“How to Grow Your Business without Driving Yourself Crazy”
Tools to tackle the barriers to growth, profitability, and ease

Business Advisor Mike Van Horn’s New Book Offers Practical Techniques and Advice 
Based on Real-World Experiences of a Thousand Small Business Owners 

San Rafael, CA – (September 30, 2002) “There are no secrets to succeeding in small business,” asserts small business growth advisor Mike Van Horn. “But there are tested approaches small business owners can adopt to help ensure their success.” Van Horn has heard it all—from over a thousand small business owners—about how to grow a small business profitably and, most importantly, how to achieve that growth with a greater sense of ease and life balance. 

The approaches that arose from their collective successes and failures are now available in Van Horn’s new book, How To Grow Your Business Without Driving Yourself Crazy, a compendium of nuts-and-bolts advice and exercises, peppered with plenty of examples and stories from the many businesspeople with whom he has worked. The book is designed to help the small business owner tackle the challenges of growth while overcoming the headaches often associated with a growing business. Van Horn adds, “Four out of five small businesses I advise succeed using these approaches—in contrast to the nationwide statistic that four out of five businesses fail within a couple of years.”

“This is about more than just growth,” says Van Horn. “Increasingly, business owners want to boost profitability and at the same time operate with greater ease. They want to achieve that elusive balance between their business and the rest of their lives.”-

“Here’s the kind of story I hear all the time,” recounts Van Horn. “Last week, a woman who runs a successful financial services company said to me, ‘When we started out, I worked most all the time. I wore all the hats. As we grew, I brought in highly skilled managers to ease my load. But I still work all the time. It must be the entrepreneur’s disease.’ She sees that she must change her ingrained management habits and let her people do the work she hired them for. This is what my book is about.” 

The book’s knowledge comes from Van Horn’s work with over a thousand owner-run small and medium-sized companies over the past 20 years through his successful “business advisory group” format. A business advisory group is a support structure where a group of business owners from a variety of industries meets regularly to help each other deal with their challenges. This ongoing peer-level support offers small businesses their own de facto “board of directors” to help solve problems, set goals, and receive guidance and accountability beyond crunching numbers. Van Horn’s groups meet regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area through his company, The Business Group. 

“I’m a strong advocate of the power of the group, for brainstorming, role models, and mutual accountability,” he adds. “Business owners often learn from one another more readily than from a consultant. I wrote this book so readers could have the value of learning from hundreds of them.”

“We’re always on the lookout for business owners, consultants, or accountants who would like help getting one of these groups going in their area.”
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Chapters from How to Grow Your Business without Driving Yourself Crazy include:
– Growth, Ease & Profitability—Questionnaires and checklists to assess your business
– The Problem Solvent—The five elements needed to tackle any barrier to growth
– Build a Culture of Growth, Build a Culture of Profitability
– The Inner Game of Growth—How is the way you run your business a barrier to your growth?
– Promote Yourself to CEO — Polish the skills and capabilities needed for growth
 
“Every business owner thinks his or her business is unique,” observes Van Horn, “But when it comes to the barriers to growth, profitability, and ease of operation, most businesses face the common issues addressed in my book.”

A frequent public speaker at small business conferences, Van Horn addresses organizations as diverse as local chambers of commerce, Citibank, and the City of Oakland’s popular Small Business Symposium. He also offers regular half-day seminars that introduce small business owners to the dynamic of the business advisory group. 

Van Horn served on the faculties of the University of San Francisco and Golden Gate University, teaching courses in Management and International Business. He also served as Coordinator of UCLA’s Creative Problem Solving Program. He earned his MBA at UCLA.
See a description of The Business Group and its workshops online at www.businessgroup.biz.

Photo or JPG of book cover and author available upon request. We can also email you this press release.


How to Grow Your Business without Driving Yourself Crazy
by Mike Van Horn
Published by The Business Group, October 2002
304 pages, 6x9, perfect bound. Glossary, index.
ISBN 0-9714114-2-5
$19.95


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