Jim Muehlhaussen has traveled the country collecting the best and worst practices from business owners. The 51 Fatal Business Errors provides a quick and easy format to learn from other business owners' successes and failures. Each error contains a real-life example and definitive action-steps needed to improve common areas of weakness in small business. The 51 Fatal Business Errors is designed to be used as a reference that you can come back to repeatedly as new issues arise in your business that need toning. The dangerous (but common) mistakes described are outlined in four categories: Myth -Busters, Improving your personal effectiveness, Using best practices, and Mule-kicks - Muehlhausen's bluntly honest tips that realign the way small business owners typical lines of thought. Readers will be able to use it to energize themselves about the boundless possibilities of their businesses while giving them practical steps to move forward to the next level.

Entrepreneur and business coach Jim Muehlhausen has turned his attention to the problems facing experienced business owners. Ten years ago, business owners turning sixty-five were not selling their businesses and retiring. As Jim researched the issues, he found that owners: 1) Simply could not afford to sell the company. 2) Wanted to stay active. 3) Wanted to maintain the business for the employees. By studying thousands of business owners, Jim saw a select few that had shifted from “working income” to “equity income.” Owners earned money by owning the business, not working in it. By collecting their best practices and augmenting them, Jim created the Half-Retire Blueprint. This step-by-step process helps business owners like you create a profitable alternative to selling your business via Half-Retirement, allowing you to shift your focus and find your balance. “Every business owner should consider Half-Retirement if they want to get full value for all their hard work.” —Wayne Breitbarth, Author of the bestseller The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success “Many business owners want to stay involved and active but can’t find a way to extricate themselves from day-to-day office demands. Half-Retire shows you how to transform your mindset, keep your relationships and your income, and work on your own terms.” —Bill Schley, Worldwide Marketing Expert, Author of The Micro-Script Rules “I’ve worked in the exit community for decades and have seen business owners struggle to sell their business for enough to retire comfortably. Half-Retirement is a great solution to help business owners enjoy life and increase wealth.” —Bill Black, Host of Exit Coach Radio

Write a business model? Easy. Business Models For Dummies helps you write a solid business model to further define your company's goals and increase attractiveness to customers. Inside, you'll discover how to: make a value proposition; define a market segment; locate your company's position in the value chain; create a revenue generation statement; identify competitors, complementors, and other network effects; develop a competitive strategy; and much more. Shows you how to define the purpose of a business and its profitability to customers Serves as a thorough guide to business modeling techniques Helps to ensure that your business has the very best business model possible If you need to update a business model due to changes in the market or maturation of your company,Business Models For Dummies has you covered.

Forty experts discuss how they have written books for their professional success, thereby increasing their credibility and enhancing their reputations.

With straightforward, insightful advice, renowned business trainer W. Steven Brown provides managers--from new to experienced--with essential leadership tools. This is the book that "ought to be in the top drawer of every manager's desk"*. Are you guilty of... * Being a buddy, not a boss? * Never admitting that you are accountable? * Managing different people in the same way? * Failing to set common business goals? * Trying to control your people instead of influencing their thinking with enthusiasm? These are just a few of the 13 fatal errors managers make. Errors that waste valuable time, money, and talent. This book will show you how to recognize problems--and avoid them--before they happen. Author Steven Brown, a nationally recognized professional trainer and consultant, provides the essential guide for effective managers and shows you how to get the best from your workers, your company--and yourself.

What do Enron, the Space Shuttle Columbia and 9/11 have in common? How a chain of mistakes can lead to disaster if they go unrecognised. How to build internal systems that prevent failure chains from spiralling out of control. Practical techniques for avoiding business failures - whether they arise from preparation, strategy, execution, or culture.

There are approximately 12.2 million salespeople in the United States-that's about 1 out of every 23 people! Salespeople are everywhere, selling everything imaginable. Some are making a killing, but a greater percentage end up victims of the sales industry-and their own mistakes. Some are normal bumps in the road toward success. Others are more damaging. But many are fatal to a career. Duncan addresses these catastrophic mistakes with clarity and directness. Whether you're a seasoned sales professional or someone considering sales as a career, Duncan's wisdom can help you avoid errors in perception, practice, and performance that could not only kill a sale but also your career.

Jim Paul's meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all--his fortune, his reputation, and his job--in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors. This book--winner of a 2014 Axiom Business Book award gold medal--begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped Paul achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to Paul's $1.6 million loss and the essential lessons he learned from it--primarily that, although there are as many ways to make money in the markets as there are people participating in them, all losses come from the same few sources. Investors lose money in the markets either because of errors in their analysis or because of psychological barriers preventing the application of analysis. While all analytical methods have some validity and make allowances for instances in which they do not work, psychological factors can keep an investor in a losing position, causing him to abandon one method for another in order to rationalize the decisions already made. Paul and Moynihan's cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.

Long-listed for the FT & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2011 The true story of how risk destroys, as told through the ongoing saga of AIG From the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the subject of the financial crisis has been well covered. However, the story central to the crisis-that of AIG-has until now remained largely untold. Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide tells the inside story of what really went on inside AIG that caused it to choke on risk and nearly brining down the entire economic system. The book Reveals inside information available nowhere else, including the personal notes and records of key players such as the former Chairman of AIG, Hank Greenberg Takes readers behind the scenes at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Details how an understanding of risk built AIG, but a disdain for government regulators led to a run-in with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Fatal Risk is the comprehensive and compelling true story of the company at the center of the financial storm and how it nearly caused the entire economic system to collapse.

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?