Small Business Leadership

Small business and legal expert Cliff Ennico has followed the equity crowdfunding story since its inception. Now, in The Crowdfunding Handbook, he explains the JOBS Act and translates the regulations into a clear set of do's and don'ts for entrepreneurs and small-business owners looking to get in early - and do things right.

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.

At the core of this classic treatise is the message that sledgehammer approaches can backfire, and size alone does not guarantee wins. Strategy, positioning, planning, leadership - all play equally significant roles, making Sun Tzu's teachings perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs entrenched in fierce competition for customers, market share, talent - for their very survival.

In an age of Twitter, smartphones, and self-service kiosks, high-tech but still high-touch customer service is the answer. Today’s customers are a hard bunch to crack. Time-strapped, screen-addicted, value-savvy, and socially engaged, their expectations are tougher than ever for a business to keep up with. They are empowered like never before and expect businesses to respect that sense of empowerment - lashing out at those that don’t. Take heart: Old-fashioned customer service, fully retooled for today’s blistering pace and digitally connected reality, is what you need to build the kind of loyal customer base that allows you to survive - and thrive.

The LLC Bible provides a clear and concise playbook which explains the positives and negatives of LLCs. You will receive expert advice on choosing members, creating your legal name, filing your Articles of Organization, as well as managing daily operations.

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.

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.

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.

Whether you're a novice entrepreneur or a seasoned pro, The Small Business Bible is a comprehensive A-to-Z library of everything you might need to know. Not only does it teach new entrepreneurs what works and what doesn't, with scores of tips, hints, insider information, and secrets of success, but it's also a reliable, valuable, and insightful resource for established business owners who want to help their businesses to grow and succeed.

In his comprehensive Starting a Business QuickStart Guide, Ken Colwell concisely presents the core fundamentals that all new entrepreneurs need to know to get started, find success, and live the life of their dreams.

Drawing upon their experience founding more than 30 companies, authors Lars Tvede and Mads Faurholt share their entrepreneurial wisdom and reveal the real-world techniques that lead to success. A simple step-by-step process will help you translate your ideas into effective business plans, raise the capital needed to start and grow your business, build a winning team, and leave the competition behind.

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas realities. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald's. It worked for Ford. It can work for you. From the author of the best-selling Traction, Rocket Fuel details the integral roles of the visionary and integrator and explains how an effective relationship between the two can help your business thrive.

This is a complete guide to how to create a plan for, open, operate, and market a new small business. This book intends to help you overcome fear and inspire you to own and operate your own small business.

A lot of businesspeople talk about innovation, but few companies have achieved the level of truly transformative innovation as brilliantly - or as famously - as the legendary Mayo Clinic. Introducing Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast, the first innovation guide based on the proven, decade-long program that's made Mayo Clinic one of the most respected and successful organizations in the world.

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.

You can build a home service business that is profitable EVERY month of the year. Offseasons will keep you poor. I hate offseasons. I used to waste $100,000 every winter. I didn't know how to generate leads during the slow months. My revenue dropped. My profits went negative. I had to lay off all my employees! This book fixes that problem. This book contains the playbooks that took me from sleeping in my office closet to owning a business that generates $50,000,000+ per year. When I started my lawn care business, I had no systems. This almost cost me my life in a workplace accident.

Tip is a timeless, inspirational story created to remind anyone in a position judged by performance that the only way to achieve continued recognition and growth in work and life is to take personal accountability for your reputation and results. Whatever your role, or level of success in your career, Tip is a guide that will help you discover, or remember, how to consistently bring unique value to your team, your organization, and your most important customers.

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.

In QuickBooks Small Business Bookkeeping and Accounting Guide, Zachary shows the basics of bookkeeping all the way to complex items like handling the managing of your cash flow. With a heavy focus on QuickBooks and accounting fundamentals, listeners will go from novices to accounting professionals in a matter of hours.

What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.