The Right Brain Business Plan

Turn Passionate Ideas into Profitable Enterprises Do you dream of making a living doing what you love but find the process of creating a viable business plan like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? Jennifer Lee knows what it's like to make the entrepreneurial leap -- and how to do it successfully. The key is using, rather than stifling, imagination and intuition. Lee's illustrated, colorful worksheets and step-by-step instructions are playful yet practical, transforming drudgery into joy. They'll enable you to define your vision and nail down plans for funding, marketing, networking, and long-term strategy. Discover how to: * Develop a financial plan with fun and flair * Select your circle of support to get the work done * Clarify your business values and goals * Paint a picture of your business landscape * Understand your competition and what makes you stand out from the crowd * Identify your perfect customers and create a marketing plan to reach them * Map out concrete action steps to bring your Right-Brain Business Plan to life

Millions of artists, entrepreneurs, crafters, and solopreneurs dream of making a living doing what they love. But turning their vision into a viable business plan can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Jennifer Lee knows what it’s like to make the entrepreneurial leap — and how to do it successfully. The key is showing creative types how to use — rather than stifle — the imagination and intuition that make them creative in the first place. Lee’s illustrated, colorful worksheets and step-by-step instructions are playful yet practical, enabling readers to get down to the essential business of defining their vision and nailing down plans for funding, marketing, networking, and long-term strategy. Both budding and seasoned business owners will benefit from Lee’s wonderfully original approach. Discover how to: • Develop a financial plan with fun and flair • Select your circle of support to get the work done • Clarify your business values and goals • Paint a picture of your business landscape • Understand your competition and what makes you stand out from the crowd • Identify your perfect customers and create a marketing plan to reach them • Map out concrete action steps to bring your Right-Brain Business Plan to life

Grow a Profitable and Lasting Business on Your Terms If you’ve started a business, you know that the journey toward success can be both invigorating and confusing, so where can you find advice that is practical and focused but still as playful and passionate as you are? Look no further than this book, which combines solid business expertise with a right-brain perspective that inspires creativity and innovation. Jennifer Lee’s fresh, empowering approach emphasizes taking action and continually improving to achieve extraordinary long-term results. Building Your Business the Right-Brain Way offers real-world-tested techniques that can benefit all sorts of businesses, whether you’re a sole proprietor running a coaching practice, a crafter looking to license products, a wellness professional with a team of employees, or any creative soul making a meaningful difference with your work. You’ll discover how to: • assess your business’s unique “ecosystem” • build your brand and attract, engage, and keep ideal customers • develop new income streams that better leverage your time and resources • promote your products and services with authenticity and ease • grow your team (virtual and in-person) and manage staff and vendors • establish infrastructure and procedures to keep operations running smoothly • carve out vital white space to pause, reflect, and celebrate Includes play sheets and color illustrations to inspire action and propel your success

If Chris Cooper has a superpower, it's the ability to make mistakes faster than anyone else. Fortunately, none have been fatal, and they can help OTHER gym owners build happier lives.Chris brings a "big picture" perspective unmatched by anyone else in the industry. After thousands of hours spent one-on-one with gym owners, hundreds of blog posts and more interviews than he can recall, Chris shares his best lessons in the second edition of "Two-Brain Business." From Australia to Europe to North America, these are what Chris' clients--some of the best gyms in the world--are doing RIGHT.This is the follow-up to Two-Brain Business, one of the most popular fitness business books of all time. But its content is all new, with fresh stories, smart ideas and proven tactics.www.twobrainbusiness.com

Judging by all the hoopla surrounding business plans, you'd think the only things standing between would-be entrepreneurs and spectacular success are glossy five-color charts, bundles of meticulous-looking spreadsheets, and decades of month-by-month financial projections. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, often the more elaborately crafted a business plan, the more likely the venture is to flop. Why? Most plans waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to information that really matters to investors. The result? Investors discount them. In How to Write a Great Business Plan, William A. Sahlman shows how to avoid this all-too-common mistake by ensuring that your plan assesses the factors critical to every new venture: The people—the individuals launching and leading the venture and outside parties providing key services or important resources The opportunity—what the business will sell and to whom, and whether the venture can grow and how fast The context—the regulatory environment, interest rates, demographic trends, and other forces shaping the venture's fate Risk and reward—what can go wrong and right, and how the entrepreneurial team will respond Timely in this age of innovation, How to Write a Great Business Plan helps you give your new venture the best possible chances for success.

"Building a second brain is getting things done for the digital age. It's a ... productivity method for consuming, synthesizing, and remembering the vast amount of information we take in, allowing us to become more effective and creative and harness the unprecedented amount of technology we have at our disposal"--

Business startup advice from the former president of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation and cofounder of Global Entrepreneurship Week and StartUp America, this “thoughtful study of ‘how businesses really start, grow, and prosper’...dispels quite a few business myths along the way” (Publishers Weekly). Carl Schramm, the man described by The Economist as “The Evangelist of Entrepreneurship,” has written a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to help you get your big idea off the ground. Schramm believes that entrepreneurship has been misrepresented by the media, business books, university programs, and MBA courses. For example, despite the emphasis on the business plan in most business schools, some of the most successful companies in history—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and hundreds of others—achieved success before they ever had a business plan. Burn the Business Plan punctures the myth of the cool, tech-savvy twenty-something entrepreneur with nothing to lose and venture capital to burn. In fact most people who start businesses are juggling careers and mortgages just like you. The average entrepreneur is actually thirty-nine years old, and the success rate of entrepreneurs over forty is five times higher than that of those under age thirty. Entrepreneurs who come out of the corporate world often have discovered a need for a product or service and have valuable contacts to help them get started. Filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs who drew on real-life experience rather than academic coursework, Burn the Business Plan is the guide to starting and running a business that will actually work for the rest of us.

The Creative Entrepreneur was voted Winner, in two categories—Craft and Business, of the 2009 IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) Benjamin Franklin Award which recognizes excellence in publishing. This book is for the large audience of artists, crafters, and creative individuals from all walks of life who desire to make a livelihood from their creative work, or who possibly have achieved some success, but don’t know how to replicate it or move to another level of accomplishment. These crafty DIY artists are everywhere--they are holding alternative craft fairs, they advertise in the pages of Bust and ReadyMade and Craft, they are selling online by the thousands at Etsy.com, and are blogging at Typepad, LiveJournal, and Whipup.com. But many of them do not have the skills needed to take their business ideas to the next level. The Creative Entrepreneur takes readers on an inner journey of creative exploration to discover how to make their dreams of creative livelihood real, as they craft their own Artist’s Business Journal. The Artist’s Business Journal is a visual, project-oriented, step-by-step approach to business development for artists from all walks of life who are mystified and possibly frustrated by how to make a business out of their creative work.