Small Leadership

You can be one of those super-successful people who not only have a successful career but also a successful business! We start with the key things any start-up needs, giving you insight into helpful things to consider as you start your business. Then, we take you back as far back in time as middle school. We then go through what kind of internships and educational choices you’ve made or are going to make.

After 15 years stuck behind a desk in the software industry, Bob Clagett walked away from a well-paying, stable job to make the things he was interested in and show the world how to make them, too. His company, I Like to Make Stuff, started as a hobby but quickly grew into a passion project. In "Making Time", Bob recounts his history and build-up to becoming a full-time content creator, and shares his process, experiences, and mistakes from his first two years of self-employment.

Tom Golisano understands the fears, risks, and challenges small-business owners face every day - he’s lived it. He has launched and grown his own highly successful businesses and mentored dozens of entrepreneurs, helping them build their own successful companies.

"What do I need to do?" It's almost always the wrong question that an entrepreneur asks when creativity seems to have been lost. When you're stuck and the journals and books you've been reading and going to the masterminds and conventions and seminars you've been attending haven't led to any breakthroughs. When your notepads full of "proven best practices" should have brought you to the next level but haven't. In this paradigm-shifting work, serial entrepreneur Patrick Gentempo explains why the primary question you need to ask as a business leader is "Who should we be?"

The Compass and the Nail presents an unconventional perspective of how particular organizations create rabid fan bases, in turn making them more successful and more profitable. Written by Patagonia's former lead strategist for consumer marketing, and advisor to such iconic brands as Seventh Generation and Burton Snowboards, Craig Wilson outlines game-changing insights for providers of any product or service who desire fiercely loyal behavior.

Watching his father struggle to support his family through bigotry and other challenges in being an Italian immigrant, Tom Golisano learned early on the value of thinking outside the box and not letting perception sway your view of reality. Now, for the first time, Golisano shares the political shenanigans, behind-the-scenes stories, significant characters from his remarkable life, and key insights to thrive in your career.

Breaking into freelance writing has gotten much easier for word-savvy entrepreneurs like you. But even in the golden age of content creation, you still need to know what it takes to launch and consistently pitch your services so you can grow and scale your freelance writing side hustle into a full-fledged career you really love. Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business is an easy-to-understand, introductory, and nontechnical approach to the world of freelance writing.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

Take Your Shot is the story about Russ Hibbert. Russ is a hard worker, dedicated to his wife and children, and building a career as a golf professional. But one day he wakes up and realizes his business is going nowhere. A chance meeting with business coach, David, leads to a dramatic change and an opportunity, for Russ, to design the business that he always wanted.

Make It Happen explodes the myth that the restaurant business is harder than other industries. It challenges the belief that you must be in your restaurant all day every day just so things get done right.

Hype Yourself is an invaluable toolkit for getting you and your business featured in the media: newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. Crammed full of insider advice, from the building blocks of your PR strategy to the execution of creative campaigns, it includes expert tips from journalists and industry specialists and is supported by a stack of online resources. Lucy Werner has over 15 years of publicity experience, including running her own specialist consultancy focused on startups and entrepreneurs.

1000 Tips and Tools for Small Business Success is a compact, informative guide for small business owners and managers. Written by an expert business consultant, this handy volume provides helpful advice for all areas of managing a business. If you need answers to your HR, marketing, and operation management needs, you will find them here.

People often spend years on working on startup ideas that fail - and they could have known long before, had they asked the hard questions earlier. Five-time tech founder Dave Parker has been there, and in Trajectory: Startup he offers a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months. Parker shares advice on: what makes a good idea that makes money; recruiting and working with cofounders; asking customers what product they want (customer development); how to build a tech product even as a non-tech founder; and more.

Confronting change is incredibly hard, both organizationally and personally. Yet the pace of change in our world will never be slower than it is right now, says Beth Comstock, the former vice chair and head of marketing and innovation at GE. Imagine It Forward is an inspiring, fresh, candid, and deeply personal audiobook about how to grapple with the challenges to change we face every day. It is a different kind of narrative, a big-picture audiobook that combines Comstock’s personal story in leading change with vital lessons on overcoming the inevitable roadblocks.

Every start-up founder feels overwhelmed and uncertain at various times. From Start-Up to Grown-Up gives you, the founder and CEO of a great start-up, the knowledge and experience that executive coach Alisa Cohn has gained from helping companies such as Etsy, Foursquare, InVision, and The Wirecutter become headline names. The audiobook provides you with effective and practical ways of maximizing your strengths, defusing your triggers, controlling your self-doubt, and building on your motivators.

Project managers are no longer judged by the technical success of their projects alone. They're also held accountable for their contributions to the company's financial goals. Yet most project managers don't have the business knowledge necessary to make project-based decisions that lead to bottom-line success.

Addressing diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills - such as time management, team-building, communication and listening, creative-thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing - a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding valuable takeaways that ensure growth.

The Simple Six system will teach you how to grow your business one step at a time while avoiding distractions.

Develop and expand your innate leadership abilities through daily exercises and challenges designed to help you grow into the leader you want to be and prepare you for the job you were made to have. A recent Harvard Business Review article outlining a study of over 17,000 leaders found that although, on average, people begin to supervise others at age 30, most do not start to receive formal leadership training until their forties.

Starting a creative company needn't cost you everything. If you agree, then you'll find wit and wisdom in this book for creative entrepreneurs. Author, artist, and graphic designer Patricia Arnold presents her best tips for starting a handmade business with this initial volume in her Creative Entrepreneur series. After starting a decade-old business with a shoestring budget and then founding a second business six years later, Patricia Arnold has a lot to say about building creative businesses from scratch.