Mind Your Own Business The Ultimate Business Handbook Perfect For Aspiring Entrepreneurs And Business Owners

12 CRUCIAL LESSONS ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP; OFFERING A FRESH PERSPECTIVE, SAVVY ADVICE AND PRACTICAL MEASURES TO PUT INTO PLACE. Are you working long hours just to keep your head above water? Are you stuck in the first gear and want to get moving - fast? The journey of an entrepreneur means being a risk-taker, a visionary, a leader, a pit bull and essentially a superhero all rolled into one. Nevi Letcher found herself doing this. She worked her way up in corporate, invested in her personal development and climbed the ladder fast, racing down the same track every day, plugging holes, negotiating deals, coaching and directing her team, developing and tweaking successful strategies to bring big brands to life. She only really learned about business when she started her own agency and she reveals aspects that business school didn't teach her. In Mind Your Own Business, Nevi shares what she learned and how she managed to implement strategies that saw her business grow and grow. Find something you want to do - and then just do it. That's how real entrepreneurs always start. This is your time. Make your mark on the world. "Nevi has articulated valuable success principles in an engaging and inspiring way." Natasha Sideris - Founder & CEO, Tashas Group

Carly's goal for you: become a happy, healthy, successful, business-minded boss. Part self-help wisdom, part business school teaching, and part interactive workbook pages, plus real-life advice from 15 amazing, thriving entrepreneurs: this book is everything you need to know to turn your creative passion into a successful company. With clarity and approachability, this complete guide will teach you how to monetize your creativity with a sustainable operation: ideation and business plans, branding, bookkeeping, accounting, marketing, management, social media, and more. Maybe you want to become a social media influencer like Carly. Maybe you want to sell cake pops on the side. Maybe you want to design beautiful branding for small business owners, or maybe you want to run a coffee cart on campus! Whatever your idea, the same responsible business principles apply. With dedicated space for you to write down your own ideas, Carly will walk you through the process, step-by-step. Through it all, Carly will remind you of your true goal: you started your business to make you happy. That's not a bad thing! You can't field calls, answer emails, manage your accounts, and so on, if you're not taking care of yourself first. With firsthand wisdom, she'll encourage you to live a happy entrepreneur's lifestyle because YOU are your business's greatest asset. With insight from some of the best women in the entrepreneurial game, this book will become your most-trusted resource. Thank you to the owners of these amazing small businesses: Chappy Wrap, chloédigital, Sarah Flint, Sarah O. Jewelry, Lycette Designs, Margaux, Oui Create, Grace Rose Farm, Dudley Stephens, Diane Hill, Sara Fitz, BFB Hair and dae Hair, Addison Bay, and The Tiny Tassel!

Want to start your own business, but not sure where to begin? Mind Your Business is the ONLY book that teaches you everything you need to know about how to build a successful business from scratch. From developing your brand to designing products to identifying your legal and tax needs, this comprehensive guide will take you through every step of the process and help you create a unique and customized roadmap for your business. Mind Your Business is for aspiring entrepreneurs who are driven, ambitious, creative, and determined to build a business and life they love. Author Ilana Griffo shares the formula that turned her creative hobby into a six-figure design studio. From initial planning to long-term business strategy, Mind Your Business includes: • Insider tips from successful entrepreneurs • Advice to identify your ideal market and customer • Legal guidelines to protect your ass(ets) • Budget and forecast tools • How to avoid the pitfalls that doom most startups • Guidance on how to scale and grow • Suggestions on how to dominate online platforms • Tips to beat your competitors with SEO and social media Mind Your Business puts you in the driver’s seat. It will help you navigate the journey of starting your first business and take your ambitions and ideas from wishful thinking to successful reality.

“The maverick’s way of conducting business forswears the leader as commanding general; it rejects the practice of top-down, authoritative command. Rather, it proposes the leader as catalyst, conscience, and inspirer . . . The true leader sees his job as setting an environment in which new ideas can emerge that neither he nor any other individual anticipated. That leap of imagination, that moment of genuine creativity, can only be inspired by a leader who encourages exploration and shows a willingness to consider a totally new approach.” --from Mind Your Own Business The corporate misdeeds of self-serving executives during the high-octane economy of the 1990s have forced many people to rethink the qualities that make a strong leader. For sixty years, Sidney Harman, the chairman and CEO of the world’s premier manufacturer of high-end audio equipment, has stood apart from the crowd, building his business the old-fashioned way, by satisfying customers and, in doing so, making a healthy profit. His refreshingly employee-centric, bottoms-up approach to business is the secret of Harman International’s continuing success. In Mind Your Own Business, Harman shares his visionary ideas about leadership, providing a welcome contrast to the bad behavior of business leaders recently dominating the news. Harman focuses on creating a culture of personal responsibility throughout his company. He likens his top management team to a jazz quartet that listens to and improvises with one another to create harmony. He stresses the need to do more for workers at every level because employees are the company’s most valuable asset. At Harman International, he has established in-house classrooms to teach English, basic math, health, and music, and encourages his employees to pursue their potential. Now a hale and healthy eighty-five, Harman thinks that “an idea a day” is more important than the proverbial apple and that the key to a long life is a restless curiosity. In the bestselling tradition of Max DePree’s Leadership Is an Art, Mind Your Own Business is a frank, no-nonsense guide for those who want to bring strength, vitality, and values to their businesses—and to their lives.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

After spending several years in Canada and the Caribbean working with small and medium-sized businesses, John Philip Henderson brings a working knowledge that business owners need to be successful after dealing with the hardships in this potentially tough sector of society. Written in an essentially conversational tone to be easily comprehended by those seeking knowledge in starting up a business, Henderson's business plan will help you with sound and proven topics including: Choosing the right investment goal Deciding your business structure Finding the capital for your business Marketing your product and services Managing your time and your money Henderson shares the advantages and disadvantages of going into business for yourself as well as sharing examples of how to skillfully and profitably implement your ideas. The Small-Business Self-Starter Handbook is a must for aspiring entrepreneurs ready to make the dream of starting their own business a reality.

Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment.This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap.This book assumes: You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this.Start Small, Stay Small also focuses on the single most important element of a startup that most developers avoid: marketing. There are many great resources for learning how to write code, organize source control, or connect to a database. This book does not cover the technical aspects developers already know or can learn elsewhere. It focuses on finding your idea, testing it before you build, and getting it into the hands of your customers.

Second edition, December, 2014.In its first year, about half of all businesses fail. Five years down the line, depending upon which study you look at, only 1 in 10 to 1 in 3 businesses are left standing. The main reasons businesses fail are no business plan and poor management. That is why this book covers both topics. However, this book goes beyond other books on these topics. The book not only provides a road map for writing a business plan, but also provides a strategy for writing a business plan. A business plan is both a strategic document and a sales document. It also provides the reader with a look into the skills, knowledge and personality of the business owner. Therefore, a good business plan is written to satisfy all of these uses. In addition, this book provides information on how to research and organize the information needed for a business plan, and has worksheets the entrepreneur can use to help make the process easier. Likewise, management topics such as strategic planning (SWOT analysis plus), advertising, branding, project management, customer service management, cash flow management, sales skills, business writing and more are explained, and a method is provided for each management skill that can be implemented and used in the business. There are worksheets for many of the management topics as well.While many business book writers know and cover business writing, it's amazing how few actually apply that knowledge to their business books. I do. The information in this book is presented in bullet points, assuring the reader that he or she does not have to wade through four paragraphs of writing to get a couple of key points. Even the size of the book is practical for the end user. An over-sized book might attract attention in the book store, but would make it difficult to copy and use the worksheets in the book. An under-sized book might demonstrate value by the sheer volume of pages (same amount of information, but more pages), but would mean compressing the worksheets into smaller sizes rendering them less useful.In addition to entrepreneurs, this book was written so that venues teaching entrepreneurship can use it as a text book. In fact, I have been teaching entrepreneurship courses since 1997. This book was written to be a stand alone book, to support my business plan mentoring service (I review the worksheets for clients), and to be a text book for my course, How to Start, Grow and Manage a Business.The book received a very good review from the Midwest Book Review:"Too many businesses are started without the experience needed to keep it alive and going. "Building a Successful Business" is Jay Goldberg's advice manual for those embarking on the entrepreneurial path, with tips on how to avoid the common pitfalls that strike many first time business owners. With advice on strategically planning your business, cautious advertising, business writing, managing the funds and more, "Building a Successful Business" is a strongly recommended pick for any first time business person."Author's personal note: While the review concentrated on new business owners, the book was written for both first time business owners and established business owners. Many people assume that established business owners are utilizing management tools to help ensure success. However, many do not and that is one reason for the high failure rate of existing businesses. My book provides management tools, with associated worksheets, that existing businesses can use to help them achieve or maintain success as well as tools and worksheets for new business owners.