A summary of things you should know about Get A Grip according to Mike Paton: Introduction In this episode Mike Paton takes a deep dive into his book, Get ARead More
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]]>In this episode Mike Paton takes a deep dive into his book, Get A Grip, where he discusses how to get everything you want from your entrepreneurial business.
In his book Paton shares the entrepreneurial story of two startup founders that uncovers the real-life hardships and accomplishments that come with starting an entrepreneurial business. The goal of the book is to help you understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur, how to resolve typical issues that come with running a startup, and how to create a more effective team.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are in a business partnership or own a business that is team oriented and need an action plan to improve their organizational operations.
The book is a real world, in the trenches, gritty, true story of a topical entrepreneurial organization. It’s very instructive, it’s a system full of simple practical tools, and our intent was to write this book in a way where an entrepreneurial owner or leader might read the book, see things that feel and sound familiar and be able to take the techniques to solve their own business problems.
This book is much more logically digested front to back rather than diving in and out.
Vision without traction is hallucination. And the common entrepreneurial challenge isn’t a lack of vision. The real challenge is migrating that vision into the trenches of that business, helping everybody in the organization understand it, internalize it, and own the appropriate piece of it so together everyone is executing on that vision and what you want actually happens. I believe EOS and the tools we characterized in the book is a great way to help the typical entrepreneurial leadership team get better at that fast.
The book illustrates the people who founded and are running a typical small business. There are about 35 people in this organization, it’s called Swan Services, and the founding entrepreneurs have been wildly successful in the first seven years of this business. We meet these owners when they have begun hitting a few ceilings and starting to feel as though the business is running them rather than the other way around. What the readers are introduced to are a lot of the common frustrations, challenges, and root causes of the inevitable ceiling that people who run and own small businesses hit from time to time. As the story unfolds we take a deep dive into those root causes and we watch the members of the leadership team get together in a room with the aid of a professional EOS implementer and master the tools, disciplines, and simple concepts that EOS teaches to identify, prioritize, and resolve those common obstacles and issues.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:10
“Every entrepreneurial business needs a system for operating.” – Mike Paton
I am a lifelong entrepreneur, grew up in an entrepreneurial household and today I spend all day, every day, surrounded by entrepreneurs and their leadership teams helping them implement a system for running a small business called EOS (The Entrepreneurial Operating System).
My co-author and I both individually believed that this book needed to be written. We both work in the trenches with entrepreneurial leadership teams all the time, we both are avid learners, and both fallen in love with a forum for a book and we believe that telling the EOS story using the entrepreneurial approach would be a compelling read for most of the people we surround ourselves with.
Traction: Get A Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
Buy Get A Grip by Mike Paton and Gino Wickman on Amazon today
Visit EOSWorldwide.com to learn more about the book and download free chapters
Follow Mike Paton on LinkedIn and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
All in Startup by Diana Kander
The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
Fairness if Overrated by Tim Stevens
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Signs That You Have What It Takes to Be An Entrepreneur
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 How To Ruin A Business Without Really Trying according to MJ Gottlieb: Introduction In this episode MJ Gottlieb shares his book, HowRead More
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]]>In this episode MJ Gottlieb shares his book, How To Ruin A Business Without Really Trying, where he shares what every entrepreneur should not do when running a business.
In his book Gottlieb gives you 55 of the most painful and destruction mistakes and failures many entrepreneurs make when running a business today. The goal of his book is to help you learn from other entrepreneurs’ mistakes while taking the ego out of the equation allowing you to enjoy the freedom of your own experience.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are thinking about starting a business and need a stepping stone to help promote faster growth in the beginning.
Most of the books that are out there tell people what to do. I believe that this is really the first book that tells people what not to do. And the reasoning behind that is that I don’t believe entrepreneurs like to be told what to do.
You can absolutely jump from one section to the next and it doesn’t necessarily have to be read from front to back.
I would say doing your due diligence. I think that doing your due diligence is one of the most recurring themes of the book.
The book is separated in to two sections. The first section is 39 case studies starting with the top do nots and never evers. These are the most common and prominent mistakes entrepreneurs make and I do that by highlighting the mistakes that I have made. Every case study has the mistake that I made and then it goes into the right thing to do which is what I know about it now and how I would go about doing things differently. Even though I came from the fashionable background it is applicable for all business whether you are product driven or service driven.
The second part of the book has everything to do with people that are in pursuit of the deal, raising capital, the different types of investors, the whole process of looking for money, the value of resources compared to just money, different problems with technology and different ways that we can take advantage now of the technology that we have. Sections also contain things that you would never learn in a business class such as something like Murphy’s Law. It is full of information that happens in the real world of being an entrepreneur that you really can’t be taught in business class.
“The jack of all trades is a jackass.” – MJ Gottlieb
I have been typically in the offline business for about 20 years having owned and operated five fashion brands since 1991. The last one I owned was up until 2007. I recently wrote a book about all the mistakes I made in hopes that aspiring entrepreneurs can actually learn from those mistakes.
I had just lost my second business and I was writing down all the mistakes that I had made just to get it out of my system. A friend of mine said it was great that I was doing it but asked if I had any idea the value that this information can have for those people that are looking to start a business. He said to call it What Not To Do When Starting A Business and then years later I made it into a book.
How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Buy How To Ruin A Business Without Really Trying by MJ Gottlieb on Amazon today
Visit HustleBranding.com to learn more about MJ and his company
Visit HowToRuinABusiness.com to learn more about the book
Follow MJ Gottlieb on Twitter and Facebook
For questions contact MJ by email here
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Business in Blue Jeans by Susan Baroncini-Moe | All In Startup by Diana Kander | People Tools For Business by Alan Fox
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 All In Startup according to Diana Kander Introduction In this episode Diana Kander discusses her book All In Startup which is aRead More
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]]>In this episode Diana Kander discusses her book All In Startup which is a perfect fit for entrepreneurs seeking a fantastic business story focused on the lessons learned from running a startup. All In Startup follows a fictional storyline of a business consultant who is on the verge of shutting down his company and gambles his debt at a casino.
It’s very different in that I try to convey the lessons through a fictional story. It’s a novel through and through; takes place at the world series of poker and it’s got more sexual tension than any business book you have ever read. Most people find that they finish the book in one or two days.
You almost have to read it from beginning to end because it’s a novel. The storyline is just as much a part of the book as the lessons that you take out of it.
My favorite lesson out of the book is the less you gamble, the luckier you’re going to get.
The book is about Owen Chase who is a very smart MBA who worked as a business consultant. Owen had lots of great business ideas but he decided that he just couldn’t resist. He started a company and we join him a year after he started it. He is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and on the verge of shutting the whole thing down. And through pure happenstance he gets a ticket to the world series of poker which he decided to go to the tournament, clear him mind and figure out what to do with the company.
At the tournament he meets a very successful entrepreneur named Samantha who has started and sold a number of companies. She helps him start from scratch and figure out what Owen has been doing wrong in his approach this entire time.
Owen figures out that what he did wrong at the very beginning was that he was focusing on the product he was building and not as much on the customers. He was making a lot of assumptions about his customers that turned out to be very false.
Owens business is a custom bicycle manufacturing shop and builds custom bikes from used bike parts and sales them for about half of what you can buy a road bike for. The first assumptions he made was that people were interested in paying half of what they could buy a new bicycle for and they would use his website to make the purchases.
The sales just aren’t where Owen projected them in his financials and so Sam encourages him to start interviewing his customers as he should have done from the very beginning. When he does he learns that price is not as important to people as he thought it was. More importantly he learns that people aren’t as willing to buy something like a bicycle without testing it out at a physical store. Understanding his customers better he tries to find another solution that will serve their needs.
I don’t have a favorite quote but I do have some sentences that I love and make me smirk every time I read them.
Owen and Sam meet early on in a bar and Sam notices that Owen didn’t offer to buy her a drink; he’s just trying to sell something to her. The sentences was something like she was disappointed that he was all business and he wasn’t trying to pump alcohol into her, as it was she was going to have to pump alcohol into herself.
I teach entrepreneurship at the University of Missouri and I serve as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, the world’s largest foundation dedicated to entrepreneurship and education.
I worked with a lot of entrepreneurs through my position at the Kauffman foundation and I found them all getting stuck at very similar points and felt like I was reliving the movie Groundhog Day. I would have the same conversations over and over again so it was born out of a frustration of me trying to save myself some time. I wanted to create a pamphlet or video to have people watch before we started meeting so that they could avoid all the common pitfalls that most people were facing.
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
Buy All In Startup by Diana Kander on Amazon today
Visit DianaKander.com to learn more about Diana and her book
Follow Diana Kander on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber | Business in Blue Jeans by Susan Baroncini-Moe | The Entrepreneur Mind by Kevin Johnson
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure | 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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