Scale: Seven Proven Principle to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back - Hardcover

Hoffman, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591847249 ISBN 13: 9781591847243

Verlag: Penguin, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Business owners want growth but fear it will take over their lives. Surprisingly, the only way to truly grow your company is to reduce its reliance on you - to Scale.

Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel offer a blueprint to rapidly grow your business whilst also gaining more freedom. Based on their own experiences starting, scaling, and effectively exiting from multiple successful companies, they provide seven clear principles that will help you determine the best strategy for growth in your company.

They show you how to execute in the face of conflicting demands and multiple responsibilities. And they show you how to enjoy the freedom that comes from owning a business - without it owning you.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jess Hoffman is a founding member and former CEO of the Priceline.com Family of Companies. He is currently a partner in ColorJar, the Idea Accelerator company. He writes a regular column for Inc. and works with the White House to support business and economic growth initiatives.

David Finkel is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He is founder and CEO of Maui Mastermind, a coaching company that helps businesses in the $1-20 million range grow.

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INTRODUCTION

In 1992, a 22-year-old undergrad dropped out of college to launch his own business. He wanted to be his own boss and decided to build a company selling health products. His sisters told him he was a “*$%*&^@” idiot, and his befuddled parents asked him softly if he wouldn’t rather finish his degree first. But he was committed to make this, his first real attempt at formally building a business, a massive success. He bought the wholesale rights to a line of health products and invested his life savings ($3,200) in stocking inventory and setting up a small office, then spent long hours marketing the line, personally posting thousands of flyers and making hundreds of sales calls.

Eight months later, the business had failed; his family graciously never said “I told you so.” But the story doesn’t end there. The good ones never do.

After taking some time to lick his wounds and salve his bruised ego, our now 25-year-old recent college grad made another go in a totally different business. His earlier failure had taught him some crucial lessons (including a sorely needed dose of humility). Cataloging his talents and interests, he decided on a new industry—info-marketing. He made a list of the top ten business leaders in this industry and approached each one, asking for the opportunity to interview them about how they had built such successful companies, and asking for any advice they could give to someone just starting out. Initially, these big players ignored him, but he was persistent, hounding them until he finally got eight of the ten to meet with him. In their interviews, these leaders spoke candidly about the lessons they had gleaned after decades in the business world, climbing the same peaks our young businessman wanted to scale. He took their advice to heart, following up on skills and topics they said he would have to understand to be successful. He read dozens of business books and made a study of how to successfully build a business.

Eight years later, he was an “overnight” success, the owner of one of the top real estate training companies in the United States, having trained more than 50,000 investors who went on to buy and sell over $1 billion of properties. With no debt or outside investors, his company generated over $3 million of annual operating profit and was valued at $10 million to $16 million. After he sold this company, he went on to found and build half a dozen other successful companies, each time leveraging the lessons and experiences from his earlier businesses.

In 2009 a mutual friend introduced him to a business superstar—a guy who had helped launch and grow one of the fastest-scaling companies of all time, Priceline.com, which had grown from $0 in sales to over $1 billion in less than four years. When the two of them met in Atlanta, they talked for hours, realizing they had a lot in common—especially their shared passion for mentoring and coaching other business owners. One had built several multimillion-dollar companies and personally trained more than 100,000 business owners; the other helped build a multibillion-dollar company that revolutionized an industry. But they both loved coaching and mentoring business owners to scale their companies.

You may have already guessed that the college dropout turned successful entrepreneur was David, and the Priceline.com superstar was Jeff. Like David, Jeff launched his first start-up, a software company, while still in college. Unlike David, Jeff and his team nailed it with their first company, which they later sold to American Express for millions. Priceline.com was actually Jeff’s fifth start-up, and after the company went public and Jeff transitioned out of the business, he went on to be the CEO of uBid.com and RedTag.com. He even launched a very successful entertainment company, Black Sky Entertainment, which went on to generate over $100 million in sales.

We’ve both lived the life of serial entrepreneurs, not just launching companies, but leading them through those all-important middle years when a business must either stay stuck as an extension of the founder, or scale and grow independent of the owner. Over the years, we’ve grown our friendship and shared the stage teaching at various business conferences. During that time, we came to realize that we shared a complementary skill set and approach to growing companies. And we also learned that we had shared experiences of those scary, absorbing, and exciting years when these businesses began to grow at triple-digit rates or faster. We joked that at times it felt like we were on the back of a rodeo bull, holding on with all our might, praying for that eight-second buzzer to sound. The thing we discovered is that whereas in the rodeo those eight seconds are literal, in your business the buzzer doesn’t go off for years.

We also realized that we shared a frustration with the existing business books that addressed scaling a company. Too many told readers what to do, but didn’t have the details on how to do the what to do. That’s why we decided to pool our years of experiences to write this book. We wanted to put in one place a structured, systematic approach not just to create growth, but, more important, to show you how to survive and enjoy that growth by leveraging the systems, team, and internal controls necessary to sustain that development over the long term. Following this methodology, not only do you get growth in sales and profits, but you’ll also enjoy increased freedom as the business owner. You can build a company that is stable, vibrant, valuable, and a joy to own. This book contains the guiding principles and the concrete formulas you can apply to consistently create the dual results of business growth and personal freedom.

We are primarily serial entrepreneurs, not authors. We love building businesses, and have been fortunate to enjoy some big successes, and to have survived the stupid, messy mistakes that, looking back, were both predictable and avoidable. While we wouldn’t trade our paths, we wanted to catalog and share our real-world lessons about how to do it better, smarter, and faster. This is the book we wished we had read when we were struggling to grow our earlier businesses.

Everything you read here has been tested and validated. It is proven to work; we’ve used it to build more than a dozen successful companies with combined sales in the billions. More important, over the past ten years, we’ve taught these ideas to more than 100,000 business owners around the world, and the results they’ve gotten have proved the concepts, strategies, and tools are transferable and get results. We wrote it so that you can read any chapter, put down the book, and immediately apply several of the key ideas the very next day in your business—generating immediate results.

The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst, this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.

Instead, we will introduce you to the Level Three Road Map, a comprehensive model for building and scaling your business. Essentially the Level Three Road Map will help you go from a Level One business (a start-up), through Level Two (an owner-reliant company), to Level Three (a rapid growth or “exit stage” company).

The bottom line is that scaling your company and reaching the ambitious goals that you really want requires that you move beyond an “owner-reliant” business to one that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1591847249
• ISBN 13: 9781591847243
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar