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ClydeBank Media LLC - Ken Colwell

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122 pages

English

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Description

The Best Book For New Or Experienced Entrepreneurs Who Want To Grow Their Business!

You’ve started a brand-new business. Are you ready to crush the competition?

It’s no secret that starting a new business isn’t easy. Once everything is up and running, however, entrepreneurs face a new set of challenges. It’s time to leave the uncertainty behind and start scaling the success of your business.

Best-selling author, professor, and consultant Ken Colwell, PhD, MBA knows what it takes to fuel the growth that brings a new business out of the early startup days and into a new phase of profitability.

Drawing on nearly three decades of hands-on experience, Colwell lays out the clearest path yet for new entrepreneurs who need to manage hiring, daily operations, and business growth while developing critical leadership, time management, and growth mindset skills.

Use the guidance in this book to secure the future of your business.

It doesn’t matter if your company is two weeks old or two years old—this book will teach you how to scale operations, strengthen your bottom line, and build a resilient business that stands out from the competition for years to come!

Running and Growing a Business QuickStart Guide Is Perfect For:

- New or experienced entrepreneurs getting their businesses off the ground

- First-time entrepreneurs planning for the future

- Current business owners who are struggling to scale or aren’t happy with their rate of growth

- New managers, new startup hires, or current employees angling for a promotion

- Anyone who wants to get a better picture of how best to manage a business for the long term

Running and Growing a Business QuickStart Guide Explains:

- How to scale your business and stand out in a competitive business environment

- How to excel at business management fundamentals from managing your LLC to growing your company

- How to run your start-up on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis

- How fund growth without overextending yourself and maintaining profitability

- How to become a better manager, how to improve your work-life balance, and how to lead your business to new heights of success

YOU WILL LEARN:

- Growth Management Fundamentals – How to Ignite, Control, and Profitably Sustain Business Growth

- How to Grow as an Entrepreneur – Learn Valuable Time Management Skills and How to Live a Self-Actualized Life

- How to Be a Better Leader – Learn How to Inspire Your Team, Delegate Effectively, and Achieve Your Goals

- How to Manage Your Business – Measure and Improve Day-To-Day Success, Standardize Procedures, and Scale Profitably

- How to Hire the Perfect Team, How to Accelerate Business Innovation, How to Grow Your Bottom Line, and More!

If you have ever looked at your new business and asked yourself “where do I go from here?” this book is for you! Ken Colwell, PhD, MBA is also the author of the bestselling book Starting a Business QuickStart Guide.

*LIFETIME ACCESS TO FREE BUSINESS GROWTH DIGITAL ASSETS!*

Running and Growing a Business QuickStart Guide comes with free lifetime access to a comprehensive library of tools and templates to help you grow your business quickly.

*GIVING BACK*

ClydeBank Media proudly supports One Tree Planted as a reforestation partner.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Reflecting

Chapter 2: Balancing

Chapter 3: Laughing

Chapter 4: Leading

Chapter 5: Management Skills that Accelerate Growth

Chapter 6: Hiring

Chapter 7: Create Scalable Systems and Processes

Chapter 8: Growing and Scaling

Chapter 9: Planning

Chapter 10: Funding

Chapter 11: We Live in a VUCA World

Conclusion

About the Author

About QuickStart Guides

Glossary
References

Index

Sujets

Entrepreneuriat

Business

Economics

Strategic management

Entrepreneurship

Employabilité, métiers et formations

Small Business

New Business Enterprises

Informations

Publié par	ClydeBank Media LLC
Date de parution	19 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636100661
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART I - GETTING YOURSELF READY FOR GROWTH
| 1 | REFLECTING
The Growth Mindset
Cultivating the Growth Mindset
Other Important Mindsets
Persistence
Accountability
| 2 | BALANCING
Protect Your Physical Health
Protect Your Mental Health
Cultivate Stronger Relationships
Seek Mindfulness
Develop Time-Management Routines
| 3 | LAUGHING
Improve Your Leadership with Improv
Shifting Out of Autopilot with Stand-Up
Opening Doors with Self-Deprecating Humor
Breaking the Tension with a Sense of Humor
Share the Truth in Unexpected Ways
PART II - MANEUVERING FOR GROWTH
| 4 | LEADING
Delegation
How to Foster an Environment Where Employees Aren t Afraid to Fail
Innovation
Transparency and Emotional Availability
| 5 | MANAGEMENT SKILLS THAT ACCELERATE GROWTH
Communicating
The Psychology of Communication: Connecting with Your Audience
Organizing
Decision Making
| 6 | HIRING
Build a Growth-Minded Team: The Attraction-Selection-Attrition Model
Outsourcing: How to Decide What to Keep In-House
| 7 | CREATE SCALABLE SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES
Standardizing Policies and Procedures
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Choosing the Right Digital Tools
Other Operations Issues
PART III - STRATEGIC ISSUES IN GROWING YOUR BUSINESS
| 8 | GROWING AND SCALING
Product Extension and Product Expansion
Growth by Acquisition
Growth by Vertical Integration
Expansion-Related Pitfalls
The Fallacy of First-Mover Advantage
| 9 | PLANNING
Review Your Business Plan
Keep These Growth Factors in Mind
Steps to Strategic Planning
| 10 | FUNDING
Raising Money to Fuel Growth
Debt
Sources of Debt Funding
Equity
Sources of Equity Funding
New Sources of Funding
Stages of Startup Funding
| 11 | WE LIVE IN A VUCA WORLD
Improvise
Adapt
Overcome
CONCLUSION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT CLYDEBANK MEDIA
GLOSSARY
REFERENCES

Introduction
Anyone interested in reading about how to run and grow their business will find plenty of content out there offering advice, tips, or narratives about the best ways to do it. Some of this material is good, some of it is trite, and some of it is downright awful. So, if I m asking you to read my stuff, the obvious questions are: Why should you? What sets me apart from any number of other would-be experts? Before we get to the real meat of this QuickStart Guide, let me tell you a little bit about my background and why I think my unique perspective will help you navigate complex issues more easily than you could on your own-or by turning to the myriad blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, etc., that deal with these topics.
A few years ago, I was approached by the publishers of the QuickStart Guides to write about starting a business. I did, and to my gratification, Starting a Business QuickStart Guide became an immediate bestseller. Running and Growing a Business QuickStart Guide is my follow-up, reflecting the next significant hurdle for a founder after a successful launch.
I believe my first book succeeded due to both my experience in academia and my fluency in the practical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of entrepreneurship. This combination allows me to use relevant, real-world examples to illustrate tried-and-true models from the domains of operations, human resources, and strategic management in addition to entrepreneurship. Hopefully, this will demystify these concepts for you. I also don t pull any punches and am very blunt about what works and about the mistakes I ve seen founders make over the years. My hope is that this will make for an enjoyable and educational read.
I also write for readers who did not start out as entrepreneurs-as I didn t myself. I m a Gen-Xer; my dad was a corporate wage slave and I assumed I would be too. So when I graduated from university, I started working in a series of normal jobs in finance. I ended up as a managing director at a major brokerage firm in San Francisco and also acquired (sorry, Elon!) an MBA. But I wasn t in San Francisco at just any time; I was there in the mid-to-late 1990s. In other words, during the dot-com boom and bust. It was the first time I d been exposed to the startup world, and I was at ground zero. My company wasn t a startup, but we were making a major push into online brokerage and disrupting the relatively sleepy world of personal finance while basically inventing high-volume e-commerce as we went along.
The whole firm experience left me burned out. I was tired of the middle manager s life of going to meeting after meeting, trying to get support and resources for the things I wanted to do. I wanted a way out, but I still wasn t thinking of starting my own business. In those days, tech deals needed massive amounts of capital to scale, which venture capital (VC) firms and other private equity organizations were happy to provide to the right people. I didn t have the technical background or expertise. It wasn t for me.
Several of my MBA professors had suggested academia as a career path, so I started to ask more questions about it. It sounded awesome: freedom to pursue whatever research projects I wanted, tenure for job security, and a good salary to boot. So I went to the University of Oregon to get my PhD in strategic management and entrepreneurship.
As I was studying and observing the dot-com bubble in real time, my advisor and I realized that private equity (PE) investors were pivoting. They had been roasted in the press for their extravagant bets on what seemed to be worthless e-commerce plays. I remember in particular people laughing about VC funding for five online pet stores. Who in the world would buy pet kibble online? (I write this as I await my latest Chewy order.) On the other hand, when pets.com was buying sock puppet ads for the Super Bowl, we all probably should have predicted that the bubble would burst.
Once I got my PhD, I joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia as an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship. At a school like Drexel, a professor s job is to produce high-quality research and teach a few courses each term. After a while, I found that I hated the research part of the job. I was too practical and impatient with the long time it took to get published and the politics it took to get into the best journals. I found myself drifting toward work at the entrepreneurship center, helping students who were interested in starting businesses, and taking student teams to national business plan competitions. Even though we were well into the internet age, it still took a lot of money to begin and scale a tech startup, and budding entrepreneurs needed business plans with extensive details to pitch to potential investors.
Because I wasn t enthusiastic about the major part of my job-academic research-I knew I had to find a new gig. By this time, I had acquired a decade of experience in the startup ecosystem. I d met a lot of entrepreneurs, and I began to understand what made them tick and what deals were fundable and workable. With my foot already in the academic door, I got a job running the entrepreneurship program at the University of Miami School of Business. Freed of research responsibilities, I could focus on what I really loved: tapping into the local entrepreneurial ecosystem and getting my students involved in it.
Tapping into that ecosystem was also very educational for me. It was the first time I had really interacted with entrepreneurs on a personal basis, rather than as research subjects. I began to better understand how they thought and what motivated them. Because I was trained as a business researcher, I was able to recognize and characterize behaviors that led to successful outcomes in a way that was different from those without this background. I was also able to apply standard tools of strategic management (like external analysis of the firm environment and internal analysis of firm competencies and capabilities) to the entrepreneurial context and show how they were meant to be used: to help managers make more effective decisions. As you will see over and over in this book, these tools can help you understand not only what needs to be done, but why. This realization led me to run an entrepreneurial consulting program with my students, helping local entrepreneurs, and eventually to found my own consulting firm, Innovative Growth Advisors.
After a few years at UMiami, I felt I was ready for my next challenge in academic administration, so I became a dean. People misunderstand what a dean does-and those misperceptions aren t helped by depictions of deans in movies as evil despots out to foil students fun. In reality, they are unit managers for fairly large organizational entities, managing academic programs with (in my case, anyway) thousands of students and millions of dollars in annual revenue. I have been dean of business schools at three universities as of this writing, and I ve tried to take the lessons of entrepreneurship and apply them to academia. In other words, to use the tools of creativity and innovation to attract new students and to help existing ones graduate and get good jobs.
During these twenty-plus years, I ve been both an observer and a participant in the startup ecosystem in many ways-studying it as an academic, teaching it to students, acting as a consultant to help students and others start and grow their own businesses, and running my own ventures. This varied background has provided me with insight into what works and what does not. My perspective on business growth and success is very much my own and quite distinct from that of the others who currently write, speak, think, and publish in this field.
Speaking of twenty-plus years of close observation, I ve seen radical changes in the startup world over the last two decades. Gone are the days when you needed to raise millions of dollars and live in San Francisco