Starting a Business? What You Need to Think About, Know, and Do Planning a business needs to start somewhere. This playbook is it. The objective of this manageable and plainspoken playbook (and workbook) is to sometimes gently, and sometimes less so, prod you toward making an informed decision about your proposed entrepreneurial undertaking or, conversely, help you realize and understand why you need to let go, walk away, and look elsewhere for opportunities. That’s the “go/no-go” crossroads, likely the most important business decision you will ever have to make. Think of this as a race to the starting line. Get ready to walk through 30 consecutive tough and sometimes personal (even mildly cringe-worthy) step-by-step milestones.

According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, more than 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010 in the United States alone—each one of them hoping to strike gold. The Startup Playbook will help them succeed. Going insider to insider with unprecedented access, New York Times bestselling author and Clickable CEO, David Kidder, shares the hard-hitting experiences of some of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs and CEOs, revealing their most closely held advice. Face-to-face interviews with 40 founders give readers key insights into what it took to build PayPal, LinkedIn, AOL, TED, Flickr, and many others into household names. Special sections include topics ranging from how to select the right idea to pursue to finding funding and overcoming inevitable obstacles. In an economy demanding change, The Startup Playbook is the go-to for entrepreneurs big and small.

Get the real guidance you need to create and build your first startup company from founders who have been there many times before. The first run printing of The Startup Playbook SOLD OUT! So, we revised, expanded, and improved this second edition, including a new foreword by Brad Feld, author of Venture Deals. We still give our personal, how-to guide for building your startup from the ground up. You'll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we've learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We're sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you. We make no bones about our bias. We're on your side, the founder's side. While venture capitalists, investors, and accelerators/incubators can add great value in the startup ecosystem, this book isn't about their points of view. We'll tell you where our interests as founders diverge from those on the other side of the table—investors, bankers, advisors, board members, and others—and what to do when that happens. The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's our insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between us, we've started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. We've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of our startups go public, sold six of them, and we made billions of dollars for shareholders. We've also invested in over eighty startups, advised and mentored over two hundred companies and actively worked with venture capitalists (VCs), incubators, and accelerators to help launch many other new startups. We've had plenty of failures, too. And we've probably learned more from those than from the successes. We share those lessons as well. The Startup Playbook is full of our advice, guidance, do's, and don'ts from our years of experience as founders many times. We want to share our hard-earned knowledge with you to make success easier for you to achieve. "This book is extraordinarily fresh and exciting. In an accessible, straight talk fashion, this book is a manual, and an inspiration. The Startup Playbook is smart and avoids the 'I am so smart' over-writing endemic to the genre. Read this as it is presented. You'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor." —Amazon Reviewer

Powerhouse Business Mentorship is the Definitive Business/Entrepreneurial Mentoring Handbook Mentoring embraces vision-building, handholding, numbers-crunching, and encouragement. It’s a two-way street consisting of the mentor (advisor/coach) and the mentee (the committed participant). For the mentor, Powerhouse Business Mentorship offers powerful, success-oriented techniques and proven strategies that can assure a mutually effective mentorship experience. For the mentee, this book counsels on how to choose a mentor, how to control the process and how to get the most out of the relationship. Mentoring is not all about ‘You need to do it this way, my way’, but more so ‘Tell me what you are trying to do and where you want this opportunity to take you’. Powerhouse Business Mentorship also recounts Jay’s mentoring journeys. Some were great and delivered memorable outcomes, some merely good, and others best described as...‘colorful’. Everything Jay has learned from his mentoring encounters has found its way into Powerhouse Business Mentorship. Anyone leading or participating in mentorship needs to have Powerhouse Business Mentorship as their indispensable handbook.

"Ed has taken thirty years of battle-hardened experience running managed services businesses as a systems integrator, communications provider, equipment manufacturer, offshore provider and an independent start-up and put it in a highly readable, yet incredibly detailed and indispensable book." Bob Boles CEO, Hostway Corporation "The Managed Services Playbook is the blueprint for building and running a successful managed services business. The explosion in managed services at Avaya was fueled by many of the strategies and plans Ed has outlined in this book." Mike Runda President, Avaya Client Services "Successfully running a managed services business is a difficult task with many nuances which make it very different from other IT services. Ed has unlocked these secrets which have eluded so many businesses. The advice in The Managed Services Playbook is priceless." Chris Formant President, Verizon Enterprise Solutions "Ed's proven ability to build high growth, high profit managed services businesses has made him one of the top managed services executive in the industry. The Managed Services Playbook details the keys to success for all those involved in managed and cloud businesses and can be mapped to proven, measurable results." George Humphrey Senior Director, Research and Advisory - Managed Services, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) "As IT vendors of all shapes and sizes rush to move their businesses to the cloud and managed services, The Managed Services Playbook should be required reading for anyone involved in those businesses." Dave D'Aprano Group Executive - IT Outsourcing, Dimension Data

Rethink your business for the digital age. Every business begun before the Internet now faces the same challenge: How to transform to compete in a digital economy? Globally recognized digital expert David L. Rogers argues that digital transformation is not about updating your technology but about upgrading your strategic thinking. Based on Rogers's decade of research and teaching at Columbia Business School, and his consulting for businesses around the world, The Digital Transformation Playbook shows how pre-digital-era companies can reinvigorate their game plans and capture the new opportunities of the digital world. Rogers shows why traditional businesses need to rethink their underlying assumptions in five domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. He reveals how to harness customer networks, platforms, big data, rapid experimentation, and disruptive business models—and how to integrate these into your existing business and organization. Rogers illustrates every strategy in this playbook with real-world case studies, from Google to GE, from Airbnb to the New York Times. With practical frameworks and nine step-by-step planning tools, he distills the lessons of today's greatest digital innovators and makes them usable for businesses at any stage. Many books offer advice for digital start-ups, but The Digital Transformation Playbook is the first complete treatment of how legacy businesses can transform to thrive in the digital age. It is an indispensable guide for executives looking to take their firms to the next stage of profitable growth.

When a personal trainer agrees to fake date her client, all rules are out the window in this "fun, heartfelt, and totally relatable" romantic comedy named one of the best of the year by USA Today, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly (Abby Jimenez, NYT bestselling author of Life's Too Short). When it comes to personal training, Taylor Powell kicks serious butt. Unfortunately, her bills are piling up, rent is due, and the money situation is dire. Taylor needs more than the support of her new best friends, Samiah and London. She needs a miracle. And Jamar Dixon might just be it. The oh-so-fine former footballer wants back into the NFL, and he wants Taylor to train him. There's just one catch—no one can know what they're doing. But when they're accidentally outed as a couple, Taylor's game plan is turned completely upside down. Is Jamar just playing to win . . . or is he playing for keeps? USA Today Best Rom-Coms of 2021 NPR Best Romances of 2021 Kirkus Best Romances of the Year Vulture Best Romances of 2021 SheReads Best of the Year nominee – Romance

Examples of ineffective and even negative leaders are all too abundant in sports. Poor leadership attitudes are a great loss for players, coaches, teams, schools, communities and society as a whole. To become productive leaders, coaches, administrators and parents need guidance and resources. This book reveals what the most revered scholars and icons from business and other leadership fields know about leadership theory, research and practice--and applies the results to the world of sport. This is a book parents, coaches and administrators can use to maximize their own leadership potential as well as teach leadership to those under their charge.

Stories of government management failures often make the headlines, but quietly much gets done as well. What makes the difference? Ira Goldstein offers wisdom about how to lead and succeed in the federal realm, even during periods when the political climate is intensely negative, based on his decades of experience as a senior executive at two major government consulting firms and as a member of the US federal government's Senior Executive Service. The Federal Management Playbook coaches the importance of always keeping four key concepts in mind when planning for success: goals, stakeholders, resources, and time frames. Its chapters address how to effectively motivate government employees, pick the right technologies, communicate and negotiate with powerful stakeholders, manage risks, get value from contractors, foster innovation, and more. Goldstein makes lessons easy to apply by breaking each chapter's plans into three strategic phases: create an offensive strategy, execute your plan effectively, and play a smart defense. Additional tips describe how career civil servants and political appointees can get the most from one another, advise consultants on providing value to government, and help everyone better manage ever-present oversight. The Federal Management Playbook is a must-read for anyone working in the government realm and for students who aspire to public service.

Savvy companies recognize the value of a strong community. Think of Nike and its community of runners, Nike+, and you’ll quickly understand that creating and fostering an online community around a product or brand is a powerful way to boost marketing efforts, gain valuable insight into consumers, increase revenue, improve consumer loyalty, and enhance customer service efforts. Companies now have the unprecedented opportunity to integrate their brand’s messaging into the everyday lives of their target audiences. But while supporting the growth of online communities should be at the top of every company’s priority list, all too often it falls by the wayside. That’s why brand strategy expert and digital marketer Lauren Perkins wrote The Community Manager’s Playbook (#CMplaybook on Twitter), a must-read guide for business and brand builders who need to strengthen their approach to online B2C community management and customer engagement. As Perkins explains, if companies want to create thriving online communities focused on their product or brand, they must do more than simply issue a few tweets a day, create (and then abandon) a Facebook page, and blog every once in a while. Instead, organizations of all sizes must treat community management as a central component of their overall marketing strategy. When they do, they will be rewarded handsomely with greater brand awareness, increased customer use and retention, lower acquisition costs, and a tribe of consumers who can’t wait to purchase their next product. Perkins not only teaches readers how to build an engaging community strategy from the ground up, but she also provides them with the tactical community management activities they need to acquire and retain customers, create compelling content, and track their results along the way. Distinctive in its comprehensive, step-by-step approach to creating online communities that are fully consistent with a company’s existing brand voice, The Community Manager’s Playbook: Explains how excellent community management provides a competitive advantage with a large impact on sales Provides an in-depth overview of brand and business alignment Teaches readers how to identify their community's online target audience and influence their needs and wants Details the appropriate online channels through which content should be distributed Champions the use of an agile approach through repeated testing to maximize the return on every company investment Discusses the many diverse metrics that can be used to measure community scope Today, there is no brand strategy without a community strategy. Companies that are not developing communities are losing control of their brands and missing opportunities to optimize their marketing investments. With The Community Manager’s Playbook as their guide, however, marketing professionals and the companies and brands they represent will be equipped with the tools they need to manage their online marketing efforts, engage their core customers at every level, leverage community insights into the product development cycle, and ensure that their messaging is heard across all corners of the digital landscape.