A summary of things you should know about The 15 Success Traits of Pro Bloggers according to Jonathan Milligan: Introduction In this episode Jonathan Milligan takes a deep dive intoRead More
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]]>In this episode Jonathan Milligan takes a deep dive into his book, The 15 Success Traits of Pro Bloggers, where he shares a roadmap to becoming a full-time blogger.
In his book Milligan provides a simple blueprint with actionable summaries of the 4 significant habits that aspiring bloggers should add to their daily routine if they want to become online professionals. The goal of the book is to teach you what it takes to achieve maximum results with your blog, how to get your blog noticed by more people, and what types of content generate the most traffic.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs that own or plan on owing an online based business and what to know the ins and outs of establishing a popular yet profitable blog.
I was very specific in the beginning and I did not want to write another book about how to write a blog. My book is a business book first, it’s something someone can take and use as a self-development plan that you can fall into over the next couple of years.
I would say that if you are just starting out as a blogger you should read it straight through. If you’ve been blogging for a while you might be interested to jump further to the actual processes.
I would hope that the reader would walk away with the heart of the book. The heart of the book is that the best way to grow a business is teaching and serving an audience well.
At the very beginning of the book I share with you a way that you can get access to a one page colored PDF that I had designed that explains the essence of the whole book. This one page infographic is what I call The Blogger Success Pyramid. It’s got the 15 traits in a pyramid format and both my students and I use to help form and build our businesses. And so the chapters are divided into each of those traits.
The very bottom of the pyramid is what I call Tier One and it’s the mindset. The mindset is so important for us to be able to grasp the things that we need to get ahold of in order to achieve success. For many of us, we are going to act out of our thoughts. And so if our thoughts are defeating we are not going to take action. The five mindsets that I share are passion, resilience, confidence, consistency, and patience. You have got to have these five mindsets because without them you will not be able to stay with it over the long haul to achieve success.
In Tier Two we jump into what I think many people get hung up on, the habits. There are so many things to do that you don’t know where to focus your time and so I boil it down in the book to four simple keystone habits. The first habit is the create habit; this habit is to use text, audio and video to get your message out to the masses. The second habit is the capture habit which is the art form exchange of value for e-mail addresses. Building that e-mail list is so critical and so important. From there you have the compile habit and that is where you package your knowledge and perspective into products and services. And then you move into the connect habit which is your ability to connect with other people and build community with other passionate influencers.
In Tier Three we go over systems and there are three traits in this tier which are people, processes, and plans. When you get the right people, you create the right processes that you can outsource, and you put the right plans in place, you can begin to scale your business way beyond yourself.
And finally, the top tier is the Leverage Tier and that’s how you stay on top. There are two essential traits to staying on top and those two traits are learning and listening. Learning is the ability to unlearn and sit at the feet of your peers. The second leverage point is listening and that is the constant awareness of the goals, passions, and struggles of your audience.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:57
“What’s the ultimate result we want from all of this hard work? For me it’s not money, although I need money to live and reach my goals, it’s not fame or popularity, I find more fulfillment in stewarding the gifts Gods given me even if popularity never comes my way. The final success trait cannot be achieved as a goal; instead it’s a result of doing everything else well. It’s the ultimate gift from a lifetime of serving others, trust and authority. You are rich when you’ve earned trust and authority with your audience.” – Jonathan Milligan
I started my career as a high school teacher and both of my parents were educators and so I thought that might be where I was going to land. After about three years of coaching and teaching, I loved the kids but I found that it wasn’t the right environment for me. I had a real entrepreneurial side to me and so I joined up with a startup company that was an executive search firm. I did that for about eight years and from there I got into blogging. Over the course of a couple years I ended up getting to a place where it could replace my job and now today it’s what I do. I am a fulltime blogger and I have two blogs that I manage.
I always had multiple e-mails asking questions of how I became a fulltime blogger and so I began thinking through how exactly I could teach this to others. After running it by friends and family I boiled it down to what I considered 15 success traits.
Work Simply by Carson Tate
Buy The 15 Success Traits of Pro Bloggers by Jonathan Milligan on Amazon today
Visit BloggingYourPassion.com to learn more Jonathan’s book and online courses
Follow Jonathan Milligan on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Real Moms Making Real Money Blogging by Stephanie O’Dea
The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick
The Website Investor by Jeffrey Hunt
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Recommended Books for Starting an Online Business
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]]>A summary of things you should know about High Paying Clients according to Trevor Crane: Introduction In this episode Trevor Crane takes a deep dive into his book, High PayingRead More
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]]>In this episode Trevor Crane takes a deep dive into his book, High Paying Clients, where he reveals a no-fluff, non-BS approach for selling to high-end clients.
In his book Crane provides a step-by-step guide derived from his personal experience training and consulting entrepreneurs to reinvent the way they do business in order to make more money. The goal of the book is to show you exactly how to find highly profitable clients, sell high-end products to high-paying people, make more money off less deals, and easily close a high-end sale.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are selling a high-end product or service, are tired of handling cheap, unappreciative customers, and need to guide for finding loyal clients.
One of my strengths is breaking something down into something really simple. This book has functionally created results in every one of my clients.
You can jump in and out based on where your strengths and weaknesses are.
It’s to get help. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned in my businesses is that I’ve had successes and I’ve had failures but if you want to improve something the greatest way to get the result that you want is to get help. Go find somebody to help you create the result you want.
The content of the four initial steps of how you can train your entire staff are Hi, Why, Try, and Bye. Hi is just a very simple greeting and the building section of the process. If you do this well and someone knows, likes, and trusts you, that in it of itself can get people to want to buy from you right away. Because if people really like you and trust you they are going to want to buy from you and too often when someone is trying to make the sale they forget this part.
The second step is the Why and there are two things to probe for, first you want to probe for pain, and second you want to probe for pleasure. Step number three is after you find out what they want and why they want it you then give them Try and now make them an option. Often time’s people are given too many options and a confused mind says no. You don’t want that to happen so make sure to give people a very clear, consist, and compelling call to action.
In the Bye step I ask for you to close the deal and give you different strategies and benchmark questions to make sure you collect a decision. Yes’s are great, no’s are great because you don’t have to waste any more time, and maybes will kill you. So you want to avoid the maybes. I also highly recommend, no matter what your business is, that you at least talk about your guarantee when you are trying to close the deal.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 12:11
“A confused mind says no and does nothing.” “We can only see in someone else what we can also see in ourselves.” – Trevor Crane
For the last 12 years I’ve been a fulltime business coach and consultant. I work with small business owners, medium size business owners and my expertise is helping them find that extra money laying around in their business without spending more money. So I help them improve their systems and processes and drive bottom line revenue. All the tools and teachings came from my own experiences in owning a business is water sports and tourism, marketing and advertising, and also one in environmental protection. I’ve had a lot of failures and successes and put the best of what I’ve learned into High Paying Clients.
I decided to write this book because it was really the best of what I do for my clients. As I looked at what I wanted to promote I figured I wanted to give my best stuff away first. This is what helps people convert the sale.
The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
Buy High Paying Clients by Trevor Crane on Amazon today
Visit TrevorCrane.com to learn more about Trevor and his book
Visit GreatnessQuest.com to learn more about his TV show
Follow Trevor Crane on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Trusted Advisor by Rob Galford
Never Chase Clients Again by Michael Moshiri
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sleaze-Free Selling by Julia Kline
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
5 Simple Ways An Entrepreneur Can Attract Customers To Their Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Website Investor according to Jeff Hunt: Introduction In this episode Jeff Hunt gives an in-depth summary of his book, The WebsiteRead More
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]]>In this episode Jeff Hunt gives an in-depth summary of his book, The Website Investor, where he shares a guide to buying an online website business for passive income.
In his book Hunt provides a roadmap for finding highly profitable online businesses for sale and shows you how to get the most value out of them without having to start from scratch. The goal of the book is to help you estimate the value of a website, negotiate price with website sellers, differentiate between low and high effort web businesses, and hire the right virtual assistants to help grow your web business.
This book is perfect for serial entrepreneurs who are interested in owning profitable online businesses that have already developed a customer base without having to start fresh.
A lot of people are interested in entrepreneurship and buying your own business and because of that a lot of books are coming out on the topic. But really there are no books about buying online businesses and that’s really a shame. My book teaches people exactly how to do that.
A lot of people read through the whole book and then go back and use it as a reference. The important thing is that you take time to stop and ponder what it’s saying and how it applies to you and then take action on it.
In any enterprise of any size there is always a buy vs build decision. The key principle in the book is that investing is better than inventing in almost every case. The action item associated with that principle is to get out there and start looking and educate yourself on what’s available.
The first thing you will notice about my book are the stories. I have a number of case studies that are essentially stories of acquisitions that I’ve made. Those stories are there because it is helpful for people to get an idea of what their website would look like, pricing, etc. if they were to purchase one.
The second thing the book is all about is process. The book is a comprehensive guide on how to do it and it really follows the same kind of processes you would use in making any kind of significant purchase and starts with where to buy, how to search website listings, and how to narrow down those listings to something you would be interested in. It starts at the beginning helping people find where those opportunities are, and then it moves into how to evaluate. After you’ve picked a few that you want to evaluate then you need to dig in and figure out how much they are worth. So the book has a really nice chapter on how to value and put a price tag on a website to give you an idea of what you should pay.
There are chapters on negotiation because many of website purchases are negotiated and don’t have a hard and fixed price. And then we go over how to transfer the website from the seller to the buyer and making sure everyone is taken care of and everything is protected.
The book also covers lots of other topics like buying international websites, organizing yourself as a business, and how to sell a website if you choose to. We discuss the topics of apps vs websites and whether you should buy one or not.
As you read through the book you will get the idea that buying in to a website business vs starting from scratch is just a whole lot easier.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:55
“Be the nicest buyer.” – Jeff Hunt
I’ve worked for many years in middle management at IBM where we had achieved most of our career goals. We felt like we just wanted to give back some of the blessing we had received so my family and I sold everything we had and moved overseas to a western Asian country where we served for about seven years. Once the kids grew up we knew it was time to come home. When I got home I didn’t feel like I could return to the corporate world very easily with the seven year gap on my resume so with little cash I decided to start buying websites and since bought about 300 income generating websites. Along with the website investing I am also an advisor for an online business acquisition for a company called Cloud Income Properties.
I meet a lot of people who would be better off buying in rather than starting a business from scratch. I go to conferences and people are really attracted to the online business space because of the flexibility that it offers. What most people don’t realize is the online business failure rate is even higher than offline just because people don’t invest themselves into it as much. And so the inspiration for my book is introducing all these people who are interested in a business to this idea of buying a website. The other inspiration is to help myself because the more people who are aware of this possibility, the more websites come out of the wood work that are for sale that I can buy and add to my portfolio.
Managing by Harold Geneen
Buy The Website Investor by Jeff Hunt on Amazon today
Visit HeckYeah.org to learn more about Jeff and his book
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
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]]>A summary of things you should know about 100 Days of Growth according to Sujan Patel: Introduction In this episode Sujan Patel takes a deep dive into his book, 100Read More
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]]>In this episode Sujan Patel takes a deep dive into his book, 100 Days of Growth, where he shares over 100 online marketing strategies that are used by top performing companies.
In his book Patel provides actionable techniques his company has used to help other businesses grow and teaches you step-by-step how to implement these growth strategies into your own business. The goal of the book is to help you improve your search engine optimization efforts, increase your lead generation results, eliminate ineffective digital marketing tactics, and much more.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who own an online business and are looking for an all-in-one guide for effective digital marketing tactics that will take their results from good to excellent.
I have personally weeded out a lot of strategies and tried 300 things I include in the book. This book is not a long read and each tactic and page is easy to understand and something you can do yourself.
It’s one of those books that you can jump in and out of.
The principle that I want the reader to takeaway is that you should always be testing new concepts. I layout 100 and as you read the book you will probably find a few 100 more. You don’t have to spend months strategizing and planning, you just start doing.
From the book you are going to learn a lot of how to repeat and how to implement things like AB testing your homepage. You can read all this stuff on the web but this is specifically the one thing you need to AB test. If you are thinking about how to leverage your traffic more there are things like the exit intent popup. Or if you want to build a referral program there is a simple way to get started. This book is not the end all be all but simply a way for you to start and with a successful method. The book spins around a lot of different things that are all around getting more revenue from your internet business.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:21
I don’t have a favorite quote but I’ll give you my favorite tactic listed in the book. It’s the first tactic and it’s just giving away a free company t-shirt. It’s such a simple thing and yes it cost money but I’ve personally made a little under a million dollars just from giving away free t-shirts from my agency.
I’ve been doing digital marketing for 12 years now and worked with hundreds of clients helping them grow their traffic and revenue. Over the years I’ve worked on a lot of different ideas that have failed and a handful of things that have worked. My concept for the book is to put together my learnings and successes in a repeatable fashion.
I wanted to make something where people can follow along. Every tip and tactic is something you can do and ideally if you did one thing a day for the next 100 days you’re going to see some exponential growth. My inspiration was to take all my learnings of how to grow a business and make it useful, tactical, and actionable.
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Buy 100 Days of Growth by Sujan Patel today
Visit 100DaysofGrowth.com to learn more about the book
Get in touch with Sujan via email here
Follow Sujan Patel on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Predictable Profits Playbook by Charles Gaudet
Do It! Marketing by David Newman
Digital Bacon by Alex Rodriguez
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Captivology according to Ben Parr: Introduction In this episode Ben Parr shares all his insights on his book, Captivology, where he presentsRead More
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]]>In this episode Ben Parr shares all his insights on his book, Captivology, where he presents a unique understanding of capturing people’s attention.
In his book Parr reveals his latest research on the psychology and neuroscience on what attracts consumers and convinces them to support certain areas of a business product or service. The goal of the book is to help you create effective advertising campaigns, deliver high quality presentations, delegate the right jobs to the right people, and bring your product to the attention of millions of prospects.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who understand the importance of building a following but are having trouble attracting and engaging the right consumers with a product or service.
What I set out to do was not write a marketing or social media book. There is a lot of scientific research and information in this book and I don’t base my suggestions or triggers on my gut feeling. I actually went through the actual science and 1,000 research studies to truly understand the subject at a fundamental level.
I think that you can jump in and out but you are going to get the most benefit by reading it front to back.
The one thing that I’ve learned from all the research I did and all the people I interview was the masters of attention don’t try to capture attention for themselves, they try to capture attention for their projects, passions, and ideas. I want people to think of attention as this positive tool for whatever they do.
The book is divided into two key sections and I’ll describe some of the key pieces and findings.
The first part is what I call The Three Stages of Attention and I go through the new model that I found for how attention works and how we should think of attention. Everybody seems to think of attention as this kind of short-term or reactionary thing or short-term focus but that’s not really the attention and the fundamentals. Attention is really a memory construct and it goes on three stages which are immediate attention, short attention, and long attention. With these three attentions I don’t think many people think about how to walk their audience through all three, they just focus on how to get initial attention. So I talk a lot about walking your audience through those three stages of attention.
The key and the structure of the book is around seven captivation triggers and these are the seven psychological triggers that kept coming up through my research that capture your attention across all three stages. The seven triggers are automaticity, framing, disruption, reward, reputation, mystery, and acknowledgement. Automaticity understands the automatic reaction we have to certain sights, sounds, and colors. Framing is about our frame of reference and how our frame of reference based on our world experience, really does change the way in which we pay attention. Disruption is that we pay attention to the people and things that violate our expectations. Then you have reward and the reward system is one that is not fully understood. Reputation is that we pay attention to reputable source specifically experts, authority figures, and the crowd. Mystery is one of the final triggers and it’s when we pay attention to incomplete story lines and thoughts. The most prayerful trigger of them all is acknowledgment and that is when we pay attention to the people and things that provide us with validation, empathy, and understanding.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:08
“Attention is the most important currency that anybody can give you. It’s worth more than money, possession, or things.” – Ben Parr
I am the author of Captivology and also the founder of DominateFund which is an early stage venture fund that coaches startups on attention and how to capture attention for their products. My original claim to fame in the tech industry was that I was the co-editor and editor-at-large of Mashable.
I was initially inspired by entrepreneurs. When I first left Mashable and I started doing the venture fund and the kind of help that startups came to me for was all around attention. As I did my research I really came to realize that attention is the fundamental life blood of the modern economy and so that set me off the path of writing this book.
Quiet by Susan Cain
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Buy Captivology by Ben Parr on Amazon today
Visit Captivology.com to learn more about the book
Visit BenParr.com to learn more about Ben and his company
Follow Ben Parr on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Escape The Expected by Tom Trush
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Traction: A Startup Guide for Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Social Profit Handbook according to David Grant: Introduction In this episode David Grant takes a deep dive into his book, TheRead More
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]]>In this episode David Grant takes a deep dive into his book, The Social Profit Handbook, where he shares a guide to setting goals, assessing outcomes, and achieving success for mission-driven organizations.
In his book Grant provides proven, actionable strategies that help low-profit and non-profit organizations take charge of their operations in order to improve their future. The goal of the book is to teach you how to create assessment rubrics, develop a solid social business plan, properly measure your success, and effectively set attainable goals.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are in the business of creating social change and want to know what it takes to create an efficiently run mission-based organization.
I think the book is quite different in that it’s written by somebody who actually doesn’t care that much about the science of measurement. I have great respect for people who do but I am much more interested in the whole idea of assessment as a tool than I am as an end in itself. My whole interest is not in measurement but in what is being measured and that is to say in this case social profit. The world is full of people chasing financial profit and the world needs more people who are interested in social profit.
I wrote it to be read from front to back.
I think my phrase would be the power of rubric writing in mission time.
I spend the introduction and chapter one asking the question if this is worth your time. I am trying to let people know that this is a book about questions of assessment but I’ve got a bigger purpose in mind and that is the social profit that the world needs.
Chapters two, three, and four are about mindset and assumptions. I think if we start thinking differently about assessment and have different practices we will not only create more social profit but also be happier in our workplace. Chapter two is about measurement itself. We live in an age of metrics and we live in an age of outcomes measurement and people are constantly asking for numbers but we know that not everything yields itself to numbers. I suggest that we should open ourselves to quantitative measure and if we don’t have a standard measure for something we actually have to create it.
Chapter four is called Mission Time which is a key idea in the book that is based on my twelve years of running the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation where I time and again talked to leaders in the social sector and none of them took enough time with colleagues to reflect on how they were doing. I make the case of mission time and building an end an organization and thereby really changing the culture of the place.
All of that leads me to chapter five which is the central chapter of the book and it’s called The Art of the Rubric. The rubric is a qualitative assessment tool; it’s everywhere in education and hardly anywhere in the social sector. It’s a matrix where down one side you have criteria for success and along the other side you’ve got levels of performance in relation to those criteria. It’s infinitely expandable and it gives you time to use words as well as numbers to describe what success looks like at these different levels. This chapter is part of a workshop that I have given for years about how to think about rubric and how to design them. By the time you are at the end of this chapter it is my hope that you are fired up to start working with your colleagues on writing some rubrics.
Chapter six is practical advice on rubric design and I shift from teacher to coach in this chapter because I know the problems you are going to bump in to.
Chapters seven, eight, and nine are examples of organizations that have gotten together, sat around a table, and used rubrics to create qualitative assessment tools that have changed their work. I start with individual organizations that are kind of small and by the time I’m in chapter nine I am describing entire systems where people all over the country have come together to write rubrics.
The last chapter is called Changing Our Minds and Cultures and it asks the question of what gets in the way of this work. You can have the best ideas in the world but you can’t actually bring them to life unless you create an atmosphere in the workplace where people can come together with clarity about what it is they do, what they don’t do, what they value, and what success would look like.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:32
“The first value of the rubric was that it pushed us to think more clearly and more deeply about what we were trying to accomplish.” – Unknown
I have had a career split between two fields, the first half was in education and I was an English teacher. Then I had the opportunity to start and found a school in Vermont called The Mountain School which was the first of the whole series of semester plans which now exist around the country. From there I became president of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey.
When I came in to the foundation world I leaning towards the question who needs to learn what here. I ended up working very closely with the executive directors and the board chairs of the nonprofit organizations that the Dodge Foundation funded. What started with a couple afternoon sessions became a full blown course in leadership. The real incentive to write the book was that after these workshops, time and again, people told me that I had to write a book.
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Buy The Social Profit Handbook by David Grant on Amazon today
Visit SocialProfitHandbook.com to learn more about the book
Follow David Grant on LinkedIn
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Happywork according to Chris Reimer: Introduction In this episode Chris Reimer takes a deep dive into his book, Happywork, where he sharesRead More
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]]>In this episode Chris Reimer takes a deep dive into his book, Happywork, where he shares a business parable about the journey to better teamwork, profit, and purpose.
In his book Reimer embraces the everyday unhappiness at work and provides real advice on how to transform any workplace into a motivationally positive environment. The goal of the book is to help you overcome workplace negativity, bring the best out of your employees, streamline your business processes, prioritize your employee tasks, and eliminate human emotions from the workplace.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who want to improve their management skills and ensure that their business workplace runs efficiently and effectively in the absence of negative attitudes.
My book is a story and I believe that is how we learn best.
This book is a front to back read.
We too often overlook our own fulfillment and our own happiness at work. I want to enjoy my job and what I do and I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
My story starts with a man named Dick Vunorri who is the second generation owner of a manufacturing company called Vunorri Inc. Dick learns that this company is on the ropes and 30 days away from foreclosure because they can’t pay their bills. And so Dick decides that he is going to call a turnaround specialist named Sam. Sam tells Dick that he needs to tear the place down to the studs to figure out what exactly is wrong with it. From there Sam meets a man named Charlie who is an older man who works in the mailroom but has some wisdom that’s beyond his job title. Charlie comes forth and really challenges Sam which is surprising to Sam. Sam then goes about studying the company and he first encounters the CFO named Neil who isn’t a lot of fun. Neil is not very good at his job but he’s found a way to proverbially lock himself in his office and not get a lot done. After meeting the rest of the team Sam gets to a point where he gets progressively more down each day. Each day he comes on this four week assignment he doesn’t want to be there. As he is interviewing each person in the company to figure out what’s going on he gets a chance to interview Charlie and its then that Charlie turns the table on him and challenges him on everything he knows about business. Sam starts to realize that the thing that this company is missing is team work, productivity, and very few employees that are fulfilling any of their human needs. Through his experience with Vunorri Sam realized that happiness in work is actually very important. Eventually Sam goes back to Dick and gives him the full rundown of why the company isn’t working and what needs to be done to fix it.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:19
“Why use fear and intimidation? Why do you have to scare us? This isn’t a haunted house.” – Chris Reimer
I am based in St. Louis Missouri and I am a Marketing Communication Strategist. Previous to that I spent a little over 15 years as a CPA and CFO of organizations around St. Louis.
This books inspiration came from my own work experiences. I’ve never had a job that was absolutely horrible but I’ve had some pretty colorful job experiences. The other inspiration would be my mother and what she went through working a 30 plus year career for the US government.
The Go-Giver by Bob Burg
Buy Happywork by Chris Reimer on Amazon today
Visit HappyworkBook.com to learn more about the book
Visit ChrisReimer.com to learn more about Chris
Follow Chris Reimer on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Best Place to Work by Ron Friedman
The Culture Engine by Chris Edmonds
The Hidden Leader by Scott Edinger
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps To Promote Innovation At The Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about But Are You Making Any Money? according to Marley Majcher: Introduction In this episode Marley Majcher takes a deep dive into herRead More
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]]>In this episode Marley Majcher takes a deep dive into her book, But Are You Making Any Money?, where she reveals a fun yet effective way to start making money in any industry.
In her book Majcher provides a profit generating roadmap that stems from her many years as an entrepreneur as well as a financially unstable individual. The goal of the book is to help you create a financially stable income all while learning effective tips and tricks for growing a business, doubling the profit on your sales, and doing things more efficiently.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are having a hard time turning over a suitable profit in their small business and need a systematic way to easily double their income.
I think my book is very different for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I am very focused on the small business owner who is already overwhelmed. My book is very practical, simple and very easy to read.
I suggest the reader read straight through once and then come back and look at each chapter independently.
I want the reader to know that their whole life is revealed when you begin to track your time. What happens is when you track your time you start seeing the problem. From there you replace your highest level of time sucker with the most important item on your list.
Part One of the book is titled Get Your Barings which is made up of four chapters that elaborates on the foundation that we are all busy. Every time I would hear a response of someone being busy I wanted to know what the hell they are so busy doing. Because if everyone was truly that busy we would all be very productive and have our houses paid off, no car payments, and out of debt. So somewhere there is a disconnect between all this motion and not a return on our activity. From there I talk about getting your financial longitude and latitude in order and really drilling down on where you are and being honest. At the end of Part One I give you your way out and show you how to commit to a new way of thinking.
Part Two I get into the nitty-gritty and I walk you through setting up a system. I walk you through the basics of what cost of goods sold are and get into the specifics of what those are exactly. I walk you through the four kinds of expenses which are traditional cost of goods sold, time, things forgotten, and overhead.
Part Three is when you really start coming up with exactly how much it costs to serve your clients or produce your product and you do that by retroactively taking three of your past products and/or clients and practicing.
profitfdPart Four I explain how you put it all into place and really use the principles and use them going forward to make a huge difference in your business.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 10:57
“Stop being busy and start creating cash.” – Marley Majcher
This book basically came out of the need to solve my own problems as a business owner. My core business is event planning and I currently run a company called The Party Goddess. We handle social and corporate events as well as weddings and travel all over. I wrote this book because my business life looked very glamorous but I was not making any money. I now run an online consulting company where I help small business owners.
The inspiration came out of frustration and the fact that I felt like I had a dirty little secret which was this glamorous business on the outside and in reality it was sort of a mess under the hood. I started researching for answers and ended up coming up with my own system that I wanted to share with others that were in the same trouble as I was.
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Buy But Are You Making Any Money? by Marley Majcher on Amazon today
Test your skills by taking the productivity quiz here
Visit TheProfitGoddess.com to learn more about Marley and her company
Follow Marley Majcher on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Profit Hacking by Steven Daar
The Predictable Profits Playbook by Charles Gaudet II
The Startup Survival System by Kurt Won
Relevant advice and tips:
4 Common Reasons Why Startup Companies Fail
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Metronome Effect according to Shannon Susko: Introduction In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The MetronomeRead More
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]]>In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The Metronome Effect, where she reveals many effective ways to turbo charge the growth of any business.
In her book Susko provides a customized step-by-step action plan based on the best practices and tools that helped scale some of the most successful businesses today as well as ones she helped grow herself. The goal of the book is to teach you how to operate a company, how to scale a company dramatically, how to hold employees accountable, and how to organize a business into a smooth process.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a solid understanding of the best business practices and are in need of an easy, systematic way to tie them all into one cohesive framework.
The biggest difference I wanted to make was to be prescriptive. This book will give the entrepreneur a step by step, here is what you should do, and when.
Readers can definitely read it from front to back but they can also jump in and out where needed most.
The one thing that I would recommend that the entrepreneur and leader look at within what they are living today is coming up with what I call setting your metronome. The leader is the metronome of the business and it’s important to set some expected habits that are going to happen every day.
There is a picture in the beginning of the book that I call The House. Every entrepreneur is focused on building a great house so that their organization can grow, scale, and really set out on the success that they are looking to achieve within the business. And at the very foundation of the house is the entrepreneur and the leader of the organization and that leader needs to be absolutely in tune with their own core values and their own purpose. And that then drives to ensuring there is clarity both for the leader and the rest of the organization around the core purpose of the organization. What follows that are the core values of the organization which is absolutely in tune with the core values of the entrepreneur and the leader of that organization. From there is knowing what your big goal is for the organization. This is a 10 to 30 year goal that will guide the organization and the leader to where they need to drive to. The other piece of the strategic thinking process is the execution plan and really creating a way for an organization to have a collaborative brain, peer accountability, as well as setting up a rhythm within the organization that will beat daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually. This creates the habits needed for an entrepreneur to think less about the next thing that we need to do and think more about what we need to do within our business.
With every chapter we step through, starting with the leader, works through every piece that I go through. At the end of every chapter are actions that are recommended, books to read, as well as things you can do if you are challenged in a particular area.
The goal was to bring forth a way that the entrepreneurs and the leaders can easily and practically execute and grow their business within a time where they usually feel they don’t have another minute.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:04
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
I’ve been building high growth technology companies for the past 20 years and within that time I have very much found a great framework that I think others can learn from. Since the time of leaving my last organization I have been working with entrepreneurs and helping them scale up their own organizations.
The inspiration was to support other entrepreneurs in their journey in growing their company. While developing my first company I was looking for a silver bullet for myself to overcome that growth and sadly enough I came across many great tools but not one great framework that could pull it all together. This book allows an entrepreneur to understand that there is a framework available that you can bring in all the different tools that we learn along the way. I wanted to show entrepreneurs that there is a way that you can put this into play practically and grow your business at the same time.
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Buy The Metronome Effect by Shannon Susko on Amazon today
Visit ShannonSusko.com to learn more about Shannon and her book
Follow Shannon Susko on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Building Your Booming Business by David Mitchell
Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about System Busters according to Philip Beyer: Introduction In this episode Philip Beyer takes a deep dive into his book, System Busters whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Philip Beyer takes a deep dive into his book, System Busters where he shares a tactical guide for eliminating typical business problems and making a business run better.
In his book Beyer provides a handful of case studies and success stories of business systems that are shared in a common sense fashion so you can implement the same effective strategies. The goal of the book is to teach you how to effectively systematize any business, how to overcome business struggles, and how to improve your strengths as a business owner.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are fairly new to business, but are struggling when it comes to growing the business, meeting deadlines, finding time for personal life, and eliminating interruptions.
There are a lot of consultants and theories on business systems out there but I actually built and applied business systems from the ground up, measuring their results, and sustaining them for over 20 years. This book shares how we did it step by step in simple terms using true stories as examples. After reading our book I believe anyone can systematize and bring order to their business so that they don’t have to constantly be on site in order for their business to grow and prosper.
You can start at the beginning and read all the way through or you can jump in and out as needed.
If you ever want to get away from day to day operations and you want to own the business, not just have a job, you need a written operations manual for the business. Systems, systems, systems!
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are about where to start, making the decision to systematize your business, and the why and beginning to mission. The small business administration says that over 50% of businesses fail in the first year. In 95% of those who make it past the first year fail in the first 5 years and the reason they fail is not for lack of sales, it’s due to burnout and miss management. In the first chapter I share my epiphany on systematizing my business, my decision making process, my commitment to change, and to do whatever it takes to bring my business to order. I go into detail how that journey began and what set me on that path. I talk about the obstacles and the pitfalls to look for and the people to avoid.
Chapters four and five are about writing it down and working on your business, not in your business. Most business owners are afraid to leave their office because they fear things will fall apart. If you want people to do things the way you would do them you need to write it down step by step and you’ll only have to write it down once. In this chapter I tell the story about a system that I implemented and how it freed up six hours a day for me which was when our business really started to grow. It took around 90 days to write and implement that system but it changed my life.
Chapters six and seven we discuss what systems are and the importance of being committed to them. I talk about how systems intersect and integrate, the mindset of the anti-system solution, and what most businesses use in place of this system.
Chapter nine – How to build systems and your operations manual, where do you start? We discuss when to build or not to build your system, we give stories on how building systems transformed our company, and the building block of a system.
Chapter ten through fourteen are about types of systems that empower employees and give people the tools they need to do a job as you would like it done. I show how to build various types of checklist systems, daily routines, quality and service controls. I share sales and marketing systems, how to build them, and true stories about their success. I talk about how to implement automatic marketing using the power of systems from your operations manual.
Chapter fifteen is about our software System 100. I have one page talking about how this journey led me to build software to automate what is normally manual systems in a company. With this software now we can help other companies systematize in a matter of months, not years.
Chapter sixteen through eighteen is about encountering opposition from employees, how to deal with it, and I use real true stories. I talk about how to not delegate your vision to someone else until you’ve completed the mission.
In chapter twenty I get into Total Quality Management and ISO systems and explain what they are and how not to be intimidated by them but to embrace them.
Chapter twenty-one is closing the circle and I recap how all these systems come together step by step.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:14
“A great system is a great tool to help people do a great job.” – Philip Beyer
I was born and raised in Louisiana and I moved to Nashville Tennessee in 1981. I’ve been self-employed since the age of 24. I am the owner and president of two Nashville base businesses, a commercial printing company called Beyer Printing, and a software company called System 100. I’m the father of three grown sons who work with me in our companies, the husband of a beautiful wife who is my editor and chief of our blogs, website content and this book.
I started Beyer printing in 1988 and after five years of steady growth I found myself in chaos working long, bogged down in daily operations, and no time for personal life. I found myself making good money but not having the free time with it. A friend gave me a book to read on business and systems. From there I was able to change our systems, free up a lot of my time, and eventually help other business do the same. That journey led me to writing System Busters.
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Buy System Busters by Philip Beyer on Amazon today
Visit System100.com to learn more about Philip and his company content
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
How To Ruin a Business Without Really Trying by MJ Gottlieb
How to Get Unstuck by Barry Moltz
Relevant advice and tips:
4 Common Reasons Why Startup Companies Fail
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of System Busters with Philip Beyer appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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