You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

• Sometimes, to get to the really important things in our work or our lives, we have to let go. We have to create the space for what matters most to take its place. (The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need)
• We all make mistakes, and they can be very costly in business. They can also ruin a firm’s reputation. However, mistakes can be a great learning tool. Ideally a firm’s culture will embrace mistakes and convert them into learning opportunities. It takes good judgement to know how to balance learning from mistakes versus a lack of tolerance for incompetence. (The CEO Code)
• The spread of games to a wider population than ever before is an even bigger story–the long-term demographic shift is in fact propelling us toward an ever more gamelike future. In fact, as more women and seniors take up gaming, so do those demographics you most expect to play games. Teens it turns out are not only playing games, they are living them. And it is this fundamental shift in their behavior that has them leading the trend towards gamification–and making its arrival an inevitability. (The Gamification Revolution)
• Unless you are able to muster the courage, and get out and ‘work in’ your new business, things like business cards, logos and business plans have no value. While getting a new business going, your job is not to design the perfect image and develop the perfect business plan; it is to find customers and sell them your product. Without customers to generate revenues, there really is no business to ‘work on.’ So step away from your computer and go find some real live customers (Be The Best At What Matters Most)
• There are three specific things you can do to become more aware of yourself. The firs is to ask for feedback. Second, you can get other people to formally give you input on your performance by conducting a formal or informal 360 review. Your third choice is to get a coach or mentor who can not only facilitate the 360 process, but also guide you into ways to change and improve. (The CEO Code)
• It will not be enough to respond to the threat and opportunity of a distracted population by offering one-time-winner sweepstakes or employee of the month challenges (though both have their place). To compete successfully and to position your organization to win in this new landscape, gamification must permeate your whole company from top to bottom. In short, you need a strategy. (The Gamification Revolution)
• Business must recognize that the voice of the customer is now more powerful than ever before. Whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, review sites, product forums, blogs or Pinterest, your customers are sharing their experiences on platforms where audiences can find what others are saying about you. (What’s the Future of Business)
• If you do an extraordinary job on the three or four things that matter the most, not only will you succeed, you will likely succeed far beyond your expectations. The reason people get sucked into the tornado of trying to do a thousand things each day is that they aren’t focused on those core activities that can actually advance their strategies. Because you’re not focused, you aren’t winning on the basics, and that’s when people start looking for gimmicks, shortcuts, or ‘silver bullets’ to try to improve their results. (The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need)
• Put your energy, effort, and focus into doing a really, really great job on the basics and into consistency of performance. (The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need)
• That was the business lesson Michael and Bonnie would use over the years. When people have long, tough tasks to handle, they tend to roll through without paying attention to every small detail. It’s human nature to take the easy road. But if you’re a boss or a client and you ask for high standards, they’ll give you high standards. The thing is you usually have to ask. (The Barefoot Spirit)
• Once you are on your way sustaining customer engagement, you can use gamification to drive innovation and support through crowdsourcing techniques. This highly leveraged business strategy may enable you to turn gamification into an engine of creativity and profitability, based on your newly deepened customer relationships. That’s a powerful opportunity that no company-regardless of industry–can afford to miss. (The Gamification Revolution)
• The four principles guiding and underlying a business that practices Conscious Capitalism are: (1) Higher Purpose (2) Stakeholder Orientation (3) Conscious Leadership and (4) Conscious Culture. (It’s Just Good Business)
• It’s something most businesses face. No matter your size or funding, someone else’s inefficiency–or someone else’s better idiot–will make a mistake that affects you, and it will cost you time and money. And Barefoot’s solution applies to any business. Find ways to cuts down the likelihood someone will make that mistake, and prepare for those errors so you can reduce the impact on your company. (The Barefoot Spirit)
• The future of business isn’t tied to the permeation of Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and Droids, pin on Pinterest, Tablets, or real-time geolocation check-ins. The future of business comes down to relevance and the ability to understand how technology affects decision making and behavior to the point where the recognition of new opportunities and the ability to strategically adapt to them become a competitive advantage. (What’s the Future of Business)
• Community must have a purpose. To build a true community starts with your vision statement. It is enlivened by your brand. You must define the experience you want people to have with your brand and align that experience with everything you do. (What’s the Future of Business)
• ‘The Process is the Product’ is our motto and at the core of the Practice of Working for Good. By ‘The Process of the Product’ we mean that what we create through our business reflects the way we conduct ourselves in business. Iw we want our work to be meaningful and fulfilling and our businesses to be resilient, sustainable and successful over the long-term, then we need to treat ourselves, each other and the world around us with care and respect. (It’s Just Good Business)
• …Steve Jobs said his philosophy was that you have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make things simple but that it’s worth the effort, because if you can make things simple, you can move mountains. (The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need)
• A critical step for any new business is to find strategic partners. That’s someone who also benefits if you survive and grow. Barefoot’s partners weren’t just the distributors and stores selling the wine, their suppliers were partners, too. (The Barefoot Spirit)

The Bookshelf

Book descriptions via Amazon.com

What’s the Future of Business? by Brian Solis will galvanize a new movement that aligns the tenets of user experience with the vision of innovative leadership to improve business performance, engagement, and relationships for a new generation of consumerism. It provides an overview of real-world experiences versus “user” experiences in relation to products, services, mobile, social media, and commerce, among others. This book explains why experience is everything and how the future of business will come down to shared experiences.

Be the Best at What Matters Most by Joe Calloway is about the one essential strategy for business leaders, entrepreneurs, owners, managers and those who want to be one. Simplify, focus, and win by outperforming all your competition on those things that create real value for the customer. This is about substance, not flash, and the ultimate “wow” factors of high quality performance, consistency and relentless improvement.

Gamification: It’s the hottest new strategy in business, and for good reason–it’s helping leading companies create unprecedented engagement with customers and employees. Gamification uses the latest innovations from game design, loyalty programs, and behavioral economics to help you cut through the noise and transform your organization into a lean, mean machine ready to fight the battle for user attention and loyalty. With The Gamification Revolution by Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder you’ll learn how top companies: Recruit and retain the best talent from the gamer generation and beyond, train employees and drive excellence with noncash incentives, cut through the market noise and ignite consumer sales growth, and generate unprecedented customer loyalty without breaking the bank.

Inspirational and informative, The CEO Code shares real-life stories of success and failure from author David Rohlander’s personal journey and work as a mentor and coach to CEOs and executives of Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized companies, and start-ups. The book will give you: practical advice for dealing with people, proven strategies to increase business profits and growth, unique and simple solutions to complex problems and the secret to authentic communication.

It’s Just Good Business by Jeff Klein provides a clear, concise and compelling introduction to the emerging Conscious Capitalism movement and to the practice of Working for Good. It’s Just Good Business is an inspiring and informative “quick read” filled with quotes, stories and pathways to action.

You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

• Get Laughed At. When you first enter a marketplace, you’ll get laughed at and ridiculed and have tomatoes thrown at you. I’m routinely laughed at for things that I say, because people don’t understand my approach to solve problems. It’s difficult, but it’s the only way to see if your arguments stand up. Over time, you’ll continue to be validated by the marketplace – The Startup Playbook
• The best way to recognize an opportunity is to first know what you are capable of. Then keep your eyes and ears open while you market yourself and your service. Look for places where your service is needed. Look in your neighborhood; have your parents look at work. You will often discover opportunities while working for another customer. Customers will mention things that turn into opportunities. – Lemonade Stand Economics
• There are very few legal issues when it comes to allowing comments on your blog because it’s unlikely that you’ll be held responsible for other people’s statements such as claims for defamation. It’s unlikely you’ll be liable if you weren’t the author of the defamatory statement and you didn’t know it contained a lie. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• If you overpaid your income taxes because you had too much withheld from your paycheck or your estimated tax payments were larger than necessary, be sure to file for a tax refund. The IRS does not send you a refund automatically. – Your  Income Tax 2013
• One simple thing that we do that connects and grounds us each morning when we are physically in the same place is to spend four minutes together, making eye contact, and chatting casually about what the day’s schedule is and when we might see each other again. – Startup Life
• Principles of Mastering Email are (1) Maintain separate work and personal mailboxes (2) Do not surrender today’s plans to today’s email (3) Use administrative assistance (4) Batch process email by appointment with yourself (5) Process email last in, first serve (6) Make three deliberate passes (7) Delete aggressively (8) Send very few carbon copies (9)Send less email (10) Cut the thread (11) Empty your inbox every day (12) Shut off, or ignore, email alerts. – Unload Email Overload
• It is an engine of innovation that runs on change, truth, communication and vision. Great leaders make a difference in the lives of their people, their organizations and the processes. - The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• The bottom line on all of this is it doesn’t matter how a dream gets planted. It only matters you have one, you raise it. If it’s to grow, you must set it up for success–it’s the only choice. – The Z-Factor
• When you’re writing your psots, it’s important for you to be aware and distinguish between stating a fact and giving your opinion. You could face serious accusations and repercussions if you inadvertently state something as a fact when you meant to mereley share an opinion such as a lawsuit for defamation. In thise cases what you actually said matters mor thaan what you intened to say. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• Focus on What’s Important – We all work hard, We’re all as busy as can be. When it doesn’t seem like we could possibly get any busier, we do. But if you’re not focused on the right things, you’ll be the busiest guy on the way to the poor house. You have to focus on the right things in the right order, and you have to tolerate a lack of perfection. – The Startup Life
• If you are going to recruit the right people at the right time and in the right place, here are some things you have to focus on when you are hiring: culture, attitude, self-directed people, other-directed people and competence. - The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• Don’t let laziness prevent you from claiming your maximum write-offs. Compare your itemized deductions with the standard deduction for your filing status; then deduct the higher amount. – Your Income Tax 2013
• Link no other time in history, people hire others to do all types of work for them. We live in a service economy. Americans have more money than any society in the history of the world, and what they are buying with it is time. Time has become the new currency. Your time is worth someone else’s money. Someone pays you to do what you do best, and you pay someone else to do what he or she does best. It’s your job to be the first one standing in line to say, ‘I can do that’–ideally before your potential customer ever asks for it to be done. – Lemonade Stand Economics
• Rejection isn’t dismissal. Rejection is the introduction to a six-stage cycle that presents an exclusive opportunity to improve your idea or situation. – The Z-Factor
• The crux of many significant conflicts in an entrepreneurial partnership is time. As an entrepreneur, you may feel that there just aren’t enough hours in a day to honor your commitments to your company, your partner, your health, and your self…. Setting limits on technology is an important part of time management for an entrepreneur. You do not need to do just one more email right before bedtime. – Startup Life
• Once you have engaged, empowered, and enriched employees’ lives, you have their attention. To have their heart, they need to feel appreciated, rewarded, recognized and valued. – The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• When you want to use a guest blogger, the two of you need to determine in advance who will own the copyright rights in the blog post he creates. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• We live within our cash flow means on a daily basis, but when a big bag of money falls out of the sky, we follow something called the 10 percent rule. We spend 10 percent of what we just got on something extravagant. – Startup Life

The Bookshelf

The Power of Magnetic Leadership by Dianne Durkin “Described as the only leadership reference guide any manager needs, this book provides strategies to increase earnings by energizing the inner powers of an organization. Dianne Durkin, described as a powerhouse that takes vision to reality uses the R.E.A.L. acronym as a guide to segment the book. R = Recruiting the Right people at the Right time in the Right place, and Retaining them. E = Engaging, Empowering, and Enriching Employees for Earnings. A = Appreciating and valuing employees. L = Leadership that expresses Love and builds Loyalty. Combining the above techniques, magnetic leadership will become money magnets.” via Amazon.com

The Z Factor: How to get the Life You Dream of With the Law of Extrodinary Effort Unlike the Law of Attraction by Edwin J. Sprague, “The Z Factor is anything but elusive or indescribable. “Z” is the extraordinary effort ordinary people can generate to turn dreams into reality. Is it time to finally be what you dreamt you’d be when you grew up? If so, it’s time to harness the absolute power of Z. No affirmations here–just humorous, motivating, and gritty stories about: (1) Why too much learning can kill your dreams, and how Tactical Ignorance keeps them alive. (2) Raising your ZQ (ballsy [ball-zee] quotient) and introducing your ideas to life’s realities. (3) A Perpetual Motion Machine and the 10 tactics that’ll take you to the next level–repeatedly. (4) Landing a whale (QVC), Feeding the Tuna Mayo, N.Y. Jets Meat, Professor Backwards, It Ain’t Easy Being Seven at My Age… and much more!” via Amazon.com

Lemonade Stand Economics by Geof White “teaches high school students how to work for themselves and graduate from college without student loans. Learn to make $15, $20 or even $50 per hour working for yourself and pay for college one semester at a time. It’s not hard if you know what to do, but that’s the problem. As a high school student you just don’t know where to start. Lemonade Stand Economics shows you what you do… and where to start. There is a problem in America – some say an epidemic – called student loan debt. High school students want to attend college but most don’t have the money set aside to pay for it. Most take out student loans for four years, graduate, and start off their adult life in debt. Often times starting their adult lives with massive debt. These students are not stupid or lazy, in fact they are quite smart and energetic, but they don’t know where to start or what to do to earn enough money to pay for college. They don’t need that job slapping sandwiches together for minimum wage and going home smelling like bologna and pickles. That’s not going to pay for college!” via Amazon.com.

Unload Email Overload: How to Master Email Communications, Unload Email Overload and Save Your Precious Time by Bob O’Hare ”Email steals too much of your precious time, doesn’t it? Processing email takes way too much time because we never learned to manage it effectively. We are constantly interrupted, invest countless hours in it, re-read emails that languish in our inbox, store email we don’t need and suffer from email overload. Don’t you agree? This book provides what you need to manage email, eliminate the overload and save your precious time. It will help you minimize interruption, overcome indecision and empty your inbox. It will help you organize priorities and manage time, so you can get your work done-at work. You can give up doing email at dinner and in bed. Good idea?” via Amazon.com.

Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor “In Startup Life, Brad Feld–a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist–shares his own personal experiences with his wife Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his twenty years of experience in this field to address how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.” via Amazon.com

Your Income Tax 2013 by J.K. Lasser Tax Institue “For over half a century, more than 39 million Americans have turned to J.K. Lasser for easy-to-follow, expert advice and guidance on planning and filing their taxes. Written by a team of tax specialists, J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax 2013 includes all the outstanding features that have made this book the nation’s all-time top-selling tax guide. It covers some of the most important topics associated with your taxes, from what must you report as income and strategies that will save you on taxes to how much tax do you actually owe and what deductions can you claim. via Amazon.com

The Startup Playbook by David S. Kidder “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.” – via Amazon.com

The Legal Side of Blogging: How Not to get Sued, Fired, Arrested, or Killed by Ruth Carter “Fans of Erika Napoletano will appreciate Ruth Carter’s ability to give bloggers the direct answers to legal questions — without the excessive fluff! Having a blog is awesome.
Having the cops or Joe the Process Server show up on your doorstep is not. Bloggers put themselves at legal risk with each and every blog post. Yes, you have freedom of speech but that doesn’t mean you can’t get sued. In this book, licensed attorney and passionate blogger Ruth Carter tells you how to stay out of legal hot water — with your boss, the cops, and the courts. Copyright, trademark, privacy, defamation… it’s all in there. And it’s written in an easy-to-understand style expressly for serious bloggers.

The year is quickly coming to a close and while entrepreneurs and business owners are preparing for 2013, at CEO Blog Nation and Teach a CEO we are taking a look back at the top posts from Teach a CEO. Included in this compilation is step-by-step videos on how to create everything from a Facebook Fan Page to creating a Twitter Account. Also entrepreneurs debate the importance and relevancy of a business plan and whether being an entrepreneurship can be taught.

• How to Create a Google+ Page for Your Business [VIDEO]
• How to Create A Facebook Fan Page for your Business [VIDEO]
• How to Create A Twitter Account for Your Business [VIDEO]
• How to Claim Your Google Places Listing [VIDEO]
• How to Sleep Better At Night As A CEO (Guest Post)
• How to Hire a Rock Star: 5 Tips for Better Recruiting (Guest Post)
• Did You Write A Business Plan? Why or Why Not? [ANSWERS]
• How to Use the New Facebook Timeline for Business (Guest Post)
• 6 Bold Tips for Entrepreneurs & Business Owners from William Parrish (Guest Post)
• Doug Bend – Legal Tips For Entrepreneurs [VIDEO]
• German Lam – Adding Swagger to an Entrepreneur’s Kitchen [VIDEO]
• Entrepreneurs Bookshelf: Books to Add to the Library [ANSWERS]
• Can You Learn to be an Entrepreneur? [ANSWERS]
• Business Plan 101 [Compilation]

You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

How to build social media into the customer experience (1) Empower your community manager (2) Listen (3) Serve Transparently (4) Provide Direction (5) Connect -Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not like You

Many business owners are hiring online for the cost savings. By hiring independent contractors, they don’t have to supply office space, unemployment insurance, or health benefits. In today’s world, these alone are huge savings.

Organizing and deploying such a marketing communications strategy starts by rethinking your approach in terms of the opportunities this new world is creating–which are considerable for companies who become skilled at engaging with their customers to get the word out. - The Hidden Wealth of Customers

Social media is a gift to business. It’s a godsend for the small or independent business owner, because the conversations that once took place only between people in private settings now occur more and more in public online environments. By “eavesdropping” on the right customer conversations, businesses can identify strengths and weaknesses in the products and services they–or their competitors–provide. - Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not Like You

11 principles of likeable business is (1) Listening (2) Storytelling (3) Authenticity (4) Transparency (5) Team Playing (6) Responsiveness (7) Adaptability (8) Passion (9) Surprise and Delight (10) Simplicity (11) Gratefulness -Likeable Business

While the VC Community seems stuck in an old boys’ network mentality, crowdfunding is radically reshaping business investment and neutralizing gender bias, for both investors and entrepreneurs. – The Crowdfunding Revolution

Listening to someone requires that you hear what they say to you and be able to repeat it back to them if not exactly, then in a format that provides a clear understanding of what they said. -Likeable Business

As Thomas Edison said, ” What it boils down to is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Or put in a more moder and related crowdfunding context: “Inspire people to be part of your dream, what with high integrity and authenticity, and then just take massive action… -The Crowdfunding Revolution

Firs that know how to create an effective Web presence, one that attracts buyers and provides them with value when they’re searching online, have a distinct advantage in today’s market and into the future. As we’ve seen it’s the Internet and its myriad connections that customers will consult before they even think about buying from you. -The Hidden Wealth of Customers

In business, authenticity means that processes are what you say they are and products and services do what you say they do. Your job titles, slogans, and advertisements are brand promises that your business must deliver to your employees and customers. -Likeable Business

Seven Principles for Creating a Customer Experience for People Not Like You: (1) Website/Digital Communication (2) Product or Service Tweaks (3) Hiring and Staffing Diverse Talent (4) Advertising and Marketing (5) Staff Interactions (6) Customer Service and Support (7) After the Sale -Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not like You

The Hispanic market is large, lucrative, and loyal–and those are the three Ls that every business wants their customers to be. -Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not like You

The advantages of hiring online are numerous. For just a start, look at these: (1) The ability to scale up or down rapidly…Experts are avialable for each job….Faster project completion time…. Robust information on contractors prior work experience…..24/7, 365-day-a-week access to talent. -The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Elance

This new customer value proposition addresses a problem that I’ve heard executives complain about again and again: the difficulty of finding salespeople who actually understand their customers, including the businesses they manage, their very different view of the world and of what matters, and the emotions that keep them awake at night. By bringing more of your customers into the sales process, you tap into the easy, mutual understanding that emerges naturally amount like-minded souls. -The Hidden Wealth of Customers

One of the best ways to do all four [(1) Ask and listen (2) Pay attention to trends (3) Overcome barriers (4) Communicate] of these steps–on an ongoing basis–is to become active with social media tools that are significantly shaping the customer experience for all of us. -Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not like You

In the freelancing and small business worlds, online or otherwise, the 80-20 rule is alive and well. In fact, you could take it one step further and call it the 90-10 rule. Meaning 90 percent of freelancers and small businesses do just okay, or outright fail, while 10 percent really shine.  10 percent of small businesses generate 90 percent of the revenue. -The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Elance

Books from the Bookshelf

Likeable Business by Dave Kerpen lays out 11 strategies for organizations of all sizes to spur growth, profits, and overall success. Dave kerpen reveals the return on investment of principles such as listening, responsiveness, transparency, adaptability, and gratefulness. In today’s social world, it literally pays to be likeable.

The Crowdfunding Revolution by Kevin Lawton and Dan Marom explains how the expolive growth of connectivity via physical and social technologies is changing venture capitalism as we know it–and how you can take advantage of it reach more investors than ever.

The Hidden Wealth of Customers by Bill Lee shows the value some customers can have by helping to market your offerings, penetrate foreign markets, leverage the demand-generating power of social media, build customer communities, improve innovation, and more.

Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not Like You by Kelly McDonald shows how companies, brands and products struggling to differentiate themselves in a “sea of sameness” can foster long-term loyalty and brand preference with exceptional and customized customer service.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Elance by Karen Lacey is about hiring contract workers and in-house staff at lower costs. The book provides everything that you need to be successful including advice and tricks, writing project proposals, and virtual office tips.

You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

If you want to create that emotional connection that leads to sharing, there are four core principles that we’ve found are crucial for you to understand: (1) Be true (2) Don’t waste our time (3) Be unforgettable (4) Ultimately, it’s all about humanity. – The Viral Video Manifesto

Few people in the world are consciously aware that their destiny is directly tied to their thoughts. For example if you think (believe) that you are trapped in your work, your job, or your present circumstances, that thinking will dictate how you feel on a daily basis. -Entrepreneur Unleashed

Being an entrepreneur involves a huge amount of work, dedication and sacrifice. If you enjoy working from 9 to 5, following the same routine day in and day out, and having plenty of paid time off, you probably shouldn’t start your own business. Because owning your own business means you’re going to have to wear many hats, juggle many projects at the same time, deal with constant surprises and crises, and work a lot more than 40 hours a week, at least for the first few year. – One Simple Idea

Reserve accounts are particularly important for consultants, home office professionals, entrepreneurs and artists. In fact they’re critical Why? Because when we work for ourselves, we don’t get paid on a regular schedule and need to plan for the months when there is no paycheck…. That’s why we should work with a Healthy Reserve account. The reason we need a three-month buffer is that we know that, as a consultant, artist, or entrepreneur, we’re a lot more expendable than the average full-time employee. – Debt Free Spending Plan

Universal Law of Being an Entrepreneur: I will always remember that time is more valuable than money. - Entrepreneur Unleashed

The number one way to one-up the competition is to make your customer your number one priority. To do that, you have to really know and understand your customers. - One Simple Idea

To create a strong, positive emotional experience, the people are what matter. The best circus and sideshow performers–and the best viral video creators–are the ones who have been able to project their humanity, to create a connection with the audience. – The Viral Video Manifesto

Business is extraordinarily complex, even a one-person business  So you need a business plan, in whatever format it happens to be, to organize and articulate what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and why. What a business plan really represents is a set of informed decisions based on your best thinking about your business. -One Simple Idea

Most attempts at viral video take too long to get down to business. On the Internet, your audience can leave whenever they want. And they will. If they get bored, they’ll be gone in an instant.” - The Viral Video Manifesto

In today’s consumer-centric, wired world, where brand preference or rejection can be made, changed, and shared instantly, push marketing doesn’t work so well. Frankly, I don’t think it has ever worked well for startups and small businesses. As a new business, there simply isn’t enough money to buy customers with expensive advertising and marketing tactics  It takes time to earn people’s attention and business. -One Simple Idea

In order to be contagious, to get us excited enough to share with our friends, your video has to be, in some way, unforgettable. – The Viral Video Manifesto

Being unforgettable means going out on a limb and trying something different. That can seem risky. But the real risk in online video is in trying to play it safe. If you’re not different enough to distance yourself from the pack, your video won’t go viral and your entire effort will have been wasted. - The Viral Video Manifesto

The goal for any entrepreneur is to create passive streams of incomes from multiple sources or multiple business endeavors. The beauty of getting one businesss up and running and then moving on to the next one is the security that comes during times of change. - Entrepreneur Unleashed

After your business starts making a profit, consider establishing a retirement savings plan such as a SEP-IRA or Keogh….such plans allow you to shelter up to 20 percent of your business income from federal and state taxation. - Personal Finance for Dummies

Books from the Bookshelf

One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs by Stephen Key provides his perspective on how to get business ideas off the ground. Specifically the book contains plans, case studies, anecdotes tips and advice on how to develop, test, and protect your idea; plan and launch your business  manufacture, package, market, sell and distribute your product; manage and grow your business; and prepare for and implement your endgame.

The Viral Video Manifesto: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong and How To Do What Really Works by Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe the creators of the viral video studio EepyBird offers a way to create a viral video. The video includes QR Cods to successful viral videos.

The Debt-Free Spending Plan by Joanneh Nagler is a book for people who want to be free themselves from the choke hold of debt who don’t know how. It’s for people who hate numbers, never liked math, and rarely, if ever, balance their checkbooks.  The Plan is simple, easy and takes just five minutes a day—and it doesn’t matter if you make $14,000 or $14 million, the Debt-Free Spending Plan will work, every time.

Entrepreneur Unleashed: Wealth to Stand the Test of Time by Gregory Downing is a program that teaches parents how to create wealth and acquire knowledge that can be passed down to your children and grand children.

Personal Finance for Dummies by Eric Tyson provides techniques for tracking expenditures, reducing spending, and getting out from under the burden of high-interest debt, basic of investing, as well as risks, returns, and options for popular investment strategies.