Small Business Trends

There’s a lot of waste in entrepreneurial efforts today. I should know; I wasted a lot. Wasted time. Wasted money. Wasted efforts. Finally, wasted dreams. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses helps business owners see how to eliminate that waste and get to the essence of startups (tech and non-tech): Read More

Working behind the scenes on the Small Business Book Awards, you get to discover a lot of books you might not have known about otherwise. Here are just three uniquely-named books that we found there.

The Cheese Mall

If the title of this book isn’t enough to make you read it, I don’t know what will. Written by Bernie Tracey Read More

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free” – The Joker, as played by Heath Ledger

In the movie The Dark Knight, The Joker bargains with the Gotham mob dealers for half of their holdings if he kills Batman.  He replies with the above quote when a Gotham mob boss asked if killing Batman was simple, as Read More

There are two types of entrepreneurs: those that jump into a new business headfirst, and those that dip their toes in the water. One’s not better than the other, though the second one is probably more prepared for what lies ahead. In Making the Jump into Small Business Ownership (@MakingtheJump), authors David Nilssen (@DavidNilssen) and Read More

Have you noticed that there is a whole new personality and a new way of being to successful entrepreneurship?  Just compare the successful entrepreneurs from one hundred years ago and those of today – there is a subtle difference about how Andrew Carnegie built his business and how Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google.

This new theme of being Read More

In 2011 I wrote a few business book reviews based on a couple of Kindle purchases.  In addition to the business books, I picked up one of those  $.99 Kindle Singles written by John Locke about a savvy CIA assassin named Donovan Creed.  I got hooked on his engaging and entertaining stories and before I knew it, I had Read More

The highlight of my mailbox a few weeks ago was a review copy of Selling In A Skirt: The Secrets Women Don’t Know They Know About Sales (And What Men Should Know, Too) by Judy Hoberman. When I opened the first pages, the highlight to bring me further into the text was a paragraph regarding a significant challenge Read More

Many small business owners work from home, but very few of these same owners would be comfortable inviting a prospective client to see their home office.  The home office often ranges from controlled chaos to a black hole where invoices and client information are never seen from again. Organize Your Home Office for Success – Expert Strategies That Read More

Now that we are solidly into 2012, it’s time to stop dreaming and start doing.  One of my business resolutions was to create product and service offerings that are rooted in targeting my ideal customer, what’s important to them when they are buying what I’m selling and then developing an offer that is structured for exactly how they want to Read More

The numerous ways to conduct digital marketing, combined with traditional media, can create an elaborate process to measure results.  To make  the hard work of analysis easier, try Data Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone In Marketing Should Know by Mark Jeffery.  Jeffery, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, has provided the right starting points to Read More