.

Make It Happen explodes the myth that the restaurant business is harder than other industries. It challenges the belief that you must be in your restaurant all day every day just so things get done right.

Leaders of large businesses rely on boards and their managers for guidance, but entrepreneurs like you have few, if any, experienced advisors to count on. Now, Self-Made Boss provides the community of advisors you need to help make the right decisions every time. Drawn from real-life stories directly from Square's Seller's Community, the book shows you exactly what works and what doesn't.

Fitness Professionals live paycheck to paycheck despite working a heroic amount of hours. This audiobook teaches a system that increases their cash flow so they can be home at dinner time and their gym can thrive. The system is simple to learn and implement.

Addressing diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills - such as time management, team-building, communication and listening, creative-thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing - a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding valuable takeaways that ensure growth.

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.

Overwhelmed by the intricacies of small business bookkeeping? Don't worry. This book is packed with practical, easy-to-implement strategies to transform your approach, maximize profit, manage cash flow, and ensure tax compliance.

Business owners want growth but fear it will take over their lives. Surprisingly, the only way to truly grow your company is to reduce its reliance on you - to scale. Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel offer a blueprint to rapidly grow your business while also gaining more freedom. Based on their own experiences starting, scaling, and effectively exiting from multiple successful companies, they provide seven clear principles that will help you determine the best strategy for growth in your company.

What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

Existe un increble método para convertir un negocio pequeño en una compañía multimillonaria lder de la industria: el mismo que utilizan los campesinos para tener las calabazas más grandes y ganar los concursos de Halloween, el Gran Plan.

Are you ready to double the profit in your salon business and cut your stress in half? This audiobook is for the salon owner who wants to create an amazing experience for their clients and run a successful business that leaves them the time, energy, and money they need to enjoy family, friends, and hobbies.