On Crappy Napkins, or Why Cutting Corners Never Benefits Your Business

Think about the last time you visited a restaurant and there were those sheer, brittle napkins in an old school metal napkin holder on the table. You desperately pulled clumps of them out in an attempt to create the thickness of a single napkin with which to wipe your sticky hands.

Now think about another restaurant where you had a soft but strong napkin with plenty of absorption power. It didn’t fall apart when you used it to wipe barbecue sauce off of your face.

Which memory has the better position in your brain?

Are you really saving money?

The above illustrations are from the customer’s perspective, but as the business owner of this mythical restaurant, you’re probably on the side of the cheaper napkins. After all, if you can save a penny per napkin, that’s a ton of savings each year. Or is it?

While you may spend less on napkins, you may end up losing customers in your attempt to cut a few corners. Think I’m exaggerating to say that the quality of napkins is enough to send customers running out your door? Think again.

There are a million indeterminate factors that make someone decide to choose your business over another. Customers could walk out after being frustrated with your crappy napkins, or upset because the air conditioning wasn’t turned on, or annoyed at how long it took to get their meal. You can’t pin a person’s reason for not returning to your restaurant to any one of these factors, but you can bet they all contributed.

RELATED: 5 Customer Service Lessons Every Business Needs to Learn

So the next time you have to choose between cheaper (and inferior quality) or more costly (but ultimately providing a better experience), ask yourself, Which would you prefer as a customer?

Consider the experience you’re creating

Every business offers an experience, a chance for customers to interact with its brand, whether you run a restaurant or a marketing company. Service companies like my own may not have to worry about the whole napkin debate, but there are definitely ways to enhance that experience.

For my company, I have high-quality, skinny business cards that always get commented on, rather than the freebies that come from Vistaprint. I send clients gifts on my company’s birthday. I send handwritten holiday cards. All of this goes into the experience clients have with my brand. I will never cut corners on what I want them to remember about me and my brand. And you shouldn’t either.

For the brick-and-mortar store, experience includes everything from the music you play (go for middle-of-the-road, not hard rock) to whether or not there’s cacophony coming from the kitchen into the dining room. If clothes racks are crowded together too much, it takes away from a positive shopping experience. If cashiers are rude, people won’t return. Every facet of your business gets judged. Isn’t it in your best interest to ensure everything is top notch?

To succeed in business, your focus can’t always be on the bottom line. Sometimes investing in your business’s growth and secure future is as simple as buying the better napkins.

RELATED: 12 Ways to Improve Your Customers’ In-Store Experience

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Get More Out of Google Analytics With the Help of These 4 Premium Tools

Data is everywhere. But it can be time-consuming to have to gather it from multiple sources and then analyze it to decide the next course of action for your business.

Many of us think of Google Analytics as a clunky platform that is only capable of providing cursory web traffic information and a tool that could use some usability improvements. While much of this criticism is true, Analytics also happens to be a highly customizable platform that plays well with third-party integrations.

Adding tools to your Google Analytics setup, however, gives you the ability to see more information from within a single platform, so you save time and can focus on getting things done. Plus, the data will help you see traffic patterns so you can use them to your advantage—or spot issues before they start impacting your bottom line.

Here are four premium performance measurement tools that integrate especially well with Google Analytics, giving you the power to take action and make meaningful business improvements quickly.

1. Reach out to unknown site visitors with Leadfeeder

Imagine if you could figure out who your website visitors are and connect with them on social media to start the relationship-building process. With Leadfeeder, which integrates with your Google Analytics account, you can reach out to these leads on LinkedIn and connect with them. You can also export the information to build custom audience targeting lists for social media ads.

Leadfeeder works by referencing the IP addresses of visitors. The tool then finds the company that each visitor is associated with and displays this information alongside comprehensive logs of the pages the visitor checks out on your site.

This is valuable data, which is also useful for identifying bottlenecks in your lead nurture processes, so you can refine them to increase conversion rates. Leadfeeder takes just a few clicks to set up, and you don’t need to reach out to your webmaster to install a script to get it done.

2. Track funnel progress with Bizible’s Salesforce integration

If your business uses Salesforce to manage customer relationships, you can get a clearer picture of what’s actually going on in your business by connecting it with your Google Analytics data. For B2B companies, Google Analytics alone doesn’t really cut it, since it won’t show you much in the way of data relating to individual website visitors.

RELATED: Become a Data Genius: Track Everything in Your Small Business

However, if you combine it with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can match your data to your leads. You can see everything from device and location to the source, medium, campaign, the landing page and referral source, and split testing experiments and variations to better determine what’s working in order to increase your conversions.

Salesforce does offer its own Google Analytics integration, but if you opt for Bizible’s version, you’ll get even more reporting value. What Google Analytics gives you is usually relegated to only last-click attribution, whereas Bizible includes insights into anonymous visitors, and can even report the first click source when each lead is created. With Google Analytics alone, offline conversion reporting is limited to 90 days from click to close; if you routinely have deals that close after this window, you won’t be able to follow the buyer’s journey. Bizible can also help you with attribution model setup, so your data will show you exactly what you need it to.

3. Get easily digestible reports with Teacup Analytics

As useful as Google Analytics can be, it can be difficult to understand all of the data and how to use it to your advantage. The standard reports are often complex, incomplete, and hard to find. That’s where Teacup Analytics comes in. It connects with your Google Analytics and helps simplify the data to provide easily digestible reports so you can have a better understanding of what’s going on.

With built-in analyses and insights, Teacup puts you in better position to find opportunities to grow and expand your business. You won’t just see how much traffic you got yesterday, last week, or last month—you’ll see the value of that traffic, so you can easily see growth trends. Set benchmark goals in Teacup to find out whether you’ve made the right decisions, and track your progress toward reaching them.

4. See your landing page interactions with Unbounce

Your lead capture landing pages are arguably the most critical part of your sales funnel, so it makes sense that you’d want to see what’s going on there. But Google Analytics alone isn’t enough to give you the whole story. If you have an Unbounce account, you can integrate the two for a complete view of what happens when a visitor hits your landing page.

You’ll automatically get event tracking in Google Analytics for any user action on your page, so you can see what people are clicking on within the pages themselves—whether it’s scrolling down to a given depth, playing a video, typing in form fields, or opening a modal box.

Once installed—which is easily done by following the step-by-step instructions—everything’s automatic, so there’s no code to configure for each action you want to track.

Putting it all together

All of these tools take the information that’s accessible in Google Analytics and render it more complete and easier to understand. With the improved insights and analysis, you’re more likely to see actionable steps you can take to improve your website conversions, making more and better relationships with your clients. Use one, multiple, or all of the tools to take your data-driven business optimization efforts to new heights.

The post Get More Out of Google Analytics With the Help of These 4 Premium Tools appeared first on AllBusiness.com

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The 6 Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read

By Ian Naylor

People often talk about the “entrepreneurial spirit,” but spirit doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. For that you need to have a single-minded drive, which is probably the single most important quality an entrepreneur can have. Fat stacks of cash help, too, I’m not going to lie.

Still, all the passion in the world isn’t enough to see you through. You’re going to need an education, but that doesn’t mean you need to go to business school. I mean, I got my bachelor’s degree studying the Swedish language—och titta på mig nu. But my education continued well past college, in the jobs that I held, and in the books that I read—and all of it led to the point I’m at now.

But I can’t stress enough how important the reading part is. None of us are born knowing everything, not even for the things we may be naturally good at. I had the spirit and the drive, but that didn’t mean I knew how to run a business. If this sounds like you, then you’ll want to check out this list of books that made an impact on me as an entrepreneur. Whether you’re starting a business, or even if you’re already running one, I’d consider them essential reading.

1. The Startup Owner’s Manual, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf

I’m a firm believer in RTFM. Seriously, those people who say they don’t need to read the instructions are missing out. It doesn’t matter what the product is or how intuitive it is to use—it could be an iPhone or it could be a blender—you are going to find out things you didn’t know that will help you operate it most effectively.

It’s the same with starting a business. You may have a great idea for a product or service that addresses a real need, but there are things you don’t know when you first start up—like who, exactly, your customers are.

The Startup Owner’s Manual teaches you how to identify and develop your customer base, so you can operate your business most effectively. It starts with your assumptions on who your customers might be, and teaches structured processes for testing against those assumptions. Let’s face it: Starting a business involves a lot of guesswork, no matter how detailed your business plan is. The biggest guess of all is who’s going to buy, but by adhering to the wisdom in these pages you can eliminate many of the unknowns and develop a reliable understanding of just who your customers are going to be.

This book is a must-have for any startup owner’s library. It isn’t meant to be read straight through, so much as it as a reference for the entire startup phase. From customer discovery through to the business execution phase, you seriously need to RTFM, OK?

2. Purple Cow, by Seth Godin

This is the idea behind Seth Godin’s book on marketing: In a big field of brown cows, the purple one is going to stand out. Standing out in the crowd is a marketing principle so basic that I’m sure most of you read that and thought, “Wow, this Ian guy is easily impressed.” Consider this, though: The very fact that this book is a best seller is a testament to what Godin preaches.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of marketing books out there that will tell you the same thing. But how many of them are international best sellers? How many of them are just one of 18 bestsellers by the same author? Clearly, Godin’s done something to stand out with Purple Cow.

Maybe it’s his writing style—Godin pulls no punches with his opinions. Or maybe it’s his marketing ability that converts the millions of people reading his blog into book buyers. Of course, the book goes into much more depth than the simple maxim of “be unique,” detailing and analysing examples of the world’s most successful purple cows—and Godin’s great at synthesizing the lessons learned from each one.

3. The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is best known as Apple’s chief evangelist for the mind-blowing-at-the-time Macintosh back in the mid-eighties. In the 30 years since his departure from Apple, he’s made quite a living out of technology evangelism. He’s also written several books, and The Art of the Start is his most indispensable. If there were an actual startup bible, this would be “The Gospel According to Guy.”

It’s practical advice from a guy (Guy!) who’s done it all before, a few times over. When Kawasaki talks about defining your vision, or guides you through the legal aspects of starting up, or advises you on securing funding, you would do well to listen carefully and say, “Amen.”

The Art of the Start 2.0, Kawasaki’s revised and updated edition, has tons of new advice to reflect the current business landscape. He covers things like crowdfunding and social media marketing, even giving technical advice on how to build a cost-effective infrastructure in the cloud. This book isn’t Guy the Evangelist preaching to the masses, it’s practical, nuts-and-bolts advice that no entrepreneur should do without.

4. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

This isn’t a book about winning at business. It’s a self-help book aimed at sparking personal change in the reader, but the appeal to entrepreneurs should be apparent in the title. If you’re going to achieve success starting a new business, then you’ve got to do things effectively, right? And you can’t expect to manage a business effectively if your own self is a personal mess.

Stephen Covey’s list of seven habits—which include things like being being proactive, communicating, and cooperating—can help anyone navigate the interpersonal waters of office life. But in the hands of the person designated as the leader, it’s vital information. You, as the leader set the tone, lead by example, and inspire others to be at their best. To do that means being able to the same for yourself. It’s like RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how you gonna love someone else?”

5. Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld

This is the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the years-long development of the groundbreaking Macintosh computer, told by one of the core members of the team that wrote the Mac’s system software. There’s no sage business advice here, just lots of great stories, photos, and other ephemera like handwritten notes and diagrams—a treasure trove of information that any tech fan would get a kick out of reading.

Underneath all that, though, is the story of a team of people who worked their tails off to create something the world had never seen before. You definitely get a sense that they knew they were working on something bigger than themselves, and you get to see the camaraderie (and fun) that developed in that setting.

It’s not that there wasn’t any drama, or that egos didn’t clash, but the wistful nostalgia most of the team has for that time is something to behold. At the center of it all is Steve Jobs and the culture he created there. There’s no whitewashing there—Jobs was a legendary jerk to many of his employees, and Revolution in the Valley pulls no punches. But he also inspired the hell out of his Mac team, and pushed them to accomplish things that seemed at best improbable, and at worst impossible.

To understand what Jobs put them through, and also what he got them to achieve, is a master class: both in how to manage a team, and how NOT to manage a team.

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz

Running a business can be a daunting job, overwhelming and sometimes damn right scary. The lines between success and failure are at times blurred, which can lead to self-doubt or megalomania in equal measure. I’ve always taken solace and grounding from reading other founder stories and the struggles and successes they’ve journeyed.

I think in the tech world there aren’t too many roller-coaster rides better than the journey of Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs. The Hard Thing About Hard Things offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on Horowitz’s own experience.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything, from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality, to knowing the right time to cash in.

RELATED: 99 Inspirational Quotes for Entrepreneurs

About the Author

Post by: Ian Naylor

Ian Naylor is the founder and CEO of AppInstitute, one of the world’s leading DIY App Builders (over 70,000 apps built). Ian has founded, grown, and sold four successful internet and technology companies during the past 18 years around the world. He gives seminars as an expert authority on startup mobile app trends, development, and online marketing, and has spoken at numerous industry events including The Great British Business Show, Venturefest, the National Achievers Congress, and numerous industry exhibitions around the UK.

Company: AppInstitute
Website: www.appinstitute.com
Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Get More Out of Google Analytics With the Help of These 4 Premium Tools

Data is everywhere. But it can be time-consuming to have to gather it from multiple sources and then analyze it to decide the next course of action for your business.

Many of us think of Google Analytics as a clunky platform that is only capable of providing cursory web traffic information and a tool that could use some usability improvements. While much of this criticism is true, Analytics also happens to be a highly customizable platform that plays well with third-party integrations.

Adding tools to your Google Analytics setup, however, gives you the ability to see more information from within a single platform, so you save time and can focus on getting things done. Plus, the data will help you see traffic patterns so you can use them to your advantage—or spot issues before they start impacting your bottom line.

Here are four premium performance measurement tools that integrate especially well with Google Analytics, giving you the power to take action and make meaningful business improvements quickly.

1. Reach out to unknown site visitors with Leadfeeder

Imagine if you could figure out who your website visitors are and connect with them on social media to start the relationship-building process. With Leadfeeder, which integrates with your Google Analytics account, you can reach out to these leads on LinkedIn and connect with them. You can also export the information to build custom audience targeting lists for social media ads.

Leadfeeder works by referencing the IP addresses of visitors. The tool then finds the company that each visitor is associated with and displays this information alongside comprehensive logs of the pages the visitor checks out on your site.

This is valuable data, which is also useful for identifying bottlenecks in your lead nurture processes, so you can refine them to increase conversion rates. Leadfeeder takes just a few clicks to set up, and you don’t need to reach out to your webmaster to install a script to get it done.

2. Track funnel progress with Bizible’s Salesforce integration

If your business uses Salesforce to manage customer relationships, you can get a clearer picture of what’s actually going on in your business by connecting it with your Google Analytics data. For B2B companies, Google Analytics alone doesn’t really cut it, since it won’t show you much in the way of data relating to individual website visitors.

RELATED: Become a Data Genius: Track Everything in Your Small Business

However, if you combine it with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can match your data to your leads. You can see everything from device and location to the source, medium, campaign, the landing page and referral source, and split testing experiments and variations to better determine what’s working in order to increase your conversions.

Salesforce does offer its own Google Analytics integration, but if you opt for Bizible’s version, you’ll get even more reporting value. What Google Analytics gives you is usually relegated to only last-click attribution, whereas Bizible includes insights into anonymous visitors, and can even report the first click source when each lead is created. With Google Analytics alone, offline conversion reporting is limited to 90 days from click to close; if you routinely have deals that close after this window, you won’t be able to follow the buyer’s journey. Bizible can also help you with attribution model setup, so your data will show you exactly what you need it to.

3. Get easily digestible reports with Teacup Analytics

As useful as Google Analytics can be, it can be difficult to understand all of the data and how to use it to your advantage. The standard reports are often complex, incomplete, and hard to find. That’s where Teacup Analytics comes in. It connects with your Google Analytics and helps simplify the data to provide easily digestible reports so you can have a better understanding of what’s going on.

With built-in analyses and insights, Teacup puts you in better position to find opportunities to grow and expand your business. You won’t just see how much traffic you got yesterday, last week, or last month—you’ll see the value of that traffic, so you can easily see growth trends. Set benchmark goals in Teacup to find out whether you’ve made the right decisions, and track your progress toward reaching them.

4. See your landing page interactions with Unbounce

Your lead capture landing pages are arguably the most critical part of your sales funnel, so it makes sense that you’d want to see what’s going on there. But Google Analytics alone isn’t enough to give you the whole story. If you have an Unbounce account, you can integrate the two for a complete view of what happens when a visitor hits your landing page.

You’ll automatically get event tracking in Google Analytics for any user action on your page, so you can see what people are clicking on within the pages themselves—whether it’s scrolling down to a given depth, playing a video, typing in form fields, or opening a modal box.

Once installed—which is easily done by following the step-by-step instructions—everything’s automatic, so there’s no code to configure for each action you want to track.

Putting it all together

All of these tools take the information that’s accessible in Google Analytics and render it more complete and easier to understand. With the improved insights and analysis, you’re more likely to see actionable steps you can take to improve your website conversions, making more and better relationships with your clients. Use one, multiple, or all of the tools to take your data-driven business optimization efforts to new heights.

The post Get More Out of Google Analytics With the Help of These 4 Premium Tools appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Get More Out of Google Analytics With the Help of These 4 Premium Tools appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Zac Johnson.

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The 6 Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read

By Ian Naylor

People often talk about the “entrepreneurial spirit,” but spirit doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. For that you need to have a single-minded drive, which is probably the single most important quality an entrepreneur can have. Fat stacks of cash help, too, I’m not going to lie.

Still, all the passion in the world isn’t enough to see you through. You’re going to need an education, but that doesn’t mean you need to go to business school. I mean, I got my bachelor’s degree studying the Swedish language—och titta på mig nu. But my education continued well past college, in the jobs that I held, and in the books that I read—and all of it led to the point I’m at now.

But I can’t stress enough how important the reading part is. None of us are born knowing everything, not even for the things we may be naturally good at. I had the spirit and the drive, but that didn’t mean I knew how to run a business. If this sounds like you, then you’ll want to check out this list of books that made an impact on me as an entrepreneur. Whether you’re starting a business, or even if you’re already running one, I’d consider them essential reading.

1. The Startup Owner’s Manual, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf

I’m a firm believer in RTFM. Seriously, those people who say they don’t need to read the instructions are missing out. It doesn’t matter what the product is or how intuitive it is to use—it could be an iPhone or it could be a blender—you are going to find out things you didn’t know that will help you operate it most effectively.

It’s the same with starting a business. You may have a great idea for a product or service that addresses a real need, but there are things you don’t know when you first start up—like who, exactly, your customers are.

The Startup Owner’s Manual teaches you how to identify and develop your customer base, so you can operate your business most effectively. It starts with your assumptions on who your customers might be, and teaches structured processes for testing against those assumptions. Let’s face it: Starting a business involves a lot of guesswork, no matter how detailed your business plan is. The biggest guess of all is who’s going to buy, but by adhering to the wisdom in these pages you can eliminate many of the unknowns and develop a reliable understanding of just who your customers are going to be.

This book is a must-have for any startup owner’s library. It isn’t meant to be read straight through, so much as it as a reference for the entire startup phase. From customer discovery through to the business execution phase, you seriously need to RTFM, OK?

2. Purple Cow, by Seth Godin

This is the idea behind Seth Godin’s book on marketing: In a big field of brown cows, the purple one is going to stand out. Standing out in the crowd is a marketing principle so basic that I’m sure most of you read that and thought, “Wow, this Ian guy is easily impressed.” Consider this, though: The very fact that this book is a best seller is a testament to what Godin preaches.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of marketing books out there that will tell you the same thing. But how many of them are international best sellers? How many of them are just one of 18 bestsellers by the same author? Clearly, Godin’s done something to stand out with Purple Cow.

Maybe it’s his writing style—Godin pulls no punches with his opinions. Or maybe it’s his marketing ability that converts the millions of people reading his blog into book buyers. Of course, the book goes into much more depth than the simple maxim of “be unique,” detailing and analysing examples of the world’s most successful purple cows—and Godin’s great at synthesizing the lessons learned from each one.

3. The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is best known as Apple’s chief evangelist for the mind-blowing-at-the-time Macintosh back in the mid-eighties. In the 30 years since his departure from Apple, he’s made quite a living out of technology evangelism. He’s also written several books, and The Art of the Start is his most indispensable. If there were an actual startup bible, this would be “The Gospel According to Guy.”

It’s practical advice from a guy (Guy!) who’s done it all before, a few times over. When Kawasaki talks about defining your vision, or guides you through the legal aspects of starting up, or advises you on securing funding, you would do well to listen carefully and say, “Amen.”

The Art of the Start 2.0, Kawasaki’s revised and updated edition, has tons of new advice to reflect the current business landscape. He covers things like crowdfunding and social media marketing, even giving technical advice on how to build a cost-effective infrastructure in the cloud. This book isn’t Guy the Evangelist preaching to the masses, it’s practical, nuts-and-bolts advice that no entrepreneur should do without.

4. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

This isn’t a book about winning at business. It’s a self-help book aimed at sparking personal change in the reader, but the appeal to entrepreneurs should be apparent in the title. If you’re going to achieve success starting a new business, then you’ve got to do things effectively, right? And you can’t expect to manage a business effectively if your own self is a personal mess.

Stephen Covey’s list of seven habits—which include things like being being proactive, communicating, and cooperating—can help anyone navigate the interpersonal waters of office life. But in the hands of the person designated as the leader, it’s vital information. You, as the leader set the tone, lead by example, and inspire others to be at their best. To do that means being able to the same for yourself. It’s like RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how you gonna love someone else?”

5. Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld

This is the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the years-long development of the groundbreaking Macintosh computer, told by one of the core members of the team that wrote the Mac’s system software. There’s no sage business advice here, just lots of great stories, photos, and other ephemera like handwritten notes and diagrams—a treasure trove of information that any tech fan would get a kick out of reading.

Underneath all that, though, is the story of a team of people who worked their tails off to create something the world had never seen before. You definitely get a sense that they knew they were working on something bigger than themselves, and you get to see the camaraderie (and fun) that developed in that setting.

It’s not that there wasn’t any drama, or that egos didn’t clash, but the wistful nostalgia most of the team has for that time is something to behold. At the center of it all is Steve Jobs and the culture he created there. There’s no whitewashing there—Jobs was a legendary jerk to many of his employees, and Revolution in the Valley pulls no punches. But he also inspired the hell out of his Mac team, and pushed them to accomplish things that seemed at best improbable, and at worst impossible.

To understand what Jobs put them through, and also what he got them to achieve, is a master class: both in how to manage a team, and how NOT to manage a team.

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz

Running a business can be a daunting job, overwhelming and sometimes damn right scary. The lines between success and failure are at times blurred, which can lead to self-doubt or megalomania in equal measure. I’ve always taken solace and grounding from reading other founder stories and the struggles and successes they’ve journeyed.

I think in the tech world there aren’t too many roller-coaster rides better than the journey of Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs. The Hard Thing About Hard Things offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on Horowitz’s own experience.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything, from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality, to knowing the right time to cash in.

RELATED: 99 Inspirational Quotes for Entrepreneurs

About the Author

Post by: Ian Naylor

Ian Naylor is the founder and CEO of AppInstitute, one of the world’s leading DIY App Builders (over 70,000 apps built). Ian has founded, grown, and sold four successful internet and technology companies during the past 18 years around the world. He gives seminars as an expert authority on startup mobile app trends, development, and online marketing, and has spoken at numerous industry events including The Great British Business Show, Venturefest, the National Achievers Congress, and numerous industry exhibitions around the UK.

Company: AppInstitute
Website: www.appinstitute.com
Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The post The 6 Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read appeared first on AllBusiness.com

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How One Engineer Made His Hobby Pay Off

For years, Jacques Hopkins wanted to make money online with a flexible side gig. Now the former electrical engineer has found a niche that has become his career: teaching people to play modern songs on the piano in 21 days, all over the internet. Hopkins didn’t make the transition overnight. He and his wife had been...

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How to Gift Stock to a New Grad

Graduation season is in full swing and for many Americans that means one thing: It’s time to head to the ATM. Cash is expected to be the go-to gift again this year for new grads, followed by greeting cards and gift cards, according to survey results released this month by the National Retail Federation. The...

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