Small Business Leadership

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.

Start a successful business mid-life When you think of someone launching a start-up, the image of a twenty-something techie probably springs to mind. However, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers are just as likely to start businesses and reinvent themselves later in life. Never Too Old to Get Rich is an exciting road map for anyone age 50-plus looking to be their own boss and launch their dream business.

It's a rainy day in Seattle, and on the third floor of First Guarantee Financial, people have stopped believing they can make a difference. To new manager Mary Jane Ramirez, the challenge of bringing life back to her unenthusiastic and unmotivated team seems impossible, until she discovers an incredibly successful workplace down the street where the employees are so alive and passionate that people stop just to watch them work!

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

Any cursory online search will reveal thousands of books and articles that try to help you become a better manager or a better leader. In this audiobook, we propose a third set of skills that are often neglected but are just as essential for effective leadership: the ability to clarify individual and organizational values and to find a way forward when these values conflict. This audiobook will help you develop those skills and apply them in your organization to become a better leader.

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.

In today's complex, highly competitive, global environment, those who will survive and thrive in this new world of work are individuals, teams, and organizations who can maintain high levels of accountability and remain focused on must-achieve desired results. Achieve with Accountability is your personal handbook for awakening your (or your team or organization's) inner confidence, drive, perseverance, determination, resolve, and can-do mindset.

Small Church Essentials is for leaders of smaller congregations. It encourages them to steward their role well, debunking myths about small churches while offering principles for leading a dynamic, healthy small church. Based on the popular six-hour lecture that Karl Vaters delivers to church leaders across the country, Small Church Essentials will affirm small church leaders and show them how to identify what they do well and how to do it even better.

Mark Siebert, franchise expert and author of Franchise Your Business, flips his script from franchising your existing business to offer entrepreneurs a comprehensive guide to succeeding as franchisees. The Franchisee Handbook tells listeners how to take a systematic approach to assess and invest in franchise opportunities, so they end up with the right fit for their entrepreneurial style. Sharing tales from the trenches and real-world anecdotes from successful franchises, Siebert lays out everything you need to know before signing with well-known franchises.

In this vital work, author Michael Levine offers compelling evidence that problems in business, large and small, typically stem from inattention to tiny details. Social psychologists and criminologists agree that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, soon thereafter the rest of the windows will be broken - and the perception will build that crime in that neighborhood is out of control. The same principle applies to business.

Sell your business. Stick the landing. We’ll show you how. Exit Strategy is everything you need to know about selling a business. Dr. Sherry Walling, a clinical psychologist specializing in entrepreneur mental health, and Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur who has secured life-changing sums in multiple exits, have teamed up to provide you with a roadmap for navigating this treacherous terrain, offering a rare combination of practical savvy and emotional nuance that can only come from a true understanding of the journey. Exit Strategy will teach you: When is the right time to sell?

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.

Three comprehensive manuscripts in one audiobook. This audiobook is intended for people who want to know something about the fundamentals of bookkeeping and accounting without necessarily becoming a certified bookkeeper or accountant. Many people are in this position; small business owners, employers, employees, business owners, stockholders, investors, and many, many more. Most of these folks do not need a deep understanding of bookkeeping or accounting; they just need to learn what it is and how they should be using it.

Just because you don’t have cash doesn’t mean you don’t want and need things. According to authors and business gurus Karen Hoffman and Shera Dalin, it’s time to get a little creative. Most people have a skill they can use—it’s just a matter of figuring out what that is and how to use it to get something else. From piano lessons in exchange for haircuts to an engine tune-up in exchange for house painting, The Art of Barter offers step-by-step instructions.

UCLA psychologist and organizational consultant Dr. Robert Maurer provides a simple and proven effective technique for making major changes with minimal disruption. Applying the operational concept of kaizen - small, continual improvements - to common management challenges, managers can drive major improvements with a series of well-planned techniques for boosting quality, innovation, sales, and morale.

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.

Leadership development speaker & consultant Andy Ellis is the former CSO of Akamai, where he contributed to the creation of Akamai's billion‑dollar cybersecurity business. He now brings his speaking, consulting, and business knowledge to listeners with 1% Leadership—based on the reality that real-world leadership is messy and complicated; it rarely fits into an acronym or a dogmatic overarching philosophy. Ellis says that there are no “irrefutable laws” of leadership or power; there is no secret.

Tilman Fertitta, also known as the Billion Dollar Buyer, started his hospitality empire 30 years ago with just one restaurant. So he knows the challenges that business owners face, as well as the common pitfalls that cause them to go under. Over the years, he’s stayed true to the principles that helped him scale his business to what is believed to be the largest single-shareholder company in America, with more than four billion dollars in revenue. He’s also sole owner of the Houston Rockets. In Shut Up and Listen!, he shares the key insights that made it all possible.

What if the smartest people in the world understand something that the rest of us don't? (They do.) What if they know that in order to achieve success, they will sometimes have to do things that others may initially perceive as stupid? The fact of the matter is that the smartest people in the world don't run from stupid, they lean into it (in a smart way). In The Power of Starting Something Stupid, Richie Norton redefines stupid as we know it, demonstrating that life-changing ideas are often tragically mislabeled stupid.

Unsliced is the resource for elevating your pizzeria - from managing staff to mindset, marketing, and everything in between. Industry leader Mike Bausch explains how to make your restaurant unique and in demand based on his 20 years of experience. You’ll learn how to build systems that will help you boost your sales and keep your sanity. And you’ll discover time-tested protocols that will protect you and your restaurant. It’s hard not to get discouraged in this business. But with the right perspective, smart systems, and hard work, your restaurant can thrive.