Make Your Own Rules

By Wayne Rogers with Josh Young
Hardcover, 244 pages, $23
www.amacombooks.org

If there was ever a book for the entrepreneur who doesn’t read “how-to” books, this is it. In Make Your Own Rules: A Renegade Guide to Unconventional Success by Wayne Rogers, the actor/entrepreneur and highly successful businessman reveals how he excelled in each of his various business ventures over the past 40 years without a “step by step” plan—and how you can, too.

Although Rogers may be best known for his role in the TV series M*A*S*H, his creative approach to business has gotten him through the challenges of starting up and turning around numerous businesses, including a convenience store chain, a vineyard, a restaurant, a number of hotels, a film distribution company and the country’s largest bridal boutique.

“I’ve found that learning to be creative, challenging convention and seizing unexpected opportunities is not only liberating,“ Rogers says, “but it can make all the difference in whether you are successful.” He also maintains, however, that his failures have been just as important as his successes. In this volume, Rogers lets his experiences speak for themselves, with the goal of provoking readers to take their own business risks, with a little bit of guidance along the way.

Each of the book’s 10 chapters, including “Do Your Homework,” “Find People You Can Work With” and “Just Ask a Customer,” is one of Rogers’ rules for unconventional business success. He also shares tips for creative financing, strategies for making the most of the banking system, and his passion for the free market, despite its flaws.

Full Engagement!

By Brian Tracy
Hardcover, 256 pages, $22
www.amacombooks.org

It’s tough out there. Store closings, bankruptcies and downsizing are now the norm. This can lead to workers being squeezed to produce more and with less. Enter Brian Tracy. The renowned business success expert and motivational master has the answer to business success, and he maintains it’s a lot less complicated than you think. His book Full Engagement!: Inspire, Motivate and Bring Out the Best in Your People gives managers the keys to unlocking not just the hidden drive and abilities within their employees, but also within themselves.

“The way you treat people, what you say and do that affects them emotionally, is more important in bringing out the best in people than all the education, intelligence or experience you might have at doing your job,” Tracy writes. In this book, he shows managers how to achieve financial success by focusing on getting the highest “ROE” (return on energy, physical, mental and emotional) from their employees by utilizing one simple tool: making people happy.

Grounded in extensive research in the fields of human psychology and motivational management, Full Engagement! offers a wealth of insights into why people think, feel, react and respond the way they do at work. It includes “Action Exercises” at the end of each chapter for managers to try in improving their own work environments. It also describes how to get the best from nearly every person on your team, and feel great about yourself along the way.

The AMA Handbook of Business Documents

By Kevin Wilson and Jennifer Wauson
Paperback, 224 pages, $19.95
www.amacombooks.org

The AMA Handbook of Business Documents: Guidelines and Sample Documents That Make Business Writing Easy is one book that should be available at every entrepreneur or manager’s fingertips. Kevin Wilson and Jennifer Wauson provide business templates for everyone—from corporate communications, marketing and public relations staffers to sales professionals and human resources administrators whose job and business depend on effective writing.

Even the best writers need the extra assistance to create a flawless document, especially when it needs to be completed quickly. That’s where The AMA Handbook of Business Documents comes in. Readers can easily find information on a particular document and quickly get back to their writing project. Readers are provided with guidelines, tips and samples of all kinds of documents including annual reports, business letters, newsletters and press releases.

Writing has the ability to strengthen a business’s competitive edge when done correctly. On the other hand, when writing is weak and sloppy, it can lead to lost opportunities or sales. Buying this book will not only improve your writing but it can, in turn, improve your business’s reputation.

Online Marketing Inside Out

By Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley
Paperback, 184 pages, $29.95
SitePoint
www.sitepoint.com

Another name for this how-to guide could be Online Marketing for Dummies. If you need an easy-to-read book about the ins and outs of online marketing, including how to make the most of e-mails, search engines and social media, Online Marketing Inside Out: Reach New Buyers Using Modern Marketing Techniques is the book for you.

It begins by discussing the “changing face” of marketing and public relations in the 21st century—press releases, blogs, websites, podcasts and social media. It can all be overwhelming for those who didn’t grow up in the technological age. Authored by two online marketing managers, Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley, Online Marketing Inside Out is full of helpful tips, notes and cautions to bring even slow learners up to speed.

The book concludes with information on how to pull together everything you learned in the previous chapters to make a powerful marketing plan, both online and off.

140 Characters

By Dom Sagolla
Paperback, 179 pages, $17.95
Wiley
www.wiley.com

Pitch an idea, make a statement or sell a product in 140 characters. Go ahead, try it. It’s pretty difficult, if not seemingly impossible.

On the widely popular social networking website, Twitter, you only have 140 characters to do just this. Dom Sagolla, co-founder of the site, realizes how difficult this can be. In his book, 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form, Sagolla provides the tricks of the trade to make the most of your online messages.

Social networking sites have made short-form communication an everyday business reality. Sagolla teaches his readers to say more with less, suggesting that “tweets” should be “short, blunt, vigorous and concise.” Most of the advice in 140 Characters is focused on helping you find the right words. After you learn what to say, this book teaches you how to make the most out of it.

Six Pixels of Separation

By Mitch Joel
Hardcover, 288 pages, $26.99
Business Plus
www.hbgusa.com

Mitch Joel believes the theory of Six Degrees of Separation (the idea that any one person is connected to anyone else through six people or less) is dead. In his book, Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone, Joel argues that in today’s digital world, it’s really about the six pixels of separation between people. Google, Facebook, YouTube and hundreds of other online social networking sites are changing everything we know about business.

Joel says most business people are not taking advantage of these digital channels, either because they don’t realize their significance or they simply don’t know how to use them. This book offers help by providing a complete set of tactics, insights and tools on how to use the Internet to make your business “connect, communicate, share and grow.”

“You don’t have to be a computer whiz or a member of the Geek Squad to make the online channel and communities work for you,” says Joel.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds. And you can measure the results. Andy Sernovitz explains in Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking (Kaplan Publishing, $24.95) that there are five Ts to a well-planned word-of-mouth campaign: Talkers, Topics, Tools, Taking Part and Tracking. To begin planning your campaign, you need to determine who your core talkers are—they can be your best or newest customers, bloggers or friends, but they have to have enthusiasm for your products and gallery. Give them a reason to talk by offering a message that’s easy to repeat. A special sale, remarkable service or a new product are all great seeds.

Your next task is to make it easy for your talkers to transmit the message. An easy-to-forward e-mail, blog post or coupon are all great tools to help spread your message. Next, you have to join the conversation. Reply to e-mails, comment on blog posts, take phone calls—be available. If you don’t join the conversation, it will die out.

Finally, take the time to track the campaign’s success. Online chatter is easy to search and compile, but a conversation from friend to friend may require a piece of physical evidence, like a coupon. The winter months are a perfect time to pick up this book and try the marketing tactic. Log on to www.wordofmouthbook.com to learn more.

Retiring from your business means more than finding a new owner. John M. Leonetti, author of Exiting Your Business, Protecting Your Wealth, helps you formulate a profitable plan

Congratulations!

You made it. Now let’s do our best to protect it.

Your business has been built on your hard work and passion for what you do. The long hours, the battles with the finances, the incremental gains that you fought tooth and nail for are now more behind you than in front of you. For many, exciting challenges still await your careers. For others, a quick exit is what is most desired. In either case, you made it, and a warm congratulations is due to you for your accomplishment.

Now it is time to enter the equally challenging phase of keeping it. “It,” of course, is the wealth that has accumulated in your illiquid business. That wealth is locked inside your business, much the same way that wealth is locked inside your home. Now, home may very well be where your heart is, but your business produces profits. If your business is where your heart is, then this book is a very good resource to assist you in viewing the business more as an investment and less as a job you love. The reason you want to think this way is because the majority of your wealth is likely tied up in your business, and without a plan to monetize or transfer that wealth, a great deal of your hard work may be lost.

Whether you want to exit over time or you are a get-me-out-right-away business owner who is burned out and dreads returning to work after enjoyable weekends and vacations, there is a way to begin planning your business exit today.

Don’t Wait Until Later

One of the difficulties of business exits is the perception of it being overwhelming and complex. With so much information to be processed in a business exit, many owners procrastinate in doing anything. Often this results in a failure to plan an exit, and, again, loss of hard-earned wealth in the illiquid business.

Begin your exit planning today.

Most business owners need to not only improve, but actually begin, designing their business exit strategy plans. Your preparation for the business exit will control the likelihood of you getting what you want. The more information you have and the more preparation you do, the better your odds of reaching your real goals and protecting your hard-earned wealth. Remember that your exit requires knowledge that spans many disciplines and is of varying levels of complexity. You need to know something about all of these different areas because you will be making decisions regarding all of them.

This author estimates that 85% of owner-operated business owners have one chance at a business exit. As with mountain climbing, the stakes are high. And mistakes can be permanent.

What Drives the Process

It is your goals and motives that drive the exit strategy planning process. There is a methodology by which you can determine both how ready you are for your exit, and what type of exiting owner you resemble.

If followed, these measurements will determine the path which your exit strategy plan will initially take. So, in order to analyze whether you are ready for an exit from your business, you will follow a process to answer these questions:

• Are you financially prepared for an exit from your business?
• Are you mentally prepared for an exit from your business?

Your financial and mental readiness will be ranked as either High or Low. Then, depending on your readiness for an exit, you can check your alignment with four different types of exiting owners. Those four types include:

1. The get-me-out-right-away-for-the-most-money exiting owner
2. The well-off-but-choose-to-keep-working exiting owner
3. The stick-around-and-grow-the-business exiting owner
4. The rich-and-ready-to-go exiting owner

Range of Exit Options

There are, in fact, many options for exiting a business. Some owners will simply close down the business. Others will liquidate and sell off their assets, if any remain. But others—many millions, in fact—will need a written plan to exit their business and protect their wealth.

Many of these business owners have a substantial amount of wealth tied up in their businesses. The five major transactions that owners can consider as the basis for their exit strategy plan are:

1. Sale of the business
2. Private equity group recapitalizations
3. Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
4. Management buyouts
5. Gifting programs

Don’t Go It Alone

Business owners wear many hats in order to handle the challenges of owning and running a business. They often adopt a do-it-yourself philosophy, which can extend to the business exit process. For instance, most business owners know something about the technicalities of exiting their business; they’ve thought about selling to a competitor or handing the reins to a family member.

Owners might know a little something about the technical pieces of a business exit, including accounting, taxation, estate planning, insurance planning, legal preparation, legal documentation and financial advisory services. But knowing a little bit about something can be dangerous; it can lead to a false sense of control and confidence. Why go it alone?

Assembling Your Team

A team of exit strategy advisors consists of a number of players, each having his or her own role and contributing to an overall execution of the exit strategy plan. The roles of the advisors are summarized.

Attorney. This advisor provides advice on legal agreements in the transaction as well as advice on estate planning documents for titling of assets.

Accountant. This advisor provides tax assessments for each exit strategy option. The accountant may also be called upon to provide cash flow projections for the company as part of a deferred payment arrangement.

Financial advisor. This advisor provides personal financial retirement projections and an investment strategy for the reinvestment of exit proceeds.

Insurance advisor. This advisor provides recommendations on life insurance policies, key-man policies, business policies, and long-term care policies—risk management tools to protect the owner’s wealth.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisor. This advisor provides insights as to the current marketplace for sales and transactions. The M&A advisor gives real-time feedback on the viability of an external sale.

Valuation advisor. This advisor provides a fair market value assessment of the company for purposes of measuring value and the viability of certain internal transactions.

Pulling It All Together

A marketplace of service providers, who vary in competence, are out there tripping over themselves to meet the needs of exiting owners. You must choose carefully amongst them to be certain that your exit strategy plan is the one being executed, not theirs.

Take charge of the exit strategy process with your newfound knowledge of business exit strategy planning so that your options are understood and your timing suits your personal goals. Customize your exit strategy plan to your liking. After a lifetime of success in business, you owe it to yourself to tackle this challenge of cashing in (or transferring your wealth) with the respect that it deserves.

“Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.” John M. Leonetti, Exiting Your Business, Protecting Your Wealth: A Strategic Guide for Owners and Their Advisors, 2008.