Growing A Business

The companion volume to the public television series explains what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

The Wall Street Journal Bestseller For so many entrepreneurs, running a small business ended up looking different than they imagined. They’re stressed, discouraged, and not confident in their plan for growth. In How to Grow Your Small Business, Donald Miller gives entrepreneurs a 6-step plan to grow their businesses so they produce dependable, predictable results. Using the exact steps you’ll learn in this book, Donald Miller grew his small business from four employees working out of a basement to a 15 million dollar operation, increasing revenue sixfold in just six years. As Miller grew his own business from the ground up, he realized nobody had put together a simple, step-by-step playbook for growing a business. That book didn’t exist. Until now. In this book, you’ll learn the 6 steps to grow a successful small business and create a playbook to implement them- your Flight Plan. When you have a completed Flight Plan in hand, you can stop drowning in the details and spend more time doing the things you truly love- in your business and your life. In How to Grow Your Small Business, you’ll learn how to: Cast a vision for your company that includes three economic priorities Clarify your marketing message Install a sales framework that makes your customers the hero Optimize your product offering Run a management and productivity playbook that aligns your entire team. Use 5 checking accounts to manage your cash flow If you’re ready to experience freedom, flexibility, and growth for your business, How to Grow Your Small Business is the book you’ve been waiting for.

Growth is a clear goal for ambitious entrepreneurs and leaders. It's often a short hand for business - and wider economic - success. But it's not without its pitfalls and challenges, and planning for, and managing, a growing business needs careful thought. Take, for example, the start-up facing for the first time the need to balance flexibility with more structure. Or a larger business tackling a range of divisions evolving at different speeds. Or an inspirational owner-founder confronting the need to step back and let other take the business forward. These are the kinds of challenges that Growing a Business tackles head-on. Drawing on a wide range of models and research and using case studies from across the business world, it offers practical advice and guidance on a whole range of topics, including: the different types and stages of growth; predicting the problems presented by growth; identifying growth triggers and barriers; the implications of growth: financially, culturally and for the people involved in the business. Growing a Business is required reading for owners and managers looking to understand a foster growth in their businesses.

Growing an Entrepreneurial Business: Concepts and Cases is a textbook designed for courses that focus on managing small to medium sized enterprises. It focuses on the major management challenges that successful start-ups encounter when leaders decide to grow and scale their businesses. The book is divided into two parts—text and cases—to provide professors with maximum flexibility in organizing their courses. The thirty-five cases can be used in conjunction with the text, or independently. Twelve cases are written as narratives with multiple teaching points, but without a focus on a particular business decision; the remaining twenty-three cases were written around specific conundrums related to strategy, operations, finance, marketing, leadership, culture, human resources, organizational design, business model, and growth. Discussion questions are provided for each case. The text portion of the book discusses key issues derived from the author's research and consulting, and is meant to complement the case method of teaching, raising issues for conversation. In addition to the real-world knowledge that students will derive from the cases, readers will take away research-based templates and models that they can use in developing or consulting with small businesses.

Business growth requires more than a business plan and a dream. You must utilize many tools and techniques to take your company to the next level. This book presents practical strategies that you can leverage based on your business-growth goals and the distinct needs of your company. In four sections--Leverage, Execute, Accelerate, and Prosper--you will learn how to: develop a business-growth action plan; automate your business; locate business capital; identify powerful marketing strategies; harness the power of the Internet; attract the media and gain valuable exposure; boost profits by innovating; and protect your time so you can enjoy your life.--From publisher description.

Designed to help those businesses with an established market position, this text adopts a practical approach to the issues encountered by rapidly expanding businesses. The handbook presents a range of practical strategies for managing growth, focusing on how companies can fulfil their potential by adopting appropriate funding, adapting their structure and ownership, as well as developing world-class management capabilities.

Ben & Jerry's. Stonyfield Farm. The Body Shop. Tom's of Maine. All leaders in the socially responsible business movement--and all eventually sold to mega-corporations. Do values-driven businesses have to choose between staying small, selling off, or selling out? Jill Bamburg says no. Based on intensive interviews with more than thirty growth-oriented, mission-driven entrepreneurs--including American Apparel, Give Something Back, Wild Planet Toys, Organic Valley Family of Farms, and Village Real Estate--her book explodes the myths of scale from both ends of the spectrum. She debunks both the limiting "small is beautiful" approach as well as the "you have to sell out to grow" mandate. Focusing on the unique challenges that socially conscious companies face, Getting to Scale addresses the issues that affect all businesses: Production and personnel Access to capital and markets Changes in organizational structure Ownership and control Corporate culture Filled with practical and tested advice, Getting to Scale provides a blueprint for socially responsible entrepreneurs in any industry who want to benefit larger groups of customers, have a greater positive impact on their communities, and maintain their independence by scaling up their enterprises.