How to Succeed as a Small Business Owner ...
and Still Have a Life!

This book can help you make more money, make the entrepreneurial journey more enjoyable, reduce "business owner stress" and work fewer hours!

Dear fellow entrepreneur:

Many people ask me, when they see the title of my book, "Is it really possible to succeed as a business owner and still have a life?"

My answer, after almost 20 years of business ownership: Yes!

Many business owners are contentedly earning high incomes and building real, long-term wealth without working a zillion hours. All the while, they're enjoying fulfilling personal and family lives - being with the important people in their lives, coming and going as they please, and doing the things they like to do.

You can do it too - by reading this book and applying its simple principles in your business.

 
Click above to watch the video book trailer (1 minute 34 seconds)

For many entrepreneurs, owning a business has become drudgery. Long hours. Employees with bad attitudes. Being involved in every aspect of the business because the employees don't care or can't be trusted to do the right thing. Sacrificing their own income so they can make payroll. Sleepless nights.

These people must be asking themselves, "What happened? How did my dreams of success turn into a nightmare? Will it ever get better?"

It can get better, but here's a good saying to remember:

If you keep doing what you've been doing,
you'll keep getting what you've been getting."

The only way to change your results is to change your behavior, your activities and your approach to business.

Based on my own experiences

My name is Bill Collier. This book is the culmination of my own personal entrepreneurial experiences. In the late 1980s, I started my first company after years in the corporate world. The first 3 years, we did fine. We attracted customers, hired some employees, and paid our bills. I thought, "I've got this business stuff figured out."

Boy, was I wrong!

Then, we hit a brick wall. We endured 4 straight years - I call them our "dark ages" - of stagnant sales, low employee morale, and high employee turnover. It got harder and harder to pay our vendors. I frequently took little or no pay so I could make payroll. My lack of business expertise had come home to roost.

I called one of our bigger competitors and inquired about selling my company to them. Their reply: "You're too small. Get bigger and maybe we can talk." I was disappointed beyond words. I had two choices - throw in the towel, or stick it out and make it work.

I chose to make it work.

Slowly but surely, I started to "get it." I was learning from my own mistakes. (And I made lots of them!) I learned to swallow my pride and admit that I didn't have all the answers. This enabled me to seek out advice and to accept input from my employees. It also helped me learn to trust my employees and to delegate to them.

By 1995, things started to turn around. Revenue was growing. Employees quit leaving. Customers became fans. I recruited and developed a management team.

Over the next 10 years, we enjoyed plenty of success. We made the "St. Louis Technology Fast 50" list 3 times. Jack Stack's open-book management organization, The Great Game of Business, gave us their "Hall of Fame" award. We made money, and I finally tasted the success I'd hoped for when I started the company.

The last 2 years I owned the business, I played golf every Wednesday morning, worked from home fairly often, and took off when I wanted to. I also bought into a small manufacturing company and started spending one day a week at that business. All the while, my company hummed along.

We sold my first business in 2005 for a nice sum. I now split my 4 day workweek between the manufacturing company mentioned above and my own consulting firm, Collier Business Advisors. (I still golf on Wednesdays.)

The approach used to turn around that first company, to reduce my workweek, to put my company on "auto-pilot", and to increase its value and make it sellable are all outlined in my book.

You can reasonably expect to achieve similar success if you read it and apply the simple principles you'll find inside.

I'd be pleased and proud for my book to be part of your entrepreneurial journey.

Wishing you success,

Bill Collier

   Click on the above to watch the Video Trailer!

 

“If you own a small business, or are thinking of starting one, you need Bill Collier’s wonderful book. In fact, it should be a fixture on your desk, with its pages dog-eared from use and its key points highlighted and underlined. Bill writes clearly and succinctly as a small business owner who paid his dues and learned how to do it right. His book is a much-needed guide for anyone who wants to get the most out of the small business experience.”    
- Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large of Inc. magazine
and author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big 

Small Business Truism #1:
"Your business exists to serve you, not the other way around."

How many small businesses have you seen wind up this way: The owners, after many years of toil and sweat, hold a sale. For pennies on the dollar, they auction off their desks, file cabinets and other physical assets. Then, the owners shut the doors and shuffle off into retirement - where they try to live on Social Security and what little savings they cobbled together over the years.

This same couple could have run that same business for those same years in an entirely different way. They could have been building sellable value into the company, so that when retirement time came, they had potential buyers bidding for the privilege of acquiring their company for top dollar.

The difference? Seeing your business not as a job, but as a tool for enhancing your personal life.

“Bill Collier has been there and done that and provides us with helpful hints on how to take the pain out of getting there and getting it done. Bill's book clearly points out what you can do to help yourself succeed. Sometimes it takes a book to remind us what life is all about, and with a little bit of knowledge and experience how we can enjoy every minute of it. This book is such a reminder."     
- Jack Stack, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SRC Holdings Corporation, author of The Great Game of Business, and the father of the Open-Book Management movement

Small Business Truism #2:
"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."

Would you take a vacation without first planning it? Would you build a house without a blueprint? Yet, many small business owners start and run their companies with no written plan.

Many other small companies have a plan, but it is a long, fancy bound document. Trouble is, nobody reads it or uses it.

You need a concise, focused plan that literally guides your yearly, monthly, weekly and daily actions, and provides accountability for you and your team members. The second section of the book will step you through the process of developing a real, working business plan that virtually guarantees success.

 

This is the most practical small business book ever! I'm an avid reader/researcher and now an entrepreneur so I have read LOTS of books on small business. This is the first book that I really felt "got it!" The writer clearly knows what it is like for a small business and has realistic tips and ideas for growing your business the right way and ending up where you want it to be.

The title initially appealed to me since running your own business can be so draining. This book was approachable, easy to read, and had actionable ideas from the beginning. I also like that it "got" the realities of being a small business owner and didn't take up your time with worthless "exercises" or visions of what your business plan should be like. After reading this book I was so inspired to create my own business plan and start working on business improvements laid out in the plan. The book helped me find the clarity I had really be lacking and it made me feel like it wouldn't be too difficult or onerous to do.

This book is a MUST for every small business owner who wants to see their business grow in a sustainable way!!! I can't recommend it highly enough.
- Jo Ilfeld, Berkeley, California

Small Business Truism #3:
If you put in long hours, have trouble getting away from work for more than a day or two at a time, and don't make any more money than you did when you worked for someone else, you haven't created a business. You've created a job.

Execution. Progress. Results. This is where the rubber meets the road. Despite your best intentions, your well-thought-out goals, and your focused plan, you're going nowhere fast unless you execute.

And, there are two aspects to execution:

The first and most obvious ... you have to do what you planned to.

The second ... you need to do certain things well. The book identifies 11 specific areas in which you need to be "firing on all cylinders", including making good hiring decisions, creating a "high-retention culture" to keep your good employees from leaving, effective delegation, using values to provide guidance, and 7 more.

You'll avoid many of the troubles that plague most business owners if you follow the simple, down-to-earth approaches outlined in this section.

 

As seen in
Entrepreneur Magazine

Finally! An "Owner's Manual" for small businesses!
Learn how to ... 

• Put your business on "auto-pilot"

• Set ambitious goals and achieve them

• Develop a real, working business plan

• Use values to provide guidance to your staff - even when you're not at the office

• Get the right people on your team ... and keep them there

• Delegate effectively

• Create a "self-healing" culture that practically fixes its own problems

• And much more

 

A must read for any small business owner. I recently read Bill's book as part of the Ellensburg Downtown Association's Brown Bag Business Basics series, and this is clearly one of the best small business resources I could recommend to any small business owner.

The book is a deceptively easy read, and as Bill freely admits, it's loaded with clichés. But Bill is able to move past the clichés and get right to the meat of the issues leaving the reader with solid useable information to act on at the end of each chapter.

From the very basics of understanding why you're in business to begin with, to planning for your businesses succession this book is a tremendous resource for any small business owners and includes some of the best advice I've read on the hiring process and why it's so important to the success of an business.

Clearly one of the best books that we've shared with our downtown business owners here in Ellensburg. 
- Timothy Bishop, Ellensburg, Washington

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How to Succeed as a
Small Business Owner ... 
and Still Have a Life!

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