Second Stage Entrepreneurship shows the aspiring entrepreneur how to create significant growth as their company scales its way to the top through the development of organizational structure; from setting up an effective company culture; to structuring an effective sales team; to helping create stand out customer interactions.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Small businesses have their own unique growth patterns. Each of the five stages of the small business life cycle has its own strengths, challenges, inconvenient truths, ways forward, and catalytic moments.

"Scaling Lean offers an invaluable blueprint for modeling startup success. You'll learn the essential metrics that measure the output of a working business model, give you the pulse of your company, communicate its health to investors, and enable you to make precise interventions when things go wrong, "--Amazon.com.

Education and training for nascent entrepreneurs is available from colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations throughout the United States. However, research suggests that the long-term effectiveness of entrepreneurship training programs is questionable. With the high rate of business failure, it is plausible to suggest that the training needs of practicing entrepreneurs are different than those of nascent entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study was to identify gaps in training as it pertains to practicing entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses. As such, the research set out describe: 1) the mindsets of growth-minded entrepreneurs in Northeast Wisconsin; 2) the activities growth-minded entrepreneurs in Northeast Wisconsin deployed to cross the threshold from a first-stage to a second-stage level business; and 3) the pivotal relationships that propelled the Northeast Wisconsin growth-minded entrepreneur's movement from first-stage to second-stage. This three-article dissertation begins with a literature review followed by a qualitative phenomenological study of 11 entrepreneurs in Northeast Wisconsin who crossed, or where in the process of crossing, the threshold from first-stage to second-stage. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using multiple coding approaches including In Vivo. The third article is a descriptive study comparing current entrepreneurship education and training programs to the phenomenological study's findings. Research findings suggest that a gap exists between what is being taught and the actual training needs of practicing entrepreneurs. In order for entrepreneurs to grow and sustain their business, the gap needs to close. It can be closed by the entrepreneur hiring individuals with those skills, or by the entrepreneur personally acquiring the skills. The implications for the research are the practical advice and training for entrepreneurs, educators, trainers, and economic development organizations. The seven training topics that specifically address the necessary skills a practicing entrepreneur needs include: financials; strategic planning; system and processes development; human capital development, communication; leadership; and, strategic relationship development.

Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment.This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap.This book assumes: You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this.Start Small, Stay Small also focuses on the single most important element of a startup that most developers avoid: marketing. There are many great resources for learning how to write code, organize source control, or connect to a database. This book does not cover the technical aspects developers already know or can learn elsewhere. It focuses on finding your idea, testing it before you build, and getting it into the hands of your customers.