How To Build A Great Business

When you start reading Mark Thompson’s and Brian Tracy’s book, Now…Build a Great Business!, you may feel like you are reading 200 pages of Blog posts, but the bite-sized approach to providing tools, practical steps and ideas, rather than theory, is precisely the authors’ intended approach.

The book thoroughly explains the seven keys for how to achieve business success:

1. Become a great leader

2. Develop a great business plan

3. Surround yourself with great people

4. Offer a great product or service

5. Design a great marketing plan

6. Perfect a great sales process

7. Create a great customer experience

You’ll find a checklist at the end of each step (each chapter) where you can write down your action plan for applying what you’ve learned.

Particularly interesting is the chapter on strategic planning, where the authors recommend you should ask yourself these important questions before you act to create or reinvent the direction of your organization:

• Where are you now? What is your current situation?

• How did you get to where you are today?

• Where do you want to go from here?

• How do you get from where you are today to where you want to be in the future?

• What obstacles will you have to overcome? What problems will you have to solve?

• What additional knowledge, skills, or resources will you require to achieve your strategic objectives?

When it comes time to surround yourself with great people, Thompson and Tracy remind us that great people are:

• Good team players.

• More concerned with what’s right rather than who’s right.

• Intensely results oriented.

And, great people accept high levels of responsibility for the outcomes required of them, and consider their company a great place to work.

Mark Thompson is an entrepreneur who sold his last company for $100 million and today coaches executives on how to lead growth companies. Brian Tracy speaks throughout the country about the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. I thank them for sending me a copy of their book. It’s a worthwhile read.

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