Run your company. Don’t let it run you. Most business owners started their company because they wanted more freedom—to work on their own schedules, make the kind of money they deserve, and eventually retire on the fruits of their labor. Unfortunately, according to John Warrillow, most owners find that stepping out of the picture is extremely difficult because their business relies too heavily on their personal involvement. Without them, their company—no matter how big or profitable—is essentially worthless. But the good news is that entrepreneurs can take specific steps—no matter what stage a business is in—to create a valuable, sellable company. Warrillow shows exactly what it takes to create a solid business that can thrive long into the future.

The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift, and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of repeat business? The secret—no matter what industry you’re in—is finding and keeping automatic customers. These days virtually anything you need can be purchased through a subscription, with more convenience than ever before. Far beyond Spotify, Netflix, and New York Times subscriptions, you can sign up for weekly or monthly supplies of everything from groceries (AmazonFresh) to cosmetics (Birchbox) to razor blades (Dollar Shave Club). According to John Warrillow, this emerging subscription economy offers huge opportunities to companies that know how to turn customers into subscribers. Automatic customers are the key to increasing cash flow, igniting growth, and boosting the value of your company. Consider Whatsapp, the internet-based messaging service that was purchased by Facebook for $19 billion. While other services bombarded users with invasive ads in order to fund a free messaging platform, Whatsapp offered a refreshingly private tool on a subscription platform, charging just $1 per year. Their business model enabled the kind of service that customers wanted and ensured automatic customers for years to come. As Warrillow shows, subscriptions aren’t limited to technology or media businesses. Companies in nearly any industry, from start-ups to the Fortune 500, from home contractors to florists, can build subscriptions into their business. Warrillow provides the essential blueprint for winning automatic customers with one of the nine subscription business models, including: • The Membership Website Model: Companies like The Wood Whisperer Guild, ContractorSelling, and DanceStudioOwner offer access to highly specialized, high quality information, recognizing that people will pay for good content. This model can work for any business with a tightly defined niche market and insider information. • The Simplifier Model: Companies like Mosquito Squad (pest control) and Hassle Free Homes (home maintenance) take a recurring task off your to-do list. Any business serving busy consumers can adopt this model not only to create a recurring revenue stream, but also to take advantage of the opportunity to cross-sell or bundle their services. • The Surprise Box Model: Companies like BarkBox (dog treats) and Standard Cocoa (craft chocolate) send their subscribers curated packages of goodies each month. If you can handle the logistics of shipping, giving customers joy in something new can translate to sales on your larger e-commerce site. This book also shows you how to master the psychology of selling subscriptions and how to reduce churn and provides a road map for the essential statistics you need to measure the health of your subscription business. Whether you want to transform your entire business into a recurring revenue engine or just pick up an extra 5 percent of sales growth, The Automatic Customer will be your secret weapon.

In How to Build a Business and Sell It for Millions, MBA meets Main Street, with a combination of inspiration and invaluable practical advice. Finally, the positive economic news every businessperson is waiting to hear. Jack Garson says the long economic downturn will give way to a major buying spree by cash-rich companies—and they could be in the market to purchase your small or medium-sized business. It's the ultimate payday for everyone who wants to live the American dream, whether they're starting a business or already own one. Millions of dollars are on the table. But will you and your business be ready? How to Build a Business and Sell it for Millions is a must-read for every business owner and would-be entrepreneur. In entertaining and elaborate detail, Garson outlines the vital moves your company needs to make to become an attractive acquisition by other firms: · Do you have a competitive edge that sets you apart from your competition? · Are both you and your company sustainable and able to outlast the bad times to become a success? · Can you stop being a "Derek," the boss who suffers from "Founder's Dilemma," micromanaging everything big and small? How to Build a Business and Sell it for Millions uses real life examples to explain how the goal of selling your company needs to be linked to every business decision you make: hiring, compensation, contracts, financial reporting and dozens of other areas often overlooked by busy entrepreneurs. While many business owners struggle to get to the next day, Garson has the inside scoop on achieving the opportunity of a lifetime— selling your company for vast riches.

Built to Love reveals how companies can create captivating products that energize the marketplace and set the standard for what customers want and expect. Firms often hope the answer is to produce the latest high technology devices - only to find that they fail to light up the marketplace. Or firms rely on ads that overstate or mislead, leaving the customer disappointed and disillusioned. Instead, a deeper emotional engagement between the customer and product is required, regardless of whether the products are physical products, services, technologies, software, systems, or brands. Using a combination of industry - based research and laboratory experiments, the authors demonstrate that customers will richly pay for products that authentically provide emotional fulfillment. They uncover the science behind successful products that create an avid and loyal following, and they present evidence that product emotions increase a product's success in the marketplace as well as a firm's success in the stock market (even when the economy is down!). A practical how - to guide, the book next shows how to analyze customers' emotional needs and translate those needs into features that galvanize customers. Throughout, the book uses revealing case studies that show how to energize customers in both consumer and business - to - business worlds, in both large and small firms.

Most people wake up and drive to a job that they hate. Think about your five closest friends. Are they happy? Do they live their lives with purpose? Do you? We put on a fake front for what we want people to see and think about us, but the reality is most people aren’t happy. We’re lost. We settle. We aren’t happy with where we are. You can’t be happy if you don’t know your purpose. It’s not possible. You want more but you don’t even know where to start. You know there is more out there. You see others having success and you want it, too; there is nothing wrong with that. You just need help finding your purpose so you can find the success you see all around you. You can be productive, crush your goals, pretend that all the things that you’ve acquired actually mean something…but at the end of the day, if you don’t know your purpose, you’ll always feel like there’s something missing. You’ll know that you’re capable of more and that you’re not living the life you should be. You might be fooling the world, but you’re not fooling the person looking back at you in the mirror. You need to find your actual power source. Your purpose is your source of power. Once you find your purpose it’ll fuel you for life. You’ll do things that you never thought you were capable of. Achieving your purpose will force you to morph into a stronger version of yourself. You’ll have to push through fears, insecurities, and doubts that held you back. But somehow it’ll all feel possible and necessary because you’re purpose-driven now…and that’s the only thing you’ll ever need.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?