"The entrepreneur's challenge is to marry their creativity, passion, and belief in their business with true introspection, sound financial analysis, and detailed planning to arrive at the best probability to succeed. This book is an excellent enabler of this process." --John Rowe, President & Inventor, Honibe, www.honibe.com The Dragons' Den Guide to Real-World Business Models describes in detail a variety of business models that work and are attractive to investors, as well as how to decide which model (or models) is best-suited to your business and how to implement it successfully. You'll be able to explain how your business is going to make money in the long term, where you fit in the market and who will pay for your product or service. Whether you intend to follow an established route or develop a disruptive model, if you have something the market wants, this book will help you build a sustainable business around it. Some of the business models detailed in the book include: Licensing, franchising, and traditional retail approaches Non-traditional retail, such as pop-up stores and consumer-direct Membership models, such as subscription or flash sales Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and peer-to-peer sharing Examples of real-world businesses that employ these models are highlighted throughout the book, including many that were featured on CBC's Dragons' Den . This is the perfect companion book for the entrepreneur trying to determine how best to turn their idea into a successful business.

A step-by-step approach to winning over investors with a solid business plan A comprehensive business plan, based on a concept that has been feasibility tested and for which a sales and marketing strategy is in place, is where the rubber meets the road for the entrepreneur and the investor. The Dragons' Den Guide to Investor-Ready Business Plans is designed to show the entrepreneur how to create a business plan that will get an investor's attention—and money. Case studies from Canadian and US businesses and stories of entrepreneurs who appeared on the Dragons' Den illustrate the key ideas and themes. Helps entrepreneurs face the reality of what they are trying to achieve Encourages readers to focus heavily on testing their business concept first, before they invest valuable time and resources in a slow-growth or no-growth business idea The current economic environment is forcing many people to start businesses to supplement their income or replace a lost job. But don't let emotion trump method. The Dragon's Den Guide offers your step-by-step approach to preparing yourself for the harsh but rewarding world of small business ownership.

Do you want or need to change your life, but aren’t sure where to start—or whether you have what it takes? At fifty-seven, Arlene Dickinson’s life was turned upside down. Her company was on the brink of disaster. Her sense of herself as a strong, confident leader was in tatters. She was overwhelmed by feelings of loss, fear, and shame. Five years later, her business is booming, she’s never been happier or more excited about the future, and she’s raised tens of millions of dollars and built a whole ecosystem to help other entrepreneurs. How did she turn things around? By following the process she’s always used to transform underperforming companies—only this time, she used it to transform her own life. Applying business principles to her personal life helped her figure out very quickly where she wanted to go and how to get there. Having a clear set of practical steps to follow kept her on track when emotions threatened to derail her progress. In Reinvention, Dickinson shares this blueprint for locating your sense of purpose, realistically evaluating your strengths, assessing opportunities outside your comfort zone, and charting a bold new path. Whether you have a big career dream to achieve, or you need to rebuild after a personal setback, this step-by-step plan for reinvention will help you change your own life—for the better.

This book is an invaluable resource for any creative with a great business idea. Starting your own business does not need to be a complicated and daunting process and serial entrepreneur, Dragon's Den investor and business educator Doug Richard, shows you how. He sets out a ten-point plan teaching creatives how to shape their startup business into a success. Written in plain English, without the dense text and technical jargon of other business books, and illustrated with visual cues to help the message stick, Doug's practical advice is accessible to all. Real-life case studies are interspersed throughout from successful creative startups that include, Tatty Devine, Paul Smith, Time Out and LoveFilm, which expand upon the theory and bring it to life. In 10 chapters, Doug asks the fundamental questions any aspiring creative entrepreneur must answer. By following the questions from start to finish, and working through the get your hands dirty activities, you will get the theory first and then apply that theory in a practical way to the real world and your own business. By the time you reach the last question, you will have the foundation of a very solid creative business. You will answer: What do we do or need that people need or want? Who is our customer? Who is our competition? What is our pricing model? And more! Doug walks you through the process for researching, answering and, ultimately, overcoming the challenges posed by these questions for your own business plan. Whether you are passionate about craft, design, advertising, antiques, film and video, music, performing arts, or any other creative field, this fantastic guide will help you start your business today!

If your heart's not in your business, why are you? In the flurry of everyday deadlines, fire fighting and all the pressing demands on our time, it's easy to forget the real reasons we started our own business in the first place. Soul Trader helps you connect with your personal mission, values and passion to create a 'stand out from the crowd' business that enriches you both financially and emotionally. Discover the seven essential principles that will help you build a business sensitive to today's economic and social realities, one that is profitable, customer-focused and in tune with your own beliefs, needs and goals. Rasheed Ogunlaru tears off the jargon and delves into the beating heart of what makes businesses really work. Throw your heart into your business, it will pay dividends.

Using our time more effectively is the single best way to seize an advantage and change our lives for good. Time - unlike money, opportunity or good looks - is the one resource that is allocated equally to all of us. No matter what our financial or family situation, we each get 24 hours a day. In the practical and straightforward style to which his DRAGONS' DEN contestants are accustomed, Duncan Bannatyne explains how we can make the most of our time to get the most from our lives, not just our working day. What do you really want to do with your life? This book will help you identify the goals and aspirations that really matter to you so that you can make them happen. It will give you the confidence to make your ambitions a reality, and teach you how to focus on the things that count. In a series of short chapters, illustrated with examples from his extraordinary career in business, Duncan will show you how to make quicker, better decisions and how to make things happen - fast. Duncan knows more than most about what can be achieved in a day, a year and a lifetime, and in this book he shares how you can achieve your ideal work/life balance

Derive useful insights from your data using Python. You will learn both basic and advanced concepts, including text and language syntax, structure, and semantics. You will focus on algorithms and techniques, such as text classification, clustering, topic modeling, and text summarization. Text Analytics with Python teaches you the techniques related to natural language processing and text analytics, and you will gain the skills to know which technique is best suited to solve a particular problem. You will look at each technique and algorithm with both a bird's eye view to understand how it can be used as well as with a microscopic view to understand the mathematical concepts and to implement them to solve your own problems. What You Will Learn: Understand the major concepts and techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics, including syntax and structure Build a text classification system to categorize news articles, analyze app or game reviews using topic modeling and text summarization, and cluster popular movie synopses and analyze the sentiment of movie reviews Implement Python and popular open source libraries in NLP and text analytics, such as the natural language toolkit (nltk), gensim, scikit-learn, spaCy and Pattern Who This Book Is For : IT professionals, analysts, developers, linguistic experts, data scientists, and anyone with a keen interest in linguistics, analytics, and generating insights from textual data