CEO, Owners

What’s the difference between a boss and a leader?
According to Barry Kaplan and Jeff Manchester, authors of  The Power of Vulnerability, “The boss is the person who owns the ultimate decision.”
They add, “He or she is accountable for a particular decision.

Using bottom-up Inductive Reasoning can create a strong case for a sale when Deductive Reasoning won’t. Put it another way. Selling a business is essentially telling a story that is substantiated by the facts. 

It is always interesting to learn more about what drives the success of business owners and entrepreneurs.
A recent survey of 248 such high-net-worth business owners and entrepreneurs by Bank of America, U.S. Trust explored their experiences from start-up to expansion to exit.
According to Karen Reynolds Sharkey, National Business Owner Strategy Executive at U.S. Trust the survey was designed to gain insight into the mindset and challenges at each stage of business ownership. 

The decision of timing on when to hire a CFO is a challenge – do it too early, and you’re wasting resources. Wait too long, and opportunities for growth and scale may have gone unrealized due to lack of financial expertise and experience.

Ellen Wood, CEO, vcfo offers these thoughts on the need for strategic planning and more sophisticated accounting and reporting:

Lessons learned from exporting goods and services abroad can also help companies improve their domestic business

Ironically, the recent attempted nationwide boycott of restaurants and other businesses by workers to demonstrate their importance to the economy actually highlighted vulnerability of many smaller businesses.
As one expert recently told an audience of small business leaders: “If your business can’t survive without low paying immigrant labor, your business model is wrong.”
His challenge came as the nascent stirrings of a fundamental change in American business practices starts to gain steam.

Talent is at the heart of every great business, pushing toward common goals and helping to achieve shared success. It goes without saying that all departments in a small business are critical to delivering results and meeting customer needs.

Ridgefield, NJ----In response to many audience queries on how to grow a company, Small Business Digest solicited contributions from executives and experts who themselves were charged with growing their enterprises.

More than 100 of their contributions are contained in a unique new book Recalculating, 97+ Experts On Driving Small Business Growth. It is available starting September 15^th where all good books are sold.

While four out of five start-ups fail within five years, successful entrepreneurs often have common traits or habits.

Our company, Information Strategies, Inc., recently asked more than 100 presidents, experts, and advisors to contribute to our new book, RECALCULATING.  Among the things we asked were their thoughts on what were the traits they found most common to their success.

The results surprised some when they heard them, but after reflection seem logical.

Among them were:

·         Passion and commitment

Although the summer season is one of the most common periods of time for small business employees to request vacation, the effects of such leave taking has become more of a year round problem in recent years.

Howard Tarnoff, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Ceridian, says the failure to take time away from work has been shown to be detrimental on a person’s physical and mental health, it also impacts work performance and productivity.