Showing results by publisher "Ascent Audio" in Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Startup money is moving online, and this guide shows you how it works. The Art of Startup Fundraising takes a fresh look at raising money for startups, with a focus on the changing face of startup finance. New regulations are making the old go-to advice less relevant, as startup money is increasingly moving online. These new waters are all but uncharted—and founders need an accessible guide. This book helps you navigate the online world of startup fundraising with easy-to-follow explanations and expert perspective on the new digital world of finance.

Elmira Bayrasli's colorful narrative brings listeners inside the world of high-growth entrepreneurs as they overcome vexing obstacles to build businesses that create jobs and economic growth and - perhaps most important - shift mindsets. Here are the people who personify the transformative force of entrepreneurship from parts of the world that will be the source of the overwhelming amount of economic growth over the next 25 years.

Skillfully redefine problems. Make an immediate connection with anyone. Rapidly determine if a client is ready to buy. Access the deepest dreams of others. Power Questions sets out a series of strategic questions that will help you win new business and dramatically deepen your professional and personal relationships. The audiobook showcases 35 riveting, real conversations with CEOs, billionaires, clients, colleagues, and friends.

Do you lack confidence or self-belief? Join the club. Millions of otherwise smart people lack the confidence to achieve their full potential - at work, in their careers and even in their personal pursuits. Yet confidence isn't something that can be conjured from motivational exercises or via quick-fix techniques. Confidence is something you must build for yourself. It takes planning and action, deciding where you want to gain confidence and how it must be won. It will require courage, optimism, and resilience.

Every human is born with multifarious potential. Why, then, do parents, schools, and employers insist that we restrict our many talents and interests - that we "specialize" in just one? Following a series of exchanges with the world's greatest historians, futurists, philosophers, and scientists, Waqas Ahmed has weaved together a narrative of history and a vision for the future that seeks to disrupt this prevailing system of unwarranted "hyper-specialization".

Each year, the nation's top business schools are flooded with applications from people eager to pursue their MBA dreams. But those aspirations come at a steep price. The average debt load for graduates of top business schools exceeds $100,000. Like most, author Laurie Pickard couldn't shoulder that. But she faced a dilemma: despite two degrees and a Peace Corps stint, she needed a business education to land her dream job in international development. She decided to take her education into her own hands.

Your business might be humming along fine, or it might be struggling to stay afloat. Either way, you know that your company has a lot more potential than the results show. What if you had a quick, effective way to ramp up productivity, morale, and your bottom line - a process you could begin right now, a strategy that would immediately start to improve broken functions without disrupting the parts of your business that don't need fixing?

At the core of this classic treatise is the message that sledgehammer approaches can backfire, and size alone does not guarantee wins. Strategy, positioning, planning, leadership - all play equally significant roles, making Sun Tzu's teachings perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs entrenched in fierce competition for customers, market share, talent - for their very survival.

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Lean UX is synonymous with modern product design and development. In the third edition of this award-winning book, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden help you focus on the product experience rather than deliverables. You'll learn tactics for integrating user experience design, product discovery, agile methods, and product management. And you'll discover how to drive your design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for businesses and users. Lean UX guides you through this change - for the better.

The one book you need to navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business - and business family.

In the newly revised second edition of the Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, bestselling author and consultant Peter Block delivers an invaluable companion to the fourth edition of his popular Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise. In the book, you'll find an expansive toolkit you can draw on for information and guidance in the midst of your next consulting engagement.

In Scale or Fail, author Allison Maslan shares her revolutionary SCALEit Method for successfully growing, replicating, and expanding your business. She also shares pivotal mindset strategies she's used to break the fear barrier as a trapeze artist so you can move past any obstacle, take strategic big-picture risks, and fulfill your dreams of business expansion and skyrocketing profit.

At more than a billion dollars, the mobile-food industry is enjoying more publicity and notoriety than ever before. Catering to a new generation of foodies looking for quick and unique specialties, the mobile-food business is booming with new opportunities for eager entrepreneurs like you. From gourmet food to all-American basics and hot dog wagons to bustaurants, our experts give you the delicious details behind starting and running a successful mobile-food business.

An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa - a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting, French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth.

With a nod to Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and other ruthless yet highly successful managers, author Dan S. Kennedy delivers the answer. In this new edition, Kennedy expands on his proven (if radical) strategies to get accountability, profitability, and productivity from employees. In his traditional "No B.S." style, Kennedy kicks traditional leadership and management ideas squarely in the teeth with a realistic, straightforward assessment of the real relationship between business owners and their employees.

Led by Dan S. Kennedy, with the support of Forrest Walden and Jim Cavale, the co-founders of Iron Tribe Fitness, and other marketing/branding vets including Bill Gough, the number-one marketing adviser to Allstate agents; Steve Adams, CEO of a chain of 21 retail stores and an e-commerce business, and Nick Nanton, of the Dicks-Nanton Celebrity Branding Agency, entrepreneurs learn how to develop and gain profit from their personal or business brand-without corporate-sized investment.

When it comes to how to succeed as an entrepreneur, we are besotted with advice. According to best-selling author Alan Weiss, success is a combination of opportunism, very disciplined work, luck, timing, and ignoring most advice. In other words, it means striking out on your own original path to success. In Million Dollar Maverick, he explains that entrepreneurs don't take advice; they create value and then monetize it. They do what they love and are great at and find a way to sell it to people.