The Best Secrets of Great Small Businesses: Creative, Innovative and Cost-Saving Ideas from Great Business Minds

By Ray Silverstein

Book Overview

Do you have a problem you've never faced before? Are you looking for an idea that will be your next big breakthrough? You are not alone. Every day, thousands of entrepreneurs are creating innovative solutions to business problems. The best of the best are here, in one of the most useful business guides to date.

The Best Secrets of Great Small Businesses is the ultimate entrepreneurial guidebook. It contains a wealth of phenomenal ideas that will inspire innovative and agile problem solving, straight from business's best minds, such as:

The company that schedules meetings at odd times (8:37) to encourage on-time attendanceThe owner who discovered a way to get a fee from any customer who poached an employeeAn entrepreneur who found a way to skip UPS zones on shipping, turning the savings into profitsThe manager who issued "Benefits Report Cards" to raise awareness and boost employee morale

And more essential advice that will build your business

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1402207662
• ISBN13: 9781402207662
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Top of my (Early) Christmas wish list

From what Ray Silverstein mentioned, I had this book in mind to get at the earliest opportunity especially as he'd said that he'd accumulated years of advising and coaching successful small businesses to do extremely well which was in fact the initial incentive to obtain a copy at some stage. Having read the other helpful reviews, I now am looking forward to reading what appears to me a practical guide to achieving excellent results in having and ensuring success in building up a business to become 'great'. The author sets out easy to follow, step by step advice on taking your business forward as the marketplace evolves with new technology such as online marketing and new media 'hype'. As an introduction to the approach to take to boost your business, see it grow and think in advance of how to market your product on an ongoing basis, the questions the author asks initially are focused on your current situation, how you feel about where you are at present and the proceeds to offering suggestions and solutions to enable you to achieve the goals you set for yourself. You are then made aware of different categories of types of sales and business person, alike, and how to distinguish where your employees fit on this scale, how best to chose your employees and how to develop and hone their skills to reach an attainable target, progressively. With the easily ocmprehensible segments, you can follow the advice daily, weekly or monthly, taking from each sector, what you would like to practice on a regular scheduled basis. Monitoring your progress then becomes an essential part of how the book sets out in a number of eye catching ways, ideas and practical solutions to developing and growing in the constantly changing, `chameleon' world of business where your daily insight into what is new in the marketplace is part of that process of keeping in touch with new developments. In a table of contents you have evaluating titles with the important notes to help you create measurable standards to manage your findings as guesswork and wishful thinking aren't considered the best way to sum up how good your employees are doing a job. Different suggestions are giving to enhance your business and get the kind of staff you want to work for you including innovative interviewing techniques to be in place with the constant changes expected of employees who can show flexibility and adeptness in adapting to such changes which are occurring faster than we imagine. Ultimately, the diagnostic test at the end of the handbook is meant for the small business owner to fill in as a way of finding out what the company's strengths and weaknesses are; each test has a short checklist `of the attributes your company's processes and disciplines should include.' (Ch.10) The book contains, `Groundbreaking systems, secrets and solutions' and has over 500 practical ideas to help you attain those objectives and grow as a business.

From one man band to Conducter

As your business grows, there comes a time when you (hopefully) will no longer be a one man band, but will in fact need to hire people to help you. Very few of the business books I've read on business growth cover this stage as well as this book does - with hiring advice, structuring pay, benefits... even several ideas on how to 'fire.' This was just one of the sections in the book, but it was the one I hadn't seen covered as well in other books on small business management. I'm sure if I looked, I could find plenty of books that concentrate on HR, but to me, there was just enough help to get me started, and not so much info that my eyes glazed over. This book had lots of good advice gleaned from working small business owners. Thanks for sharing these tips and ideas

I kept my wife awake last night reading her sentances from "The Best Secrets."

I'm only 67 pages into the book and I'm loving the great info. What a great surprise every page has to offer. Much of what I've learned over the last 30 years was confirmed by Ray Silverstein and many things I've never thought of were delivered. His writing is lazer light clear and it's easy to tell he's been there and down that. If you deal with business owners or if you own business then get this book. Gary Teaney TCB, Transformational Consulting for Business Gary.Teaney@ConsultantsTCB.com

Quick and Easy Read to Successful Business Ownership

I found this book to be a great compliation of advice from small business owners that have a diversity of experiences that help to guide me in my own role as a small business owner. This is a great read and you can use the experiences of others immediately to put into practice, that day, to improve many aspects of your own business.

Small Business Help

As a small business owner, it is lonely at the top. I am always looking for new ideas or help to make day to day decisions. I picked up this book and found it to be an excellent read. The advice was down to earth, and in most cases, right on the money! I definitely did learn quite a bit by reading this book. This book is a must read for all small business owners.