Finish Big
How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Bo Burlingham, the bestselling author of Small Giants, returns with Finish Big, an original guide to exiting your company successfully and gracefully.
No two exit experiences are exactly alike. Some people wind up happy with the process and satisfied with the way it turned out, while others look back on it as a nightmare. The question I hope to answer in this book is why. What did the people with 'good' exits do differently from those who'd had 'bad' exits?'
Bo Burlingham's first book Small Giants became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem: how to handle the pressure to grow. Now he is back to tackle an even more common problem: how to exit your company well.
Sooner or later, all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated. Whatever your preferred outcome, if you start planning for it while you still have time and options, you can build a stronger, more resilient company with a higher market value. Unfortunately, most don't - and they pay a steep price for their procrastination.
Through dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs across a range of industries, Burlingham identifies eight key factors that determine whether owners leave their businesses happily. He showcases the insights, exits and cautionary tales of entrepreneurs across an array of industries including manufacturing, food and services.
Finish Big is an illuminating and inspirational guide to one of the most stressful, and yet potentially rewarding, processes business owners must go through.
Bo Burlingham is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year in 2006. An editor at large at Inc., he has reported on the entrepreneurial revolution in America since the early 1980s and has witnessed up close the birth and development of the companies that have reshaped our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Burlingham (Small Giants) is back with a helpful guide to the toughest part of building a great company: leaving it. As he points out, we tend to focus on the whiz-bang beginnings of a company's history, with far less emphasis on if and how the founder will eventually move on. Structured as a narrative describing the experiences of various entrepreneurs interviewed for the book, this is a smooth, fascinating read. Burlingham's primary question in interviews is, what distinguished positive experiences from negative ones? He found that entrepreneurs who left their positions with a sense of accomplishment, feeling well compensated and secure in the belief that their employees would be treated well by their successors, felt better about the move. In addition, those who were happy about leaving their companies also generally had new projects planned from which to derive a sense of purpose. Burlingham goes on to address the elements of a successful exit, which he breaks down into four stages: exploration, strategy, execution, and transition all potentially tricky. Detailed and well laid out, with advice that's easy to understand and incorporate into your own business, this is an essential guide for any leader looking to turn over the reins.
