Category — Small Business

At lunch the other day I mentioned mentioned the following books …

Michael E. Gerber

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

“A business without a dream is like a life without a purpose.”
—Michael Gerber

Dream • Vision • Purpose • Mission

These words have been defining the life of Michael Gerber, bestselling author and international small business guru. He created E-Myth Worldwide in 1977 to transform the way that small business owners grow their companies. Now he’s created In The Dreaming Room as a place where entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

Michael’s Dream: to inspire people to dream by awakening the entrepreneur within them.

Michael’s Vision: to be the authority for helping dreamers everywhere create the small businesses they once could only imagine.

Michael’s Purpose: to transform the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the thrill of creation while creating the means to generate their own and others’ economic freedom.

Michael’s Mission: to create a turnkey system for awakening the entrepreneur within every person who wishes to go into business for themselves, while providing them with the support for doing it.

And he has done it. In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! As he writes: “It is time to dream. It is time to care about something bigger than you. It is time to imagine something sorely needed in the world—the world you live in—that somebody would pay to have. It is time to look around you and ask yourself, ‘What’s missing in this picture?’”

If you see something missing in your world, it’s time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.

View More about Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies

Michael E. Gerber

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.

View More about The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Tim Sanders

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?

Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.

How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.

What happens when you do all this?
* You become a rich source of information to all around you.
* You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
* You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
* You double your business intelligence in one year.
* You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
* You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.

In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.

Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

From the Hardcover edition.

View More about Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends

Timothy Ferriss

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent “mini-retirements”
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

You can have it all—really.

View More about The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

David Heinemier Hannson of 37Signals and creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails, gave a great talk at Paul Graham’s Startup School this weekend. In the same way that he and his 37Signals comrades defy conventional wisdom on developing technology, he presents his unconventional ideas on business (at least unconventional compared to the VC-ish and We-Want-To-Get-Bought-Out-By-Google crowd that probably attended Startup School).

Some highlights:

• Comparing over-fearing terrorism to over-hoping to be the next billion+ dollar Facebook or MySpace
• Targeting the “Fortune 5,000,000″
• Charge REAL MONEY for your product/service! *GASP*
• You don’t have to be the best Italian restaurant, there’s room for LOTS of excellent ones in the world
• You don’t always have to have a super original or creative idea … Zappos.com created a great business selling shoes online for godsakes! They just do it great with extraordinary customer service.

Anyway, watch the video, it’s well worth your time (and check out the always interesting comments on this over at the Signal vs. Noise blog when you’re done):

photo credit: mistersnappy
There’s a nice, no-nonsense list from Small Biz Survival: Checklists for starting your first business. Some folks may take issue with starting as a sole proprietorship, some say you should never do that and should always do business as an LLC, S-Corp, etc., but it’s up to you! Check out the list!

Check it out: Half-Assed Startup: How do I start my company and keep my day job?

Blogtrepreneur has a really useful, no-BS list of resources for entrepreneurs. They cover communications/VoIP, data backup, invoicing, financial management/accounting, time/project management, contact management, hiring resources, online reputation, accepting payments, shopping carts, fund-finding and CPC revenue.

The list is very clean and readable and does not seem to pushing any products. Nice.

Check it out: 101 Useful Resources for Online Entrepreneurs

Check out the killer interview of Michael Gerber (of E-Myth fame) over at timferris.com: Escaping the Entrepreneurial Seizure: Interview with Michael Gerber and then check out Michael Gerber’s new book, Awaking the Entrepreneur Within. Great stuff.

Michael E. Gerber

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

“A business without a dream is like a life without a purpose.”
—Michael Gerber

Dream • Vision • Purpose • Mission

These words have been defining the life of Michael Gerber, bestselling author and international small business guru. He created E-Myth Worldwide in 1977 to transform the way that small business owners grow their companies. Now he’s created In The Dreaming Room as a place where entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

Michael’s Dream: to inspire people to dream by awakening the entrepreneur within them.

Michael’s Vision: to be the authority for helping dreamers everywhere create the small businesses they once could only imagine.

Michael’s Purpose: to transform the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the thrill of creation while creating the means to generate their own and others’ economic freedom.

Michael’s Mission: to create a turnkey system for awakening the entrepreneur within every person who wishes to go into business for themselves, while providing them with the support for doing it.

And he has done it. In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! As he writes: “It is time to dream. It is time to care about something bigger than you. It is time to imagine something sorely needed in the world—the world you live in—that somebody would pay to have. It is time to look around you and ask yourself, ‘What’s missing in this picture?’”

If you see something missing in your world, it’s time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.

View More about Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies

Man I love the blog from the Trizle folks. They make business fun and deliver no-BS advice. They posted another great one today:

How To Work Your Performers

Their advice of paying 1.5X and asking me to do double would have worked on me when I was a star performer at a small company!

Ryan P. Allis

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

springq.com says: The great inspirational story of Ryan Allis.

Do You Want to Become a Multi-Millionaire Entrepreneur? Here’s How.

By the time Ryan Allis had reached the age of twenty-one, he had achieved the financial goal most people just dream about: He made built his company to one million in sales. Allis has since grown his company iContact Corp., a provider of Web-based email marketing and online communication softwares, to $10 million per year in sales, and has helped numerous clients increase their sales dramatically.

Now Allis shares the secrets of his lightning-fast success with you. In Zero to One Million, he details his simple yet innovative evaluation system of “Market-Advantages-Return” to help you determine if your business idea is viable. Once you have a solid foundation, you can apply his advice for successfully running your business-from initial planning to managing high-speed growth.

• Evaluate your business idea using the innovative MAR system
• Write a business plan sure to excite your investors
• Launch your company with minimal expenditure
• Boost online sales using cutting-edge marketing strategies
• Watch all your hard work transform into millions

Did you know that eighty-one percent of millionaires are entrepreneurs? Join the pantheon of successful businessmen and women with Zero to One Million.

View More about Zero to One Million: How I Built My Company to $1 Million in Sales . . . and How You Can, Too

Jay Conrad Levinson

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinsons philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. In this completely revised and expanded fourth edition, Levinson offers a new arsenal of weaponry for small-business success in the next century. Filled with strategies for marketing on the Internet (explaining when and precisely how to use it), tips for putting other new technologies to work, programs for targeting prospects and cultivating repeat and referral business, and management lessons in the age of telecommuting and freelance employees, this book will be the entrepreneurs marketing bible in the twenty-first century.

View More about Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your SmallBusiness

Bruce Judson

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
springq.com says: I read this book right when it came out and it was great; I think that I am going to re-read it now as I am going to start a new venture. For some reason, I’ve never heard much buzz about this book, but I think that it deserves to be grouped with some more popular entrepreneurship books.

“There is an epidemic of unhappiness in the American workplace. A full 70 percent of workers in the United States report that they are disengaged from their jobs. When asked, “”Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”" only 20 percent of nearly 2 million employees said yes. It is no wonder that 56 percent of all Americans dream of starting their own business. So why don’t they do so? Because starting one’s own business is seen as difficult, expensive, and risky.

In this extraordinary book, successful Go It Alone! entrepreneur Bruce Judson explains that the conventional wisdom about starting your own business is stunningly wrong. Using the leverage of technology — e-mail, the World Wide Web, and the remarkable array of off-the-shelf business services now available — it is dramatically easier to start your own business. Magnified by these new services, it is also possible to create, for the first time, a highly focused business.

Bruce Judson shows you the practical steps that will allow nearly any individual to create a business, often using job skills that seem to require an entire corporation for support. It is no longer necessary to spend time on the tasks that don’t add value. It is now possible to stay small but reap big profits. Go-it-alone businesses allow the individual the freedom to concentrate on their greatest skills. After reading this book, your motto will be “Do What You Do Best, Let Others Do the Rest.”

View More about Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own